Maryland

... that the modern Democratic party is sufficiently insane to be on the edge of violence concerning President Bush, yet continue to perceive no understanding of the dangers posed by an intrusive government determined to track its citizens. 

Councilor Rob Consalvo wants to put a tracking device into newly manufactured guns and have legal gun owners retrofit their firearms so owners and police can locate and retrieve stolen guns the same way police use a computer chip to locate stolen cars.

Let's hope Smith and Wesson learned from their mistake in signing the Clinton deal.

Bear in mind, too, that we already know how Maryland treats gun owners.  During the DC sniper incident, the police chief decided it would be worthwhile to investigate all "registered" Maryland gun owners who had purchased a .223 semiautomatic rifle, including "requesting" that their firearms be turned over to the police for "testing".

I do not want to live in a nation where individuals and their possessions are tracked by the everpresent State.

Hat tip to Ravenwood for this story.

MEMO TO Linda and Marty Clarke: That little midnight raid the cops staged on your Swallow at the Hollow restaurant/bar the other night? It was nothing personal, folks, just the Baltimore police trying to calm the city and instead throwing a chill into a neighborhood joint that's been a feel-good landmark for the past 60 years.

When those 18 officials swooped onto York Road and Northern Parkway and frightened customers inside the Swallow, it was all about good intentions that turned into a case of overkill.

An effort is under way to establish a firm schedule for updating the state's roster of approved firearms, a move that would reduce the time it takes for some handguns to get from manufacturers to buyers.

Just this week seven weapons were added to the roster, including three made by Smith & Wesson in Springfield, bringing the total number of firearms on the list to 379.

The roster was created by the Gun Control Act enacted in 1998, and weapons on the list are approved by the secretary of public safety after testing at a state-approved laboratory. The seven-member Gun Control Advisory Board recommends to the secretary which weapons should be added to the roster.

This is Maryland, where the state must approve every new firearm before it can be sold. This is what happens when you let "safety" drive firearms legislation -- a form of safety that protects no one, just impose more beaurocratic barriers.

Altering specified requirements for the issuance of handgun permits; repealing the requirement that the Secretary of State Police find that an applicant seeking a permit has a good and substantial reason to wear, carry, or transport a handgun; establishing a 45-day period within which the Secretary must issue a permit to carry a handgun after an application is approved; requiring that an individual be certified by a qualified handgun instructor before receiving a permit; etc.

Maryland considers shall-issue. Only a few states left!

A Democratic senator considered the swing vote on a proposed Maryland ban on the sale of semiautomatic rifles and shotguns said Friday he will vote against the gun-control bill.

Sen. John Gianetti, a Prince George's County resident whose district also includes part of Anne Arundel County, had been under intense pressure from both sides of the emotional gun-control issue.

Gianetti said he decided to oppose the bill for several reasons, including his feeling that "you're not going to see safer streets" if the bill became law.

If anyone from Maryland is reading this, Senator Gianetti would probably appreciate a few phone calls thanking him for his decision.

Police investigators expected to find guns inside a Kensington home when they raided it in April. But they did not expect to find so many.

Police found 57 handguns, shotguns, rifles and assault rifles, said Sgt. Kenneth Berger of the county police department's Firearms Investigation Unit. Guns lay on tables, under furniture and hidden in wall niches. In a bunker-like room in the basement, they found kegs holding eight pounds of black gunpowder.

The man was committed to a psychiatric hospital after the raid. He has since been released and is seeking to have his weapons returned, Berger said. However, under state and federal law, police can confiscate the weapons of those committed for mental health problems.

This is just one of the hundreds of cases investigated by the county police under a pilot program launched in 2003.

The police are quoted in the article trying hard to spin it as an effort that was being very careful of the rights of law-abiding gun owners, but there's a catch-22 here. They get a tip -- which is almost certainly worthless -- do a raid, confiscate this guy's 57 guns, and have him committed for evaluation. Then he gets released, because he's sane. No charges.

But he's been involuntarily committed to a mental hospital. He's no longer "legally permitted" to own a gun. So he can't get his guns back.

With less than two weeks remaining in the General Assembly's legislative session, the lead sponsor of an assault weapons ban conceded Tuesday that the bill is dead.

The House and Senate failed to approve the assault weapons bill by Monday's crucial "cross-over" date, prompting lawmakers and advocates on both sides of the issue to predict that the bill was headed for defeat. Bills approved after the "cross-over" date are assigned to the opposite chamber's Rules Committee, known around Annapolis as the place where controversial bills are sent to die.

"Unfortunately, the bill is dead," said Del. Neil F. Quinter (D-Dist. 13) of Columbia, lead sponsor of the ban in the House. "It's very disappointing."

Disappointing isn't exactly the word I would choose.

In the wake of this damning report showing that in several years of operation Maryland's ballistic fingerprinting database has failed to help solve a single crime, legislators have introduced a bill to discontinue the system. Normal human beings who don't like being added to a list of potential criminals just because they acquire the tools of self-defense will rejoice when this bill passes -- and frankly, I can't imagine it will fail after the publication of this report.

Those of you in Maryland: push this bill through. Take back some ground.

Maryland grassroots organization Maryland Shall Issue pushes for a bill that will end arbitrary discrimination in permitting law-abiding citizens to carry firearms. They propose a system that would allow anyone who passes an FBI background check, isn't a felon, isn't mentally ill, and passes a safety course to receive a permit, similar to the shall-issue laws in 37 other states, including Virginia.

This just on the heels of another bill repealing the ballistic fingerprinting database. It looks like gun owners in Maryland have quite a few things to fight for in this legislative session.

One of the recurring problems the gun control movement has is simply being honest.  They can't admit to what they really want to do, because no one would go along with that.  Instead they peddle lies; they say things like "only this far, and no farther", and they claim to support gun ownership by law-abiding citizens while working to make it impossible for gun owners to remain law-abiding.  That principle is in evidence here; the mayor is breaking a promise not to hold gun "buybacks":

In April 2000, the mayor -- who had taken office five months earlier -- criticized gun buybacks in general as a waste of money and promised Baltimore would not hold one. Later that month, the city's housing authority spent $286,000 to buy 710 guns, using money from a federal housing grant and drug treatment dollars.

O'Malley said at the time he would rather see the city buying guns that were used in crimes because the general buybacks tend to attract "a lot of garbage guns." He said he allowed the buyback to continue because it was scheduled prior to his election.

Of course, honesty isn't the only problem with this program.

Offering anonymity to everyone, the police will examine all guns turned in. Those that are stolen will be returned to their owners, and those used in crimes will help investigations, said Deputy Police Commissioner Marcus Brown. Otherwise, guns will be melted down.

This isn't about "taking guns off the street", it's about paying criminals to help them destroy evidence.

Dumbarton Middle School in Rodgers Forge has suspended indefinitely a sixth-grade pupil who brought a toy gun to school and told classmates it was real, school officials said yesterday. Assistant Principal Michael Etzel said he removed the boy from his first-period class on Tuesday, after a classmate reported the remarks. "At no time was there a threat to any kids in the school," Etzel said yesterday.

If there was no threat, why was he suspended?

Howard County police hope that a $250 reward will entice residents to pick up the phone to report illegal guns. The program, called Project Cease Fire, went into effect late last month and is similar to hundreds of initiatives across the nation. Some have been successful in helping authorities track down illegal guns while other police departments say their tip lines have led to only a handful of arrests each year. Howard police hope to avoid such a low total by publicizing their program heavily, which many say is vital in such efforts.

What about LEGAL guns? What's the reward for those? Do they CARE about the harassment they will inflict on law-abiding gun owners? And don't even get me started on anonymous-tip reward systems.

A federal judge has accused Baltimore police of ``fumbling and bumbling'' cases and twice forcing him to throw out evidence, including a large heroin seizure. ``I think the community is entitled to a higher level of performance, to a higher level of professionalism,'' U.S. District Judge Andre Davis said during a Jan. 10 hearing. ``They don't understand the Constitution. They don't understand the limits that the law places upon them.''

A Kinloch police officer said he accidentally shot a motorist during a traffic stop early Saturday then chased the man for 25 miles into Maryland Heights.

The officer, Walter Wilson, the former police chief in Kinloch, said he stopped the man about 3:40 a.m. at Martin Luther King Boulevard and Suburban Avenue in Kinloch.

How do you shoot someone during a traffic stop "accidentally"?

Maryland Republican gubernatorial candidate Robert L. Ehrlich is willing to judge gun-control laws on their merits ý do they actually work? ý and if not, get rid of them.

As anti-gun advocates continued to characterize him as a pawn of the National Rifle Association, Republican gubernatorial candidate Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. clarified yesterday a statement he made about the state's Handgun Roster Board, contending that he never said he would seek to get rid of it.

On Friday, Ehrlich said he would "review" the state's gun control programs "to see what's working." The two he mentioned were the ballistic fingerprint program, in which state police keep track of shell casing data, and the Handgun Roster Board, which approves all handguns before they can be sold in Maryland.

"The Handgun Roster Board was sold as this really great idea," he said Friday. "I looked at it pretty recently and they were having problems getting folks on the panel and actually doing their jobs." He said state gun crime statistics led him to suspect these programs weren't working and might be a waste of state resources.

Proponents of Maryland's ''ballistic fingerprinting'' law -- enacted two years ago as a new tool in the war against gun crime -- have some explaining to do, considering a string of sniper shootings during the past few days in the Maryland suburbs just outside Washington, D.C.

The mayor of Frederick, Md., ordered police to stop a group of activists carrying a "Save the Ten Commandments" banner from marching in a weekend parade.

The group's leader, who had a permit to march in the parade with a banner, was handcuffed and detained until the parade had passed.

"I was shocked, shocked that we were not allowed to march in the parade," said Neil Parrott, 32, president of the Friends of Frederick. "I did not expect this kind of reaction from the city at all."

Arrested for what he had on his banner??!

ROCKVILLE -- With the Washington-area sniper putting gun control at the top of the agenda, Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend's relentless attacks on U.S. Rep. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.'s NRA-friendly record were starting to get some traction in the Washington suburbs.

But this week, Ehrlich (R) pounced on the revelation that the state failed for at least three months to provide background check information to the FBI, allowing hundreds of rifle and shotgun purchases to go unchecked and possibly into the hands of criminals.

The embarrassing news came in the form of a request by U.S. House Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) for a General Accounting Office investigation of how $6.7 million in federal grants to improve background checks has been spent since 1995, when Gov. Parris N. Glendening and Townsend (D) took office.

Read all the way to the end. There are some juicy quotes from Townsend explaining her opposition to fully-automatic weapons, plus "AK-47s and Uzis on the streets". She doesn't even know they are already practically banned.

Under the Democratic leadership of Gov. Parris Glendening and Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the State of Maryland has notched the second highest violent crime rate in the nation according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Report for 2001.

According to the FBI report, there were 783 violent criminal acts committed per every 100,000 citizens in Maryland during the course of the 2001 calendar year. Florida topped the category with 797.2 per 100,000.

Since Glendening and Townsend, who assumed the role of crime czar, took office in 1995, Maryland's violent crime ranking has jumped ahead of six states to achieve its current standing.

One of the only major races focused on gun control has been called in favor of the Republican (and pro-gun, relatively) Ehrlich, over Townsend, who has aggressively called for more gun control following the sniper shootings.

Gun control advocates pressed yesterday for new measures that would ban assault-style weapons, expand ballistic fingerprinting and require immediate reporting of lost or stolen handguns - and their efforts picked up tentative support from Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. With Montgomery County police Chief Charles A. Moose and the mother of slain sniper victim Conrad Johnson appearing yesterday at an Annapolis news conference in support of the bills, gun control immediately emerged as one of the prominent issues of the General Assembly session.

The proposals include banning "assault weapons" (ie, ugly semiautomatic rifles) and ballistic fingerprinting on more classes of firearm. Ehrlich, by the way, was the NRA's favored candidate in the Maryland elections. Gee, he's doing a bang-up job of defending firearm rights, isn't he?

U.S. Rep. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) said yesterday that if elected governor he will review Maryland's strict gun laws and consider repealing two of the most far-reaching measures if they proved ineffective.

"It's time to take a look at what's passed over the last 16 years and see what's worked and what's not," he said.

No kidding. Now, even if he gets elected, he can't repeal those laws himself. He'll have to push them through the legislature. But he's got the right idea.