Monday, county resident Scott Ivy approached the Oktibbeha County Board of Supervisors to ask them to pass a resolution to make the county a “Second Amendment Sanctuary.”

That idea has been all the rage recently from gun rights extremists around the country. More than 120 counties and cities have claimed this status since the first of the year, including a handful of Mississippi counties.

With just four of the five board members present, it seemed likely any vote would have ended in a 2-2 stalemate. Board President John Montgomery and District 4 supervisor Bricklee Miller spoke in favor of turning Oktibbeha County into the Free State of Oktibbeha while District 3 Marvel Howard and District 5 Joe Williams spoke against the measure. The District 2 supervisor was not at the meeting.

So the matter was tabled, and it should remain permanently tabled if reason rules over passion as it should and must.

At about the same time the board was debating whether or not Oktibbeha County can write its own guns laws, in defiance of both the federal and state constitution, a group called the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence released data compiled by the Center for Disease Control that reasonable people — gun owners included — should find sobering.

You may dismiss the group for its advocacy, but the CDC numbers do not lie.

Those numbers showed that in 2018, the most recent year the data is available, there were a record 24,000 firearm deaths in the U.S. – 67 people per day.

In another example of being at the top of a list of bad things, Mississippi is a “leader” in gun deaths. It had the highest gun death rate (22.9 per 100,000 people), the second highest firearm homicide rate (11.4 per 100,000) and the highest children/teen firearm death rate 9.6 per 100,000) in the nation.

Something you’ve probably heard from gun extremists is “guns do not kill people, people do.”

But if you are going to sign off on that idea, you also have to accept another: “Guns don’t care who uses them.”

A gun in the hand of a curious 4-year-old or a mentally ill person has more lethal potential than a home-owner or a hunter. Yet the response of gun fanatics — including those in Oktibbeha County who support “sanctuary” status – is to view an attempt at all to regulate guns as an attack on the Second Amendment, even those laws that would seek to protect citizens from those who have no business having access to a gun.

Red flag laws, background checks, restricting the types of guns an ordinary citizen can own and, as is the case of Virginia, a law that would help prevent people from stockpiling firearms do not infringe on the rights of responsible gun owners.

The idea that these limitations violate the Second Amendment may be popular among some lay people, but our judicial system has proven time and time again that the Second Amendment is not sacrosanct. The Second Amendment, like virtually every statute found in our Constitution, has limitations.

What the Oktibbeha County board of supervisors is contemplating also runs into other impenetrable Constitutional obstacles.

First, it conflicts with Article 6, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution, commonly known as the Supremacy Clause. That clause states clearly that federal law is the “law of the land” and that no local or state law that runs contrary to federal law is legitimate.

The “sanctuary” movement also defies state law. Counties and municipalities have no authority to write gun legislation any more than a county can decide what the state income tax rate can be.

In the unlikely event that the supervisors bring the sanctuary proposal off the table and the more unlikely event that it passes, the ordinance will have no effect.

County law enforcement officers, including sheriff Steve Gladney, swore oaths to uphold the state and federal constitutions and are bound by those oaths.

In the end, the “sanctuary idea” is what Shakespeare called “sound and fury signifying nothing.”

Supervisors should spend no more time considering the proposal than if there were a proposal for sticking a fork in an electrical outlet.

Supervisors, too, swore to uphold the state and federal constitutions.. As private citizens, supervisors can have any opinion they choose, but they are obligated as public servants to follow the law of the land.

The supervisors would do well to concentrate on the issues under their authority.

Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].