If only there was something we could do...

[east or bust]

How is wielding an AR at an elementary school bus stop not considered harassment/menacing? This guy can totally protest for a legal purpose without the firearm.

Maryland harassment law:

§ 3-803. Harassment
Prohibited

(a) A person may not follow another in or about a public place or maliciously engage in a course of conduct that alarms or seriously annoys the other:

(1) with the intent to harass, alarm, or annoy the other;

(2) after receiving a reasonable warning or request to stop by or on behalf of the other; and

(3) without a legal purpose.

Exception

(b) This section does not apply to a peaceable activity intended to express a political view or provide information to others.

Penalty

(c) A person who violates this section is guilty of a misdemeanor and on conviction is subject to:

(1) for a first offense, imprisonment not exceeding 90 days or a fine not exceeding $500 or both; and

(2) for a second or subsequent offense, imprisonment not exceeding 180 days or a fine not exceeding $1,000 or both.

[m2711c]

I believe exception “b” has the answer you’re looking for.

[east or bust]

IMO that's up to interpretation.

He could be out there with a sign. Having a device that's sole purpose is used for killing things could be interpreted as:

(a) A person may not follow another in or about a public place or maliciously engage in a course of conduct that alarms or seriously annoys the other:

(1) with the intent to harass, alarm, or annoy the other;

[Ted Striker]

[SumJongGuy]

I vote for counter protestors in drag here..

[riser4]

I vote for counter protestors in drag here..

Are you asking for people to get shot??? Ammo sexual will definitely see that as a threat requiring violence. "Gay Panic."

[MagnificentUnicorn]

I bet if we made gun ownership like a video game, a lot of problems would be solved. You start out only being able to buy a musket or blunderbuss, and if you want access to more guns you must complete training challenges which open up access to more bigger, badder, cooler guns. E.g. if you want access to a double barrel break action 20 gauge shotgun, all you have to do is take a hunters safety course and a 4 hour wilderness first aid course. But if you want an AR15, then you have to score 400 on the Army's physical fitness test, take 40 hours of tactical strategery classroom courses, 16 hours of firearm and self defense law classses, and 40 hours of practical field courses with a live-fire competency test at the end.

How about limit firearm access to shotguns with three round magazines/break/bolt, bolt action rifles with 5 round magazines and revolvers. If you want to play soldier you can take the test, enlist and opt for infantry. No automatic/semiautomatic firearms or other military weapons for civilians. You can join the Guard if you want to larp around on weekends.


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[MagnificentUnicorn]

Yeah good luck w that.

So what’s your solution, you just keep repeating the same thing.


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[MagnificentUnicorn]

Attachment 459270

It’s shocking that new guns and gun deaths decreased shortly after the 1994 AWB took effect and then increased again after it was allowed to expire. I never would have thought


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[MagnificentUnicorn]

This dude is a great Instagram follow
https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cr9jf...RlODBiNWFlZA==


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Pretty much sums it up.


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[boltonoutlaw]

I vote for counter protestors in drag here..

Similar thought yesterday:

So, what happens when a similarly armed counter protester shows up?

Who is the good guy with the gun? How is the public to know the difference? Would it lead to a shootout?

Aside from the obvious threat of escalation an effective troll would dress and arm similarly and stand on the opposite side of the street brandishing his/her/its weapon. Would that not force the police to remove both individuals, or would that be interpreted as a well-regulated militia?

[concretejungle]

I would have guessed the gun toting bus stop guy was from Bowie but Severn is close enough for me.

[TBS]

Aside from the obvious threat of escalation an effective troll would dress and arm similarly and stand on the opposite side of the street brandishing his/her/its weapon. Would that not force the police to remove both individuals, or would that be interpreted as a well-regulated militia

I first read that as “brandishing her tits” and thought
“Wonder who will get arrested first?”

[basinbeater]

Talkin to a nice guy this morning, dad of a kid on my kids flag football team. We got to talking about break-ins in cars. Mine frequently get rifled through, so i now keep them unlocked, and don't leave anything in the car. They are looking for guns i suspect.
Other guy says yeah, i came out one time and some guy had gone through my truck and stole a .22 out of the center console. All I could do was shake my head. Really annoys me. Nice guy, friendly, i enjoy talking with him, and he is a dumbass. Literally the source of the problem. Responsible gun owner? I think not.

[TBS]

On a positive note…

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) signed two gun safety initiatives into law on Friday that will establish universal background checks and a process for temporarily removing firearms from those who imminently pose a threat to themselves or others.

[SumJongGuy]

^^^^^^^ SCOTUS challenge in 3.....2........1....... and will be struck down. Fucking idiots who wouldn't vote for Hillary.. I hope you're all happy.

[mcphee]

^buttery males

[SumJongGuy]

Just another day out running errands and another shot up family car.. All to common now in medium to large city USA..

MURIKA!

[boltonoutlaw]

Just another day out running errands and another shot up family car.. All to common now in medium to large city USA..

MURIKA!

Also: 2/3 for parking fails

[Harry]

Doing it wrong. Real Americans have bullet holes going outward from their cars.


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[TBS]

^^^Heh, old friend knew a county deputy in AZ who TWICE accidentally discharged his service weapon inside his cruiser.

He ended up taking disability for hearing loss

[bennymac]

[AK47bp]

^^^Heh, old friend knew a county deputy in AZ who TWICE accidentally discharged his service weapon inside his cruiser.

He ended up taking disability for hearing loss

They call that a “Cruiser Pop”, a right of passage.

[Ted Striker]

Makes total sense. Every pilot is allowed one free plane crash.

[boltonoutlaw]

Long read. I don't write the articles, I just copy n paste 'em as its behind a paywall. Size 4 font for the olds

Here’s What We Can Do Now About Gun Violence by Gordon Witkin

A litany of exasperating rituals flows from America’s regular mass shootings. One of the most frustrating is the hand-wringing that our politics is so polarized that there’s no way to move forward.

Since assault weapons bans aren’t coming back and AR-15-style rifles are here to stay, the most important thing we can do is modernize the background check system, around which there’s a modicum of bipartisan consensus. What’s required is gritty work in the administrative trenches that won’t get anyone elected — and there is substantial progress to report. But now we need more.

The F.B.I.’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System, known as NICS, stitches together three databases of state and federal criminal history records and other so-called hot files. Before NICS was set up in 1993, gun checks were largely the province of the states; some continue to do their own reviews.

NICS checks records to either approve consumer purchases from federally licensed firearms dealers or deny them to 10 categories of prohibited people: felons, fugitives, convicted drug users, people in the country illegally, people who’ve renounced U.S. citizenship, anyone dishonorably discharged from the military, people under a restraining order in regard to an intimate partner or convicted of a misdemeanor violent crime and anyone who has been adjudicated as mentally defective or committed to a psychiatric institution.

Sounds good — but sadly, NICS remains a false promise. Conceived as a first line of defense, the system is still honeycombed with enormous data gaps, loopholes and disputes over how those prohibited categories should be defined. Hundreds of thousands of crucial records remain outside the system, stacked in dusty boxes in courthouse basements or in legal limbo. As a result, lots of people who shouldn’t are buying guns.

“We know it is deadly to be missing even one critical record, and we’ve seen that in tragedies,” Rob Wilcox, the senior director of federal government affairs policy for Everytown for Gun Safety, told me.

Mental health records provide an especially vexing example. State privacy laws frequently prohibit the sharing of records — health care providers are hesitant too — and most states lack a contact person to collect the information and send it to the F.B.I.

In April 2007, Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people at Virginia Tech University with guns he bought despite a documented history of court-ordered mental health treatment — records of which never made their way into the system. That shooting brought attention to what Everytown called “fatal gaps in record submissions that undermine the background check system.” A 2011 study by the National Center for State Courts found that states struggled to report even estimates on mental health adjudications or commitments.

Other issues involving mental health are perhaps more nuanced. Early reporting indicates that Mauricio Garcia, the gunman who this month killed eight people at Allen Premium Outlets outside Dallas, was in 2008 expelled from the Army after three months, perhaps because of mental health issues. An Army official told The Dallas Morning News that Mr. Garcia was terminated under a regulation related to a host of conditions, including disorders that could disturb “perception, thinking, emotional control or behavior.” If a dishonorable discharge triggers a NICS bar on obtaining a gun, shouldn’t other kinds of separations from the military as well?

Many other sorts of records are also an unmitigated mess. There are millions of accessible arrest records but often no solid information about the dispositions of cases. A 2013 study by the National Consortium for Justice Information and Statistics concluded that as much as a quarter of felony convictions were not available in NICS. Orders deriving from domestic relations cases may reside only in local courthouses and are challenging to untangle. Many drug arrests don’t make their way into the system, either.

This dry list of data issues masks heartbreaking consequences. In late 2021 the families of nine people massacred six years earlier at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, S.C., reached an $88 million settlement with the Justice Department of their suit alleging that gaps in NICS data enabled the racist killer to obtain a gun despite his earlier drug arrest. An internal F.B.I. report partly blamed “untimely responses and/or incomplete records” from other law enforcement agencies and also cited a policy of relying on faxes rather than emails or phone calls to seek missing records.

Against that depressing backdrop, there has been important progress. Less than a year after the Virginia Tech shooting, with support from the National Rifle Association, Congress passed and President George W. Bush signed the NICS Improvement Act, intended to provide the states grants to get more of their mental health and other records to NICS. Thirty-two grants to state-level agencies totaling $42.4 million were awarded through the 2020 fiscal year.

In January 2016 the Department of Health and Human Services finalized rules to clarify that the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, or HIPAA, was not an obstacle to the reporting of mental health records.

Today 36 states have laws requiring the reporting of mental health records to NICS. The number of those records in the system has soared, to 6.88 million early this year from 531,000 at the end of 2008. The number of purchases that were blocked because of mental health issues advanced in lock step, Everytown said; those denials rose to more than 11,000 in 2017 from 960 in 2008. But eight other states have laws merely allowing, not requiring, mental health records to be reported, a far lower standard. And six states — Arkansas, Michigan, Montana, New Hampshire, Ohio and Wyoming — and the District of Columbia have no relevant law at all, so they’re providing only modest amounts of mental health documents. As of January, Montana had provided 36 relevant mental health records; Wyoming had provided 22.

Last year’s Bipartisan Safer Communities Act provided new challenges and opportunities. The law expands the gun purchase prohibition for people convicted of domestic violence or subject to a restraining order to include dating partners, not just people married to or living with the victim. Reformers applauded this closing of the boyfriend loophole, but the worry is that many criminal history records don’t clarify whether such relationships existed. The act included some federal cash to encourage states to address those considerable gaps.

Sadly, though, the tragic tales keep piling up. Last month, the Justice Department reached a $144.5 million settlement with victims and relatives of those killed in a 2017 mass shooting at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. Some of the families sued in 2018 after the Air Force admitted it had not reported the violent history of the gunman, Devin Kelley, including a 2012 conviction for domestic assault, to the NICS system. That conviction, which led to the gunman’s dismissal from the service, should have prevented his being able to buy the guns he used in the attack.

A more basic NICS flaw involves simply identifying the prospective gun buyer. In 2023, are we really going to continue to allow purchasers to show only a driver’s license, an easily and regularly forged document? Every college student in America who wants a beer has a forged driver’s license. As far back as 2001, investigators from what is now the Government Accountability Office were able to purchase firearms in five states using counterfeit licenses. Today’s technology — and common sense — argues that buyers should be required to provide fingerprints, which would be read at a gun store by a scanner and then searched in the F.B.I.’s computerized fingerprint database, which is operated closely with the states. Such checks can be completed within a few hours. I’ll stipulate that for successful purchasers, all traces of the search would need to be destroyed immediately to satisfy privacy concerns.

Admittedly, these sorts of concerns don’t translate smoothly into our current political culture of shoutfests. But these are hair-on-fire issues that cry out for more — more general attention, more media coverage, more bully pulpit focus from police chiefs and F.B.I. honchos and the president and this Congress, more appropriated money and more public shaming of lazy or recalcitrant state and local governments and health care providers who know someone is dangerous.

Gun policy progressives grouse that other proposed NICS changes could be more important — closing the loophole that exempts gun shows and private transactions from NICS and closing the so-called Charleston loophole, which forces the system to approve gun sales after three days even if investigators need more time to unearth relevant records, as happened in the massacre there. Fair enough. But those issues at this time are politically gridlocked. That’s a fact.

But closing other NICS loopholes is a task within our grasp. Isn’t that more important than watching helplessly as the death toll continues to grow?

Gordon Witkin has covered criminal justice for decades. He is a former national affairs editor of U.S. News & World Report and was an executive editor at the Center for Public Integrity.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/21/o...ound-nics.html