On March 11 of this year, a majority of the Exeter Town Council decided that firearms permitting was too serious a business for Rhode Island’s only town without its own police force to be involved with, and voted to ask the legislature to change state law to eliminate their town’s role in issuing concealed carry permits. In doing so, Council members Arlene Hicks, William Monahan, Robert Johnson and Calvin Ellis endorsed a policy that would not only restrict their own involvement or the involvement of future Town Councils in a serious governmental responsibility, but also endorsed a policy of making it more difficult for the residents of Exeter to exercise a Constitutional right.

Under current state law, Rhode Islanders can apply for concealed carry permits through either their municipal government or the Attorney General, though there is a significant difference between the two processes. The law says that applicants who seek permits via their municipal government, if they meet all legal requirements and pass a background check, shall be issued a permit, while applicants who go to the Attorney General only may be issued a permit. For 38 Rhode Island cities and towns, responsibility for conducting the background check in the municipal process lies with the local police. Where there is no police force, i.e. in Exeter, the law places the responsibility with the Town Clerk.

A resolution approved by the Exeter Town Council by a 4-1 vote asks the legislature “to remove weapon permitting authority from the Town Clerk and to vest such authority in a duly-qualified State law enforcement agency or official”. Sample legislation attached to the resolution knocks the words “Town Clerk” out of the section of the law dealing with towns without a police force and replaces them with the words “Attorney General”. However, if the Attorney General’s process as it currently exists becomes the sole option for a potential group of firearms permit applicants (e.g. applicants from the town of Exeter), they will be left without access to a shall-issue process, resulting in a dubious restriction of a Constitutional right.

Other options, creating less friction with the right to bear arms, could have been (and could still be) pursued by the Town Council. The council could have asked for the law to be revised in a way that gives people in towns without police departments access to the Attorney General’s process on a shall-issue basis. Or, as was suggested by Councilman Raymond Morrissey, the sole vote against the March 11 resolution, the council could empower a local board – an option that state law expressly provides for — to deal specifically with firearms permitting, which then could develop a robust process for handling background checks.

Instead, Councilors Hicks, Monahan, Johnson and Ellis voted to endorse an option that would place a layer of restriction on the rights of the citizens who had elected them. Prior to the vote being taken, none of the council members engaged in any discussion about their positions, or offered any response to the approximately half-hour of public comments that had preceded, though in an informal session that briefly broke out after the vote was finished, Council President Hicks said that “what we’re asking is that the legislature just take a look at the law” and that “there will be time to testify before the legislature”. (Also, in the communications section of the meeting following the vote, Councilman Morrissey read a prepared statement explaining his vote against the resolution, and Councilman Ellis noted that there are several RI municipalities that send all firearms permit applicants to the Attorney General).

Alas, in voting for the March 11 resolution (which, in spite of Council President Hicks’ characterization, takes a much more definitive position than asking the legislature to take a look at the law), the Council majority chose the path that comes all too easily to Rhode Island officials: passing serious decisions to someone else. Far too frequently, RI elected officials act on less than a philosophy/more of a feeling that serious stuff is supposed to be decided by someone else, out of public view and with limited public accountability. In fact, in a letter sent to the Providence Journal, the four Council members who voted in favor of the resolution suggested that firearms permitting authority should be removed from the Town Clerk because the position is directly accountable to the voters.  Just because many Rhode Island politicians accept this attitude as normal doesn’t mean the citizens of Exeter should be expected to — and it is a healthy thing that they haven’t.

Gun permitting is a serious issue but its seriousness does not justify local government running away from it. Governments are created to deal with serious matters, and this is as true for local branches of government as it is for larger ones. And when elected governments in any city or town become cavalier about protecting the rights of their constituents, in order to pursue a strategy of evading matters that are clearly their responsibility, a vote in favor of a recall is an entirely reasonable response.