ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ

I go there because of the types of laws that elected officials often pass when people die, in hopes of preventing further deaths.

More than a decade ago, methamphetamine labs were popping up in Missouri and killing some of our neighbors. So state legislators and city councils passed laws requiring prescriptions for cold medicines containing pseudoephedrine, a drug that can be used to make meth.

There is only one Walgreens near my home where I can get Sudafed, which contains pseudoephedrine, without having to call my doctor during allergy season. Even without a prescription, I have to show my driver’s license and get entered into a database that limits the amount I buy.

These days, the drug on lawmakers’ minds is fentanyl. Much of it is made in China and some of it comes to the U.S. across the border from Mexico.

That has caused two important issues — drugs and immigration — to become intertwined, with both leading to proposed legislation aimed at saving American lives.

Imagine if Childs had been killed by a drug overdose or an undocumented immigrant.

Pass “Stephanie’s Law,� elected officials would be demanding. Say her name, they would demand. Legislation would be filed overnight. Action would be taken.

But Childs didn’t die that way. Nor did she die when a drunken driver sped through a red light, the sort of death that has spurred countless new laws over the years.

She died of domestic violence. She died, police say, because her estranged husband, Zachary, who had an order of protection requiring him to stay away, grabbed a gun, went to her home and shot her dead.

have laws that prohibit people under domestic violence orders of protection from having firearms. Missouri is not one of them.

Some of those states — 21 of them — allow police or family members to to take guns away from people in certain domestic violence or mental health situations. Known as “red flag laws,� they have led to thousands of guns across the nation being removed from potentially violent people.

Such laws, , reduce suicides, prevent some school shootings and reduce the potential for domestic violence deaths.

Missouri doesn’t have one of those laws, either.

Republicans with super-majorities in the Missouri Legislature won’t even allow such bills to be debated. It was that way in October 2022, when a young man with mental health problems, whose family had temporarily removed a gun from his house, shot and killed a teacher and a 15-year-old student at Central Visual and Performing Arts High School in St. Louis.

There was no serious debate in the Legislature about red flag laws that year because Missouri Republicans will not discuss gun laws, even when they have no conflict with the Second Amendment.

“Bad people doing bad things are going to find ways to do those things,� Gov. Mike Parson said then.

That’s true. But it didn’t stop Parson from voting for the bill in 2005 that removed Sudafed from public counters in stores across Missouri.

There was no debate this year after the Super Bowl parade shootings in Kansas City because Republicans have determined that when people die of gun violence — as compared to virtually any other way — they are collateral damage and not worthy of even basic legislative discussion.

“Laws alone don’t solve the problem,� Missouri Speaker of the House Dean Plocher said after the Kansas City shootings.

He has since gaveled down at least two Democrats who tried to talk about gun violence in their communities.

It’s not just so-called liberal states that have red-flag laws. They have been enacted in swing states like Colorado, Michigan, New Mexico and Nevada, and conservative states like Indiana and Florida.

In Florida, there have been filed in courts in the past three years to remove guns from the hands of violent or mentally ill people under that state’s red flag law.

Surely in at least some of those cases — like driving laws, drug laws and any number of laws passed by Democrats and Republicans together to respond to tragic deaths — lives have been saved.

That won’t happen here.

There will be no Stephanie’s Law.

Not in Missouri, where it’s easier to get a gun than a box of Sudafed.