Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo
Students and supporters gather in the rotunda to protest gun violence during the opening day of the Iowa legislature, January 8, 2024, at the Capitol in Des Moines, Iowa.
In mid-February, Trey Jackson had some tough conversations with Iowa state lawmakers.
Shortly after the new year, a 17-year-old student shot his way through his high school in Perry, a city of nearly 8,000 about an hour’s drive northwest of Des Moines. He ultimately killed two people—11-year-old Ahmir Jolliff and the principal, Dan Marburger—before taking his own life.
The Perry shooting gave students a new sense of urgency. After the killings, amid the calls to ease up on existing gun restrictions, several hundred young people turned up at the Iowa State Capitol building in Des Moines for a gun reform rally and demanded new measures to control firearms. But there is little indication that new restrictions are coming.
One state lawmaker told Jackson, then working with the Iowa chapter of March for Our Lives, that gun restrictions infringe on individual rights. Another legislator refused to speak with him at all. Jackson lamented that despite the fact that many Iowans want better controls, others view new gun safety measures as curbs on personal freedoms. “That,” says Jackson, a Des Moines high school senior, “is fundamentally incorrect.”
Moreover, a 2020 National Bureau of Economic Research study indicates that these tragedies can adversely affect a student’s academic and economic performances, from potentially dropping out of high school and delaying college enrollment to reducing employment and earnings between the ages of 24 and 26.
One Iowa state lawmaker told Jackson that gun restrictions infringe on individual rights.
Jackson, who now lobbies for Brady: United Against Gun Violence, acknowledges that there are major political obstacles to gun reform. “For some reason, the Republican Party of Iowa and many of our legislators find it easier, maybe better, to protect guns than they do to protect the students of Iowa,” he told the Prospect.
The Iowa students’ push for gun reform comes on the heels of the Biden administration’s Safer States Initiative tool kit announced at the end of 2023, which encourages state officials to design and fund gun violence prevention policies such as intervention efforts with at-risk individuals. Gun control advocates also often emphasize that regulations designed to limit violence won’t affect access for licensed gun owners engaging in sports activities or subsistence hunting.
However, Iowa state Senate Majority Leader Jack Whitver has said lawmakers need more information about the causes of the Perry shooting “before you just rush to judgment” on policy solutions. Although media reports have indicated that the shooter and his sister had been bullied, law enforcement officials have not provided a motive or revealed how he obtained his firearms.
On Wednesday, the Iowa House approved a measure that would allow local school boards to decide whether teachers who secure licensing from two public-safety agencies can carry firearms on school property. Those boards could also provide additional private security or work with community police forces to hire school resource officers.
Bills have been introduced in both houses of the legislature that include requiring extreme-risk protection orders (also known as red-flag laws, which temporarily take away an individual’s firearm if they pose a risk); directing gun owners to report lost or stolen firearms or otherwise be held liable should their weapons be used illegally; and mandating certain types of background checks. (A 2021 law ended handgun background checks on firearms purchases from private sellers.)
Retiring Democratic state Rep. Ako Abdul-Samad represents a central Des Moines district and founded a community development organization that runs a violence interruption program. State leaders, he says, need to view gun violence as a public-health crisis. He proposes addressing the mental and emotional well-being of people who may be at risk to commit violence in schools by hiring counselors trained to identify such individuals.
Abdul-Samad, who has served in the House since 2007, also suggests that the state should create a task force to coordinate local law enforcement agencies, violence interrupter groups, and mental health resource providers. “If we would take that and develop programs on that premise, then, yes, we have the possibility to change the game,” he says.
Instead, Iowa lawmakers appear determined to loosen gun regulations. One state statute allows individuals, such as teachers, to carry guns in K-12 public schools if granted permission by a school. However, arming staff members faces new obstacles. Two school districts rescinded their policies after their insurance providers threatened to cancel their liability coverage. These developments illustrate how “gun rights rhetoric [runs] headlong into reality,” Karen Kedrowski, a political science professor at Iowa State University, says. However, a Senate omnibus bill includes a provision that would prohibit insurers from canceling a school district’s coverage should it decide to arm teachers.
Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds has said that “no additional gun laws would have prevented” the Perry school shooting.
Another hurdle for reformers is a 2022 ballot measure, passed by 65 percent of Iowa voters, that enshrines the right to “keep and bear arms” in the state constitution. Second Amendment challenges would be subject to “strict scrutiny,” the highest level of judicial review. “In order to have a constitutionally acceptable restriction on gun rights, the state needs to have a ‘compelling interest’ in regulating gun rights and that’s an extraordinary high standard to overcome,” says Kedrowski. Only three other states, Alabama, Louisiana, and Missouri, have strict-scrutiny clauses.
Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds has said that “no additional gun laws would have prevented” the Perry school shooting. She did not propose any fresh prevention strategies in her “Condition of the State” address detailing her legislative priorities for the 2024 session. Even in 2022, when Congress passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act that included $750 million to help states implement red-flag laws—which Iowa’s then-Attorney General Tom Miller, a Democrat, urged state officials to move on—Reynolds and the legislature did not budge.
Reynolds instead proposed to allocate $50,000 per school to enhance security, using the state’s American Rescue Plan funds, a plan that, to date, has been a policy flop. An Associated Press investigation found that this money has been “largely unspent.” Many schools, including Perry High School, have yet to receive any funding.
Reynolds’s inaction also contrasts sharply with the moves made by Democratic Gov. Janet Mills of Maine. Mills has called for new gun safety measures, including expanding checks against the National Instant Criminal Background Check System for public and private gun sales and creating a statewide network of crisis centers. Last November, she announced the formation of an independent commission to examine the causes and response to the deaths of 18 people in a mass shooting in Lewiston, the state’s second-largest city. The commission, which recently gained subpoena powers from the Democratic legislature, is currently hearing testimony about the shootings.
Overall, Iowa’s response mirrors Tennessee’s inertia. In that Republican trifecta state, students also descended on the capital city to demand gun reforms after a 2023 shooting at a private Christian elementary school where seven people died. Three Tennessee state representatives led a protest in the House, and two—Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, both people of color—were expelled from the legislature. Republican Gov. Bill Lee, who had two family friends die in the shooting, asked state legislators to pass a red-flag law. They failed to do so.
