A 5-year-old girl was shot and injured by stray gunfire Monday afternoon on the north side of St. Louis.

It's the kind of story that rocks small-town communities in the rare times that it happens there. But it registers barely a blip with a violence-weary St. Louis public.

The depressing frequency with which barrages of bullets kill or wound targets and bystanders is just one way the city is a different world than the outstate regions of Missouri.

A one-size-fits-all approach to gun regulation for those two worlds makes about as little sense as allowing freewheeling rural speed limits on city streets — yet that is exactly what the Missouri Legislature has imposed on St. Louis regarding firearms.

Now, advocates are pushing for a state constitutional amendment to give St. Louis the power to create local reforms, such as permit requirements on guns. Some in the state's ruling Republican Party have reflexively signaled their opposition, but they should consider that it can be a compromise that would address the city's crisis without altering gun policies in their own districts.

Urban centers have more societal problems because they have more density — there's more poverty and crime because there's more of everything. That's why the very mention of guns conjures up very different images in the rural areas of the state (hunting, target shooting) than in the city (carjackings, robberies, gang violence).

But the Legislature's relentless dismantling of Missouri's previously reasonable gun laws hasn't taken into account those differences. Missouri law allows people to carry guns in most public areas without a permit or criminal background check. The state doesn't even have a minimum age requirement to carry guns in public (lawmakers this year nixed a proposal to specify one).

The state has repeatedly refused to allow St. Louis to impose more stringent rules within the city. As the Post-Dispatch's Mark Schlinkmann reports, a new nonprofit called Sensible Missouri now hopes to go around lawmakers with a referendum to change the state constitution and allow county-level governments, and St. Louis city, to impose local gun restrictions tailored to their local needs.

In St. Louis, for example, that could mean a permitting requirement. In contrast to the controversial "stop and frisk" policy that New York City once imposed, this could be a consistent and rational standard to allow police to ascertain whether people they see carrying guns are legally allowed to have them. That could help police prevent shootings before they start.

It could also allow the city to impose a minimum age limit for carrying guns in public. An incident outside the City Foundry in January, in which police caught three teenagers with handguns and were advised by juvenile court authorities to release them to their parents, highlighted how unworkable the state's statutes on guns and minors are in St. Louis.

Republican opposition to the idea of letting St. Louis impose its own gun restrictions is predictable, if ironic, coming from the party that once held sacred the conservative principle of local control. Now, it seems, legislators are fine with extending the long arm of a distant state government into local decision-making.

"Having gun laws in different jurisdictions is problematic," state Sen. Andrew Koenig, R-Manchester, told Schlinkmann. "We need one policy in the whole state."

Why? Because St. Louis and, say, Rolla have the same local problems and their citizens have the same views on the issue? They don't.

Others have raised concerns that differences in local laws would create confusion, but that could be said of any local statute on any subject. This is what public signs are for.

This newspaper has said before that government by referendum isn't the preferred way to do things. But on this issue and others, a Legislature that is generally unresponsive to public opinion, and sometimes hostile toward the interests of St. Louis, leaves advocates with little other recourse.

For 5-year-old St. Louis girls and every other city-dweller threatened by loose gun laws written for a very different society, advocates should pursue this effort.

REPRINTED FROM THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

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