Maryland Considers Broad Range Of Gun Bills

Maryland was rocked by the Capital Gazette shooting last year. As tends to be the case, people watch a shooting unfold on television or the internet and want something to be done. It’s not unique to anti-gunners either, mind you, but their “something” tends to be a lot more problematic.

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Now, Maryland’s legislature is considering 16 different gun bills.

Monday was gun day in Annapolis as gun rights and gun control advocates lined up to testify on a slew of bills.

Sixteen gun-related bills being heard Monday included allowing parishioners to be armed inside church, requiring an armed presence inside every school and getting a license and background check for long guns.

Police said Capital Gazette shooting suspect Jarrod Ramos used a legally purchased pump-action shotgun and passed a background check before opening fire in the newspaper’s newsroom in June.

Some people are supporting a bill that would require a license and background check on all rifle and shotgun purchases. Jan Donahoe McNamara lost her brother-in-law, John McNamara, in the Capital Gazette shooting.

“It was a warm summer night and the fireflies had settled into the tall trees looking like twinkling Christmas lights. Rather than finding the site comforting, the girls were confused that the world could still seem so calm and beautiful when something so ugly had just happened. The man who stormed the Gazette newsroom less than 4 miles from where we are sitting right now used a long gun to destroy as many lives as he could,” Donahoe McNamara said.

Just why adding an extra layer of bureaucracy to the gun buying process would somehow stop someone like the Capital Gazette shooter is beyond me. After all, even Think Progress acknowledges the killer, despite his history, hadn’t committed any crimes severe enough to warrant him not being able to buy a gun.

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If he could pass that background check, why would anyone think he wouldn’t another?

Hell, requiring a license prior to buying a gun didn’t stop the Aurora, Illinois killer, now did it? No, and he was a convicted felon. The Capital Gazette killer was creepy and threatening, but he never crossed that line before that day.

There was no reason to prevent him from owning a gun.

I get that people want answers and they want solutions. The problem is, these aren’t. They’re not going to solve anything except make life more difficult for law-abiding citizens while having zero impact on the very crimes they’re designed to prevent. We have evidence of just that in Illinois.

If you want to prevent these things, we need to understand them. It’s not enough to blame the tool and not the tool using it. It’s not enough to look for the superficial fix or to try to blame just one thing.

No, the problem requires more than that, and it seems some are more interested in focusing on guns than looking deeper. Then again, that shouldn’t surprise me. Despite their rhetoric, it’s not like anti-gunners value human life.

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