As I noted last week, the shooter in the workplace shooting that led to the death of five people should not have been able to keep his gun due to a felony conviction should have resulted in his guns being seized. As it turns out, this is not an uncommon issue:
The workplace shooting in a Chicago suburb last week that left five people dead exposed the failings of the system designed to keep guns away from convicted felons and others deemed too dangerous to handle firearms.
Federal law bars gun ownership by felons, fugitives, drug abusers, people adjudicated to be mentally ill, those dishonorably discharged from the military or living in the country illegally, and by convicted domestic abusers or others subject to domestic violence restraining orders. But experts say the number of people who are barred from owning guns but have them anyway may reach into the millions.
Still, only eight states have laws that provide an explicit mechanism so that people suspected of having guns in violation of those prohibitions are actually required to give them up. And some of those states merely allow — but do not require — the police to seek a court order to confiscate such guns.
That was the case in Illinois, where the authorities knew for more than four years that Gary Martin was a violent felon but apparently did nothing to ensure that he surrendered the laser-sighted Smith & Wesson handgun that he used to kill five co-workers in Aurora, Ill., on Friday.
The authorities say they are investigating how Mr. Martin slipped through the cracks of the Illinois law, which the police might have been able to use to confiscate his handgun years ago. And the Illinois State Police said they were reviewing why an initial background check failed to turn up a criminal conviction that should have blocked him from buying the gun to begin with.
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The authorities say they are investigating how Mr. Martin slipped through the cracks of the Illinois law, which the police might have been able to use to confiscate his handgun years ago. And the Illinois State Police said they were reviewing why an initial background check failed to turn up a criminal conviction that should have blocked him from buying the gun to begin with.
“That’s a challenging situation for law enforcement to knock on a door and say, ‘Hey, we’re here to take your guns, Mr. Dangerous Criminal,’” said Adam Skaggs, chief counsel of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which advocates tighter gun laws.
Only a single state — California — has a database dedicated to tracking firearm owners who have lost their right to possess a gun, either because of a new criminal conviction or something else. The program, which was created in 2001 and went online five years later, was sponsored by the Republican leader in the State Senate and was approved with strong bipartisan support.
Agents from the California Department of Justice work with local law enforcement officials to surveil and disarm people in the database believed to illegally own firearms.
“They’re like little SWAT teams,” said Mark Leno, a former California state senator who sponsored a $24 million special appropriation in 2013 to hire 36 more state agents and reduce a backlog of suspected illegal gun owners.
“It is very labor intensive to do this right, and there is always the risk that someone, especially if they are suffering from a serious mental illness, could become very frightened and might act out,” said Mr. Leno, a Democrat from San Francisco.
The California mentioned above has proven to be rather successful in the time that it has been successful. Over the past five years, for example, the Golden State has managed to cut the number of people in the database the backlog of ineligible felons still in possession of weapons, from around 20,000 to around 10,000. In 2017 alone, the program managed to seize nearly 4,000 guns that were in the hands of people who should not have guns due to their criminal records. The problem is that California’s system remains a rarity across the country. Right now, only two other states, Colorado and Nevada have laws that expressly require felons to prove to courts or law enforcement that they have turned over any weapons they own after conviction. Five other states, Illinois, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania have statutes that cover this area but they are not nearly as stringent, something we’ve seen from Illinois in particular both in the case last week and in the case of a shooting in Kentucky last year where the shooter had his guns returned erroneously after having been convicted of a felony in Illinois. In the case of Illinois, there were efforts to change the law to make gun seizure mandatory upon conviction but objections due to lack of money and manpower from law enforcement caused the proposal to become stalled in the state legislature. In addition to these states, some other states require people convicted of charges such as domestic abuse, or who are subject to restraining orders, to give up their weapons or have laws that give Judges discretion to take weapons from those deemed to be a threat to themselves or others, As a matter of course, though, most of these laws are discretionary rather than mandatory and they often end up being ignored,
As with something like universal background checks, it seems axiomatic to say that this is an area of gun control law that ought to have near universa support. There is no justification for someone who has been convicted of a violent felony or charge of something such as domestic abuse, who are subject to a restraining order, or who are subject to a restraining order to be able to keep their weapons. At the very least, it seems as if those states where there are already such laws on the books should be on top of actually making sure that they are enforced, something that is specially true given that many such states are heavily Democratic states where public support for gun control is far higher than it is in other states. Granted, the fact is that very few of the mass shootings that we have seen over the past decade or more were committed by people who should not have had weapons but there are enough of them — such as the Sandy Springs, Texas case, the Knoxville Waffle House shooting last April, the shooting at an African-American church in South Carolina, and, of course last Friday’s shooting — that the fact that these events potentially could have been prevented if the law were properly enforced and followed or if the loopholes in the law had been closed is both outrageous and a tragedy.
