In 2010, Kansans amended the state Bill of Rights to guarantee that every person has the right to keep and bear arms for the defense of self, family, home, and state. The measure passed with 89 percent of the vote, more than 710,000 Kansans, the largest margin any gun rights amendment has ever received in any state. The Kansas State Rifle Association helped push that amendment from the Legislature to the ballot, and Kansans made their position unmistakable with their vote.
Words in a constitution, however, mean only what the courts say they mean. In Kansas, the final word on Section 4 belongs to the seven justices of the Kansas Supreme Court. And under the current system, gun owners have no meaningful say in who those justices are.
Here is how the process works today. When a vacancy opens, a nine-member nominating commission interviews applicants and sends three names to the governor. Five of those nine commissioners are lawyers, chosen only by other members of the Kansas bar. Kansas is the only state in the nation that gives its bar association a built-in majority over Supreme Court selection. The 89 percent of Kansans who voted to protect the right to keep and bear arms get no vote on the commission, no vote on the nominees, and no vote on the appointment. Their only option is a retention election in which the justice faces no opponent. No Kansas justice has ever lost one.
On August 4, voters can change that. The constitutional amendment on the primary ballot would let Kansans elect their Supreme Court justices directly, in staggered elections beginning in 2028, with six-year terms unchanged. The lawyer-controlled commission would be abolished. Candidates for the court would campaign in the open, state their judicial philosophy in the open, and answer to the same voters who wrote the right to bear arms into the Constitution in the first place.
The stakes for gun owners are not hypothetical. Across the country, state supreme courts have narrowed or upheld arms provisions based on how individual justices read a few sentences of text. The scope of constitutional carry, the reach of firearms preemption, the lawful purposes protected by Section 4—each of these questions can land before the Kansas Supreme Court. I served in the Legislature when Kansas passed constitutional carry in 2015. Every protection we wrote into statute and into the Constitution ultimately rests with the seven people who interpret it. Kansans should choose those seven people.
Opponents of the amendment argue that elections would politicize the court. The current system is already political; the politics simply happen in private. A commission whose majority is selected by roughly 12,000 bar members exercises more influence over the court than 2 million registered voters. Moving that influence into public elections adds disclosure rules, open campaigning, and accountability that the commission system lacks entirely. Twenty-one states already elect their supreme court justices. Kansas itself did so for nearly a century before 1958.
The Legislature placed this question on the ballot with a two-thirds majority in both chambers, 27-13 in the Senate and 84-40 in the House. Polling shows 74 percent of Kansans favor electing their justices, a number that echoes the 2010 gun rights vote: when Kansans are asked whether they trust themselves or a closed process, they choose themselves.
Kansans did not ask a commission for permission to protect their right to keep and bear arms. They voted for it. The people who interpret that right should be chosen the same way. The Kansas State Rifle Association urges a yes vote on the judicial reform amendment on August 4.
Travis Couture-Lovelady is President of the Kansas State Rifle Association and a former Kansas state representative.
— Travis Couture-Lovelady of Hays
President of the Kansas State Rifle Association