Alderman proposes open-carry trigger law in St. Louis

ST. LOUIS – Much like Missouri state lawmakers used a so-called trigger law to ban abortion, St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones has now signed a trigger law that could ban open carry of firearms in the city.

“I would say this is honestly a play out of the GOP playbook,” Alderman Rasheen Aldridge (Ward 14) said.

The language in the ordinance actually states that it is a “trigger ordinance.”

It took its cue from the Republican-backed abortion ban trigger law that the state passed to go into effect in the event that the U.S. Supreme Court ever overturned the Roe v. Wade ruling, which it did in 2022.

With a prevalence of people now openly carrying assault-style rifles legally on the streets of St. Louis, Aldridge wrote this trigger law to take effect should state law change to allow cities to ban open carry.

“St. Louis is a lot different than Joplin,” Aldridge said. “We’re a lot different than the boot heel, where people are using these guns to hunt animals. In our area, these guns are being used to hunt each other.”

St. Louis Democrat State Senator Karla May told FOX 2 she would push new legislation at the state capitol to allow this new trigger law to take effect, perhaps putting the issue on the ballot for voters to decide.

Alderman proposes open-carry trigger law in St. Louis

“I think we need more local control in every municipality, because every part of the state and every county is different,” she said. “Common-sense gun laws are not a threat to the Second Amendment.”

She may find support from state lawmakers in Kansas City, where the number of homicides has soared to more than 175 in 2023, compared to 147 in St. Louis.

St. Louis State Rep. Donna Baringer sponsored a bill this year to require adult supervision for minors to carry firearms in public. It failed to win passage.

“Kansas City carries more weight in the state legislature than St. Louis City does,” she said. “Now that they’re experiencing this, they’re also saying, ‘What can we do?’ Now that Kansas City is experiencing what we were experiencing… I think we could work together to try to get the legislature to understand that in our urban areas, we need to have different laws because we have different issues when it comes to guns.”

Should St. Louis’s new open-carry ban be triggered, violators would face up to a $500 fine and 30 days in jail.

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