Missouri Senator Proposes Rule Change To Allow Duels

Some have called the state's current legislative session "an embarrassment"

‘The duel shall take place in the well of the senate at the hour of high noon on the date agreed to by the parties to the duel.”

In a move that is perhaps the most appropriate regarding the crazy month that has been January 2024, a Missouri state senator has introduced a new rule to allow senators to challenge each other to a duel. In wording that reads like verbiage from the antebellum era, Schroer’s rule states: "“If a senator’s honor is impugned by another senator to the point that it is beyond repair and in order for the offended senator to gain satisfaction, such senator may rectify the perceived insult to the senator’s honor by challenging the offending senator to a duel. The duel shall take place in the well of the senate at the hour of high noon on the date agreed to by the parties to the duel."

Metaphorically or not, dueling in 19th-century Missouri was a very real reality, much like it was across the entire country.

Listed on the Missouri Secretary of State website: “Around 1800 a small sandbar in the middle of the Mississippi River between the states of Missouri and Illinois grew to island proportions.  This made the island an ideal site as a secluded “field of honor” for dueling…it quickly became notorious and earned its colorful name of Bloody Island.”

Photo courtesy of Missouri History Museum

Senator Nicholas Schroer, elected in 2022, told the Kansas City Star: “The behavior that we’ve seen on the floor, lack of communication from leadership, politics as a whole just eroding … If we’re going back in time and acting like an uncivilized society, I think we need to have a discussion.”

The rule will not be formally introduced, and Senator Schroer was merely trying to make a point about political disfunction, but his proposal was not without criticism, especially from Joanne B. Freeman (Yale University) who hyperbolically warned that Sen. Schroer's comments could stoke extremism and incite violence.