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Citizens will soon be allowed to carry concealed firearms into the Wyoming Capitol after the state’s top five elected officials voted Wednesday morning to ease weapons restrictions inside the seat of state government.
The timeline for implementing the rules is still uncertain.
The State Building Commission — composed of the governor, treasurer, secretary of state, superintendent of public instruction and auditor — unanimously agreed to allow concealed guns only in publicly accessible areas of the Capitol building. They are continuing to review gun rules in other state office buildings more broadly.
Acceding to long-standing demands from the growing right-wing faction of the Legislature that citizens be empowered to carry firearms into government buildings, while also trying to deliberate on public safety, the commission created a patchwork of rules that for now would allow guns in some but not all parts of the Capitol.
The commission backed the rules despite a majority of the public comment it had solicited opposing the change. Though only 56 people responded to the commission’s call for public input, 36 of those respondents opposed the new rule.
Allowing concealed carry into state buildings more broadly remains limited by statutes prohibiting firearms in public meetings. The Legislature last year voted to repeal those statutes, but Gov. Mark Gordon vetoed the legislation, promising instead to kick off the rule-making process that led to Wednesday’s vote.
Ahead of that vote, staff informed the commission that those statutes could still cloud implementation of the new rules in the short term. In a press release after the vote, Secretary of State Chuck Gray said the new rules were undercut by Gordon’s previous veto, and he called on lawmakers to bring a new bill repealing the gun statutes.
The building commission controls the entire Capitol building only when the Legislature is out of session. With lawmakers convening on Tuesday, it will be up to the Legislature’s newly elected leadership, which is dominated by conservatives who support opening state buildings to gun-carrying citizens, to make the next move.
Wednesday’s rules do not allow concealed carry in the Herschler Building, an office building that abuts the Capitol and is connected to it by a tunnel. Concealed carry will remain against the rules in that building, which houses the Department of Education and the Secretary of State’s Office, at least until the commission takes its next step.
Timeline for change
It remains uncertain whether people will be able to carry hidden firearms at the start of the fast-approaching session, which is scheduled to last through March 6.
But a committee attorney said there was a window for legislative leadership to accelerate its approval of the rules, if they directed their attorneys to prioritize reviewing the rules over the large amount of bill writing facing them.
LSO attorneys usually do not conduct rule reviews during or just ahead of a legislative session. But Gray, who closely aligns with the right-wing Wyoming Freedom Caucus that currently controls leadership in the House, suggested leadership would likely push for an immediate review of this rule.
“I think (the delay) would be superseded here just because of the importance of it,” Gray said.
Rule limitations
Gray accused his colleagues of slow-walking the effort to allow guns into government buildings and of allowing them only into piecemeal areas of the Capitol, saying the public had been misleadingly “sold this bill of goods that this rule applies to the entire Capitol complex.” He attempted to amend Wednesday’s rules to allow concealed carry throughout the Capitol complex, which includes the Herschler Building as well as the Hathaway Building, which houses more agencies, and most of the state government facilities in the heart of Cheyenne. His motion did not receive a second from his colleagues, several of whom said they believed they were continuing to advance the goal of opening up state buildings to firearm carry, but in a deliberate fashion.
“I don’t think this ever was sold as a bill of goods,” Gordon said. “It was always intended to be systematic in its approach, starting with the public areas in the Capitol and then moving into the (state) agency spaces.”
Members of the Wyoming Freedom Caucus are expected to again bring legislation seeking to remove any restrictions on guns in public meetings.
Gray also questioned whether state employees themselves would be able to carry a firearm in the parts of the Capitol covered by the new rules. There was some uncertainty about whether the rule covered state employees, though Auditor Kristi Racines said the objective was to allow staffers to carry firearms in the same public parts of the Capitol as the public.
Gordon’s office is working on an executive order that would explicitly allow employees to concealed carry in the areas covered by both Wednesday’s rules and future measures, the governor said. That executive order will be “fairly broad,” Gordon said, and address explosives, knives and “efforts at intimidation.”
This story was originally produced and published by WyoFile, which is a partner organization with States Newsroom, the parent organization of the Daily Montanan. The original post can be found here.