After the shooting at the Kansas City Super Bowl Parade last month, Democrats, in their words, “caused chaos” in the Missouri House of Representatives. Another shooting over the weekend moved a representative to speak on Monday.
Representative Eric Woods is a Democrat from Kansas City. North Kansas City High School is in his district and was the site of a shooting that left two injured on Saturday.
On Monday, Woods spoke in a point of personal privilege before the House of Representatives about how the shooting has shaken his community. A point of personal privilege is a motion that allows lawmakers to talk about issues that affect the House.
He’s calling for a change in policy. But he was interrupted by Missouri's Speaker of the House, Republican Dean Plocher, who said that Woods wasn’t speaking on a point of personal privilege. Speaker Plocher is allowed to control debate, so despite mistakenly saying that Woods did not have a point of personal privilege, he was within a parliamentary procedure.
Woods said that if Democrats sound like a broken record, it's because shootings persist and he doesn’t think anything will change.
“If I believed that something could be done with the current body we have now. I wouldn’t have tried to speak so forcefully today,” Woods said.