Deseret News editorial

Sometimes what’s left out is just as important as what’s included. That’s the case with the GOP lawmakers’ crime-fighting package that is now before the 2000 Legislature.
It has a number of laudable ingredients, including: New restrictions to state law on “date rape” drugs; a mandatory one-year term for crimes in which a gun is used; the need for judges to document why they don’t demand treatment or installation of an auto Breathalyzer for a person convicted of a DUI , if it is a second conviction within six years; and expansion of the state’s experimental drug program.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t contain needed gun-control measures. Missing are bills that would identify who brings concealed weapons into public schools, denying guns to people convicted of violent misdemeanors, banning concealed weapons from schools and requiring background checks on all gun sales at gun shows.
As Senate President Lane Beattie, R-West Bountiful, notes, what has been presented is not the final version of the bill but rather something to start the debate. In fact, Beattie’s own two bills ? one that would require a concealed weapon owner to notify the principal when bringing a weapon into a public school doing school hours and one that requires the same notification to a church official (and granting the church official the power to tell the gun-toter to leave) are not yet part of the package.
Republicans claim it’s difficult to write a law that would have effectively addressed the actions of a man who fatally shot two people last year in the LDS Church’s Family History Library or those of the woman who had been certified as mentally ill at one time and then shot to death a young mother at the Triad Center downtown.
That may be, but lawmakers have thus far shirked their responsibility to deal head-on with these issues and to find solutions. Instead, they seem to have paid more attention to lobbyists than the residents they are supposed to serve.
Survey after survey in this newspaper has show the vast majority of Utahns want guns out of schools and churches, as well as other restrictions to prevent easy access to them.