Guns are banned, but are Oklahoma lawmakers packing?

While construction workers, employees and visiting schoolchildren wait patiently to walk through the metal detectors guarding the entrances, a man with a briefcase arrives and breezes straight through the checkpoint without stopping, setting off the alarms.

[...] security officials are grumbling about a trend among some conservative legislators who are now declining to submit to the weapons screening that has been required at government buildings for years.

Oklahoma is one of 45 states that now allow some form of open carry of firearms, and pro-firearms lawmakers have been pushing to make guns allowable in most places, even college campuses and public arenas.

Firearms are permitted in the Texas, New Hampshire and Idaho statehouses, but other conservative states including Oklahoma have turned aside such proposals because of security concerns about government buildings as possible targets of violence.

During a 30-minute period after a recent lunch break, an Associated Press reporter watched six GOP House members walk through the checkpoints with their briefcases and satchels and set off the alarms.

"If a legislator wants to carry a firearm in the Capitol, I think they have a constitutional protection to do that," said Ralph Shortey, a Republican senator, who said weapons screening violates a constitutional prohibition against interfering with lawmakers during a legislative session.

In pro-gun Texas, the statehouse had no security screening until 2010, when a man who had just visited a legislator's office walked out onto the Capitol steps and fired several shots in the air.