Newcomb: ‘Why fix something that ain’t broke?’

Former House Speaker Bruce Newcomb, the government affairs director for Boise State University, told the House State Affairs Committee that when he was in the Legislature, his first rule for legislation was to do no harm. “We’re fixing a perceived non-existent problem with a solution that creates problems,” with HB 222, the guns-on-campus bill, he told the committee. “I just suggest, why fix something that ain’t broke?”

Newcomb said, “We have venues where people come and put on entertainment, like Elton John … Kenny Chesney. … They’re not going to show up if you don’t have a no-pack on campus.” The university stands to lose significant revenues if the bill passes, Newcomb said. “I realize that this is a push by the NRA. I used to belong to the NRA,” he said, but became concerned about some of the group’s positions on machine guns. “I never thought I ever saw a deer that I needed to shoot 50 times before I released the trigger,” he said. “I don’t understand this one either, because there’s not a problem there.” After the Virginia Tech shooting incident, Newcomb said, “We’ve all responded to that, so that we have security response and a way to notify all students so that we have a quick response, probably quicker than if someone was in the room.”

Newcomb said as a longtime GOP lawmaker, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was “always my hero - he believed that the Constitution says what it says.” Scalia himself, in the court’s landmark decision on Washington, D.C.’s gun law, wrote that the high court had no problem with restrictions on firearms in schools.