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Home » On the Highland Park shooter and red flag laws

On the Highland Park shooter and red flag laws

The New Neo Posted on by

The Highland Park shooter was waving red flags with both hands and both feet. And yet Illinois red flag laws didn’t stop him from purchasing not just one gun but many.

This is his history – or at least a portion of it [emphasis mine]:

On Tuesday, Lake County authorities revealed that Crimo had two encounters with local police in 2019, before he legally obtained his weapons.

The first call, in April 2019, was a report that he had attempted suicide.

Then, in September 2019, a family member called Highland Park police to report that Crimo “said he was going to kill everyone” and that he had a collection of knives, Sgt. Christopher Covelli of the Lake County Sheriff’s Office said at a press conference Tuesday.

Highland Park police confiscated 16 knives, a dagger and a sword from Crimo’s home – but ultimately did not arrest Crimo, Covelli said, in part because none of his family were willing to sign complaints.

Afterward, Highland Park police notified Illinois State Police of the incident in a “clear and present danger” report.

But because Crimo did not then have a FOID card – a firearm owner’s identification card that is issued by Illinois State Police and required for gun ownership – nor an application to deny, the state police said, their “involvement with the matter was concluded.”

Three months later, Crimo, then 19, applied for a FOID card. His application was sponsored by his father, and was approved by state police in January 2020.

Later that year, Crimo passed three background checks to purchase guns, authorities said. He passed a fourth check on Sept. 20, 2021, his 21st birthday.

In a second statement released late Tuesday, Illinois State Police addressed questions about why the “clear and present danger” report did not prevent Crimo from obtaining a FOID card just four months later.

“The report indicates that when police went to the home and asked the individual if he felt like harming himself or others, he responded no,” the agency said. “No one, including family, was willing to move forward on a complaint nor did they subsequently provide information on threats or mental health that would have allowed law enforcement to take additional action.”

Additionally, Crimo’s father claimed the knives were his, and that they were being stored in his son’s closet “for safekeeping,” police said. Highland Park police returned the knives to Crimo’s father later that afternoon.

This is another example of why strict gun laws won’t prevent these things from happening at least sometimes. Illinois is a blue state with a red flag law that failed here. I’ve highlighted the parts about the father and the family because I think they show a pattern, and the pattern is either denial or excuses or misplaced compassion or some combination of the three.

And yet I think parents of troubled youths are in a dreadful bind. What to do? Sometimes the kid has had tons of therapy and it hasn’t helped (I have no idea what the therapy history of this perp was, however). Therapy isn’t a cureall. Sometimes parents are afraid if they institute a tough-love regimen their son or daughter will get even worse, and they therefore think it’s best to keep that person home.

Remember the case of the family of John Hinckley, the young man who almost succeeded in killing Ronald Reagan in order to impress Jodie Foster? I certainly do:

‘The strength drained from the sonorous voice of John W. Hinckley Sr. as he described ”the greatest mistake of my life,” the March 7, 1981, meeting at the Denver airport when he told his ”dazed, wiped out” son he could not come home again.

Weeping silently, he buried his face in a handkerchief when he had finished his testimony as the eighth witness called in support of his son’s defense, which is that he is not guilty because he was insane…

Mr. Hinckley’s wife, JoAnn, who had been bent over, sobbing into a tissue, was escorted from the spectator section of the courtroom…

According to his father’s testimony, it was at about 4:30 A.M. on March 6, 1981 – which, unknown to him, was just hours after his son had left the letter under Miss Foster’s door – that he received an ”incoherent” and ”frantic” telephone call from him in which he said he was broke, hungry and sleepless in New York and wanted to come home.

That call led to the rupture of the long-strained relationship between the self-made oil entrepreneur and the self-described ”prodigal” son, whose unwillingness to finish college or to support himself and increasingly erratic behavior had, the father said, caused ”a great deal of discord in our home.”

The father said he met his son at the Denver airport on March 7, after reluctantly sending him money to fly to Denver from New York. While driving alone from the family home in Evergreen, Colo., to the airport, Mr. Hinckley said, ”I prayed that we were doing the right thing.” . He said a psychiatrist had told him and his wife to tell their son to fend for himself, and had advised, ”Send him $100 and wish him good luck.”

At the airport, he said, ”We sat down and I told him how disappointed we were in him, that he had let us down and he had not followed the plan we had all agreed on” for him to support himself. The plan had been devised by Dr. John J. Hopper Jr., the psychiatrist. Told Son Not to Come Back

Mr. Hinckley said he gave his son ”a couple of hundred dollars,” took him to the son’s old car parked near the airport, put some antifreeze in the leaky radiator, and told him that he could not come ”back to the house again.” As his wife sobbed quietly in her seat in the front row of the packed spectator section, Mr. Hinckley continued:

”I suggested that he go to the Y.M.C.A., and he said he did not want to do that. I said, ‘Okay, you’re on your own. Do whatever you want to.’

Please read the whole thing.

It’s not that the Highland Park shooter had much in common with Hinckley except some sort of obvious mental disturbance that caused family problems. In both cases a father was present and involved in dealing with his son, although the way each chose to treat that son was very different. It didn’t matter in the end; both sons were bent on violence and committed it.

In the case of the Highland Park shooter’s father it seems as though the father’s cooperation, or the cooperation of some family member, was necessary in order for the red flag laws of Illinois to have flagged the son and stopped him from the legal purchase of a gun. Is that a flaw in the law? If Crimo the younger seemed coherent at the time the police came, and everyone declined to escalate matters further, should a red flag law have been activated anyway? And if so, for how long?

In other words, how to draft a red flag law which protects the innocent but stops the potentially dangerous from obtaining weapons? That is far from easy and in my opinion it’s probably impossible to do perfectly. And if course, if a person is determined to get a weapon, there is always the illegal route.

Comments

On the Highland Park shooter and red flag laws — 63 Comments

  1. “… Illinois has strict gun laws that go unenforced. We don’t need more gun laws. We need the laws we already have enforced by trustworthy people. ”
    The press is saying the perp purchased the guns “legally”, in more than one buy, each time “passing” the background check. Reports from his friends state he was a regular pothead. If true, like Hunter Biden, he lied on the form about being a user of illegal drugs – which is a disqualifier for passing the background checks.
    So much for “universal background check laws”. Again, proof that laws have little to no effect on the lawless.

  2. It’s unfortunate, but I wonder if there’s a kind of ‘Lone Wolf’ over-reaction syndrome, whereby a troubled person has a brush with the law that is taken in a different light when the trouble escalates into tragedy, and the ‘brush’ is interpreted as a shortcoming of Law Enforcement. What is missing from the story is how many such domestic disturbances the police process in a single day, week, year. If the number is in the thousands, then perhaps it would put something like this into a different perspective. And: Would the Illinois red flag laws have continued to apply, 3 years later – is that how they work? I thought they were short term, crisis applications, designed to defuse as a matter of urgency until the crisis passes.

    There are many points circulating now that also add to a picture of family dysfunction. I saw a short video of the mother, outside her home, arguing with the police that had congregated there to progress the investigation. She is clearly very agitated, with that kind of wild-eyed, chin-jutting, argumentative posture, right up in a cop’s face. For me, that was a click. And then, a neighbor let a journalist up onto their balcony to look over the fence at a painting on the wall of the Crimo home, a full-sized black silhouette figure holding an assault rifle at ready, with a great big yellow Smiley Face for a head. Painted on the side of the house. Another click.

    There’s more to come with this story, I think. So, the shooter apparently had both his father and uncle living in the home at the time, but not the mother. No absence of father figures then – but maybe the theory ought to be widened to consider the absence of a traditional family instead, and to somehow evaluate the levels of dysfunction? Not an easy task…..

  3. Focusing on the guns is the wrong approach to the problem. Describing criminal acts as gun violence misses the point entirely. This only obscures the problem which prevents the issue from being sanely addressed. Guns aren’t the problem, lunatics are.

    On my site I link to a site called Borderland Beat. It tracks cartel violence in Mexico (which is horrific). It never once uses the term ‘gun crime’, instead it calls it what it is — gang violence. A much more realistic approach.

  4. Aggie,
    I read that the uncle only saw him twice a day. He said good morning and good night. Then he went to his place in the back of the house and worked on his videos. This whole family seems totally screwed up. No wonder the son is a psycho.

  5. Aggie:

    I agree about the ex post facto nature of some of this business of “we should have seen this coming,” and also about how long red flags should be in operation for the person when they do function to ban a legal gun purchase.

    In this case, though, the red flags were many and they seem to have been very very red. That’s why I highlighted the family response. I suspect something very very wrong with this family.

    The mural on the side of the house – if true – is very odd indeed. But it might just have meant something like “don’t bother to burglarize us – we are armed.”

    As far as the fatherless thing goes, it is a myth that mass shooters tend to be fatherless. A myth that many people seem to believe, by the way. I’ve written about this many times. Please see this.

  6. So the shooter is a psycho.
    For every 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 psycho’s , maybe just one will decide to go on a shooting rampage.
    How does one identify, IN ADVANCE, which psycho intends to shoot up a school or a mall or a movie theater or a parade or a …….?

    It’s one thing to put all the pieces together – to pinpoint the “obvious” signs – AFTER the shooting has occurred. It’s very difficult (impossible??) to identify in advance which individual will in fact embark on a shooting spree.

    Sort of an aside comment;

    these shooters could probably kill more people by driving their car at high speed through a large crowd or thru a group of people. But I have heard of only one incident of this sort.
    Why do those intent on committing a killing spree invariably choose a gun and not their car?

    Many questions that I have no answer to.

  8. John Tyler:

    Indeed. That’s the problem, because locking someone up is a problem, too, unless that person has acted violently. Mere words are not enough, and involuntary commitment is short term. And there are a great many sort-of-wacky people. How to tell in advance who will actually become violent?

  10. In 2009, an Iowa high school football coach, Ed Thomas was murdered by a former player, Mark Becker. Becker had been hospitalized for schizophrenia but was released to his parents’ care.

    Becker broke into a locked gun cabinet at his parents’ home to get the gun used in the killing. The parents blame the lack of mental health assistance for many of their son’s issues.

    He had spent multiple days hospitalized and visited doctors, getting the correct help is difficult, especially in rural areas.

    While the parents could have done a better job of keeping their guns from the son, very little seemed to address his mental state, which resulted in the murder of a much loved and respected coach and teachet.

    Few hospital beds are available and no real places to care for them long-term other than the immediate family. The closings of institutions began in the 1970’s with little regard for society as a whole.

  11. I suppose more parents with troubled sons should take the time to find and look through their social media posts. This shooter’s posts were very troublesome. Unfortunately, since he was no longer a minor, the family probably couldn’t require him to get psychiatric help.

    The one huge difference between the Hinckleys and the current shooter is that this shooter’s father, who knew his son was strange, enabled the gun purchases after the collection of knives and swords had been confiscated. That’s impossible to justify.

  13. Neo, here are some references to the painted figure:

    https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/highland-park-shooting-suspects-house-has-smiley-face-gun-mural/ar-AAZfawQ

    https://www.crimeonline.com/2022/07/05/independence-day-shooting-suspect-made-violent-videos-paintings/

    The latter one has a video of him creating the painting.

    Regarding the myth of father figures and mass shooters, I was speculating that perhaps the scope should be widened to consider family dysfunction of all kinds with mass killers.

  14. I have no faith “Red Flag” laws are for anything but political use, Leftists are not going to be but a small percentage of cases that get this.
    We as a society have let mental illness cases run amok, that is if this isn’t the Leftist pushing buttons ( Fk the Forth as a example) until they get one of their soldiers to act out and cause a terrorist attack.
    It was a terrorist attack as many other communities bailed out on 4th of July plans made and canceled at the last possible second.

  15. Re: first comment, above, inactivist. The shooter may have been a pothead, but that would not be illegal in Illinois. An increase in cases of psychosis and schizophrenia is one of the side effects of legalized cannabis use.

  16. Again, what John Derbyshire said. These are black swan events and they are by their very nature unpredictable. His mother and father may have been obtuse fools. Not at all unusual among parents. People persist in being their shabby selves. Very seldom does it precede disasters such as the one we’re discussing.

    If his father committed a crime previously defined in the Illinois penal code, by all means prosecute him. Ditto the uncle. Ditto the mother.

    The one appropriate response to this event is the one thing the State of Illinois refuses to do.

  17. I was speculating that perhaps the scope should be widened to consider family dysfunction of all kinds with mass killers.

    What will happen is that people with banal personal shortcomings will be scapegoated. Remember that the Columbine duo came from unremarkable intact families.

  19. Few hospital beds are available and no real places to care for them long-term other than the immediate family. The closings of institutions began in the 1970’s with little regard for society as a whole.

    De-institutionalization began around 1955 because there were ready alternatives to custodial care by the state in most circumstances. Some of this was due to improvements in public health (e.g. the disappearance of tertiary syphilis), some due to improvements in medical technology (the development of anti-psychotics, which made outpatient supervision a live option for many), some due to the expanding capacity of institutions better equipped to address certain problems (e.g. group homes for the retarded and nursing homes for the senile). There is a residue ill served by current standards and practices. Fuller Torrey has been banging the drums on this issue for > 35 years. Our state legislatures accomplish very little.

  20. In a similar story that some may recall, the parents of Ethan Crumbley, the Michigan shooter that killed 4 and injured 7 in the Oxford High School shooting last November, are standing trial for Involuntary Manslaughter as the parents of the shooter. Four counts each.

    Put that one in the ‘your-district-attorney-is-a-grandstanding-swine’ file.

  21. Eeyore’s and Skip’s above comments get to the underlying cause of these shootings ““The closings of institutions began in the 1970’s with little regard for society as a whole.” And “we as a society have let mental illness run amok”.

  24. And, while the Highland Park shootings were horrifying, this many dead and wounded happen every week in Chicago. The evil behind those is of a different nature and kills more.

  25. Grandpagrumble:

    There is no way that system could return – way too expensive, and it had its own huge problems. The rise of more drugs to treat schizophrenia somewhat effectively – which is what most of the people in mental institutions suffered from – have also replaced mental institutions for so many, as long as they take their meds (which they sometimes don’t do). If someone is suicidal or homicidal he or she can still be put in a mental institution, involuntarily, if the right people sign off on it – but it’s quite temporary until they are stabilized.

    I’ve written two posts on the subject. You can find them here.

  28. Aggie:

    “Family dysfunction” is exceedingly common. Mass killers are, fortunately, very very rare. I don’t see how “widening the scope” would work to prevent much of anything.

  29. Perhaps a lot of the current laws do prevent would be mass killers from getting closer to their goals however in a nation as big as this one it is a total tragedy when these creatures declare war on a group of US citizens celebrating Independence Day and open fire mowing his enemies down. This should not happen yet it did.

  30. Initial reports were that Crimo’s family members had not noticed anything amiss with him. Sorry, but all you had to do was look at him.

  32. Initial reports were that Crimo’s family members had not noticed anything amiss with him. Sorry, but all you had to do was look at him.

    He was ugly, badly groomed, and creepy. That, alas, was his baseline.

  33. Eeyore’s and Skip’s above comments get to the underlying cause of these shootings

    Exactly how many mass shooters would have been candidates for civil commitment back in the day? The first notable case was the Whitman spree murder at the University of Texas in 1966. IIRC, he had no history of schizophrenia or any other disorder which would have lead to him being involuntarily committed. Some of these characters have a history of lunacy, some do not.

    Why has there been an escalating problem if that’s the cause? The state asylum census was radically reduced between 1955 and 1980, only mildly reduced since then.

  34. ‘Why Are Young People So Miserable?’

    See Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

  35. ambisinistral,

    “Focusing on the guns is the wrong approach to the problem. Describing criminal acts as gun violence misses the point entirely. This only obscures the problem which prevents the issue from being sanely addressed. Guns aren’t the problem, lunatics are.”

    That “wrong approach” is entirely intentional. The hard-core Left does not want to address the problem. It is far too useful a political bludgeon. Their media propaganda organ of course inculcates that meme through incessant repetition.

    While the sheep just want someone to “do something about it” and banning gun ownership is in their minds, the most certain means of accomplishing that end.

    Nor are they bothered by Franklin’s warning about trading liberty for temporary safety because it is of such as they of whom John Stuart Mill spoke; “A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.”

    Passage of “A Duty to Retreat” laws and the recent poll revealing that 52% of democrats would flee the US if we were invaded speak volumes. And the largest portion of that 52% are young liberals and it is they who most strongly support gun control.

    “The support for gun control over the defense of gun rights in America is greatest among 18 – 29 years of age, according to a study by the Pew Research Center.”

  36. There was a time that I would have supported red flag laws as a way of preventing young crazy men from obtaining guns and causing mayhem.
    The recent antics of the Democratic Party have erased any possible support I might have had. I have no confidence that Schiff, Schumer, Pelosi, Hoyer, and their minions would not allow and even encourage Soviet-style abuse of mental health system to eliminate their political adversaries.
    We used to read about how the Soviet bureaucracy would have inconvenient people declared mentally ill and they were sent to Siberian facilities to get rehabilitated.
    The Democrats would do that to anyone found on a Republican voter list if they could get away with it; J6 is a practice run.
    Sorry, we’ll have to live with what the Ds have wrought.

  38. Yes, guns are not the problem. Red flag laws may work, but as seen here, they do not. Something else changed in our society and it’s been a long time change.

    I grew up with rifles. In the movie “Friday Night Lights,” that was my life with high school football teammates having gun racks in their trucks. As an aside, my team played, I played, against Odessa Permian in a Texas regional playoff. We got a 1-2 sentence mention in the book, “Friday Night Lights.” The movie was from a different, but close year.

    We had mail ordering of guns and rifles, but things like this were rare. Today, it’s common. Today, gun violence rages in gun-controlled cities like Chicago and it’s normal, routine. Only things what this boy did makes it sensational.

    I have no idea what changed, but something has changed. I’ll bet it’s not just one thing, but a myriad of things with cascading effects.

  39. So, if we take it as a given that it is impossible to craft a ‘red flag’ law that is capable of stopping violent nuts before they can act, without trampling on the rights of innocent parties, you then have a dilemma:

    Do you err on the side of public safety (and with high probability for abuse, both by individuals for personal reasons, and by the government officials for political reasons – see the recent law in NY requiring social media history when applying for a gun permit), or do you err on the side of individual rights?

    Given the chasm between the diverging philosophies on either side of the issue, I don’t think that’s a gap that can be bridged.

  40. Re: Kate Re: first comment, above, inactivist.
    Kate – Although pot may be legal in Illinois and other states, legal as medical, recreational or some other state-defined use, Marijuana is still a Schedule I substance under the Controlled Substances Act, meaning that it has a high potential for abuse, no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States, and a lack of accepted safety for use under medical supervision.

    So, given the NCIS and forms are federal, use of marijuana is a disqualifier for firearms purchases. See question D on ATF Responsible Persons Qualification form. There is no ambiguity. https://www.atf.gov/firearms/docs/form/national-firearms-act-nfa-responsible-person-questionnaire-atf-form-532023

  41. Inactvist,
    The form you linked pertains to the National Firearms Act, which regulates fully automatic guns, sawed-off shotguns etc.

  42. @ MollyG > “Initial reports were that Crimo’s family members had not noticed anything amiss with him. Sorry, but all you had to do was look at him.”

    FWIW, it’s difficult for people close to a situation to register gradual changes in people’s appearances — ditto a gradual decline in their house or yard.
    The mind continually resets to a new normal, and you sometimes have to look at older photographs to really see the difference.

    Someone who doesn’t live there, however, and comes by after 6 months or a yea might notice the changes immediately. Or someone looking at a series of photographs.

    https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/he-was-an-isolated-stoner-who-completely/

    Crimo was known at least locally in what’s called the lofi rap community – and there are enough pictures of him online from the last several years that anyone who cares to look can see the change in him. Not the tattoos, those are obvious, I mean the way his eyes go flat and dead and vacant.

  43. And FWIW, some very good news…
    “Mass Shooting By Two Illegal Immigrants In Richmond Foiled by Tipster: Police”—
    https://www.zerohedge.com/political/mass-shooting-two-illegal-immigrants-richmond-foiled-tipster-police

    (Without a doubt, a stroke of excellent luck…OTOH, one might say it’s a tremendous “gift” for “Biden”…. but gift or no gift, does it really matter? Does “he” care?…Since “he” no doubt believes—or should that be, “knows”?—that “he” has the election wrapped up in any event….)

  44. Interesting, inactivist, and thanks. It would be interesting to know if anyone would be prosecuted for failure to mention cannabis use on the federal form in a state in which cannabis use has been legalized.

  45. Like most (not all, of course, but I’m having a hard time thinking of one that doesn’t follow the pattern) of these horrific shootings, the shooter spent a lot of time and effort planning his spree, and one of the key aspects of the planning was to attack in a “gun-free zone.” where he stood an excellent chance of killing a whole lot of people without being killed himself.

    I don’t know how to fix the mental health component of this, and obviously we are never going to be able to keep all the guns out of the hands of the lunatics.

    But lets stop the madness of disarming the competent and herding the innocent into pens to be mowed down by the insane.

  46. Agreed, boatbuilder. Reportedly, the Highland Park shooter visited a local Chabad at Passover, where he discovered that they have an armed guard during services. He didn’t attack there.

    In this case, I don’t know if someone armed with only a pistol could have hit the shooter, who was on the roof of a store.

  47. Kate. Almost without exception, these events are carefully planned, frequently including reconnaissance.
    I wonder if the Chabad experience led the shooter to choose the sniper tactic.

  48. I do not recall hearing of one prompt execution of any of these mass shooters / killers (aside from the Oklahoma City bomber but that was ONLY because he was a politically motivated right winger).
    The Boston Marathon bombing perp: still in jail. WHY?
    The Florida school shooter: on trial still? has it even started? WHY NOT?
    What is the holdup? Is there anyone on planet earth that believes he did not murder those 17 students in that high school?
    And now this guy in Illinois: is there anyone claiming this guy is innocent?
    What about the mall shooter in Buffalo NY? Disappeared from the news, but he got his week or so of notoriety.

    Perhaps if these killers were promptly executed, say a very public hanging or firing squad – it may dissuade those intent on committing these atrocities from doing so.
    Seeing with certainty, that they will be promptly hanged or placed in front of a firing squad, maybe should scare them enough to think twice about becoming a notorious killer.

    As it stands now, the killers get all the attention they seek for a few weeks or so, then the “story” literally disappears forever. You never hear about any of them being executed, and that’s because they apparently never are; at least not until their crimes have been out of the news for several years.

  49. Some court challenged tdawgs execution it took the suoreme court to reverse.

    Judge shopping lockdowns et al

  52. We have a friend from ‘way back. She’s on the phone maybe six times a week, half hour minimum. We hear a lot about her issues, which are many. And we hear a lot about other things. You wouldn’t believe what’s going on in the kitchen of the Senior Center–half way across the state.
    Or the township board.
    Or people she knows. Not sure about how this happened, but there’s practically no household she knows about–a lot–which isn’t dysfunctional. Some worse than various shooters’ families.
    Could be a matter of selection but….maybe there are more than we think.

  53. Kate – it’s very rare for the Feds to prosecute anyone for being untruthful on any part of the ATF form 4473. About the only time they do is for straw buyers (people who buy guns for prohibited persons. Girlfriends of gang bangers, for example) and those mostly after the gun or guns are used in other crimes.
    Prosecuting someone for fibbing about being a drug user would involve collecting a bunch of witnesses to the accused’s drug use, witnesses who probably wouldn’t be very cooperative, because they’re either drug users themselves, or sellers (and selling weed is still a federal crime.)

  54. Some relevant questions: What % of mass murderers are frequent pot users? What percent on SSRIs? Both drugs? Applying the same questions to that group that is always swept under the rug, Gang related shooters, would be revealing. I imagine both groups are high users of both pot and SSRIs.

  55. Garrett Crawford:

    Depends what you call “high users,” and whether they use those things more than the general population of young men their age. Also, correlation is definitely not causation. That troubled young men might be given SSRIs and also might be drawn to pot-smoking doesn’t mean those things cause their behavior. It might, but it’s very hard to design research that can tease out whether there is causation there.

  56. John Tyler:

    The issue with capital cases isn’t ordinarily whether the perp did it, although that sometimes is in doubt. But with mass murders it’s rarely in doubt. The issues have to do with their mental state, their trial procedures, and that sort of thing. Capital cases have for a very long time been known to take a long time, for the most part, to play out in the legal system with appeals and stays and that sort of thing. It makes sense, because the state’s killing someone (as opposed to incarceration for life) is a very big step. Take a look at this article, for example, about Tsarnaev’s case.

  57. “Capital cases have for a very long time been known to take a long time, for the most part, to play out in the legal system with appeals and stays and that sort of thing.”

    Capital cases will take longer than others but the reason they last quite so long in the U.S. is a deliberate lawfare effort to exploit every possible delay even when it comes to undeniably guilty and culpable people.

    Mike

  58. Occam’s razor says neo knows the most likely reason for capital cases taking so long.

    Something about the purpose of a defense attorney comes to mind …..

  59. Kate – Dave L stated that it’s very rare for the Feds to prosecute anyone for being untruthful on any part of the ATF form 4473. He also mentioned trouble with straw purchasers only after the gun is used in a crime.

    Unfortunately, the form has no checks or balances to see if a statement is true – mostly the forms end up being used as a “gotcha” once the firearm has been used in an illegal manner – just another law broken that can be added to a litany of charges, after the fact. Also, a throw-away charge so the prosecutor has more leverage to make a deal with.

    Nonetheless, stating he purchased the guns legally is a mistake, accidental or intentional, that is used by Brady and Giffords (among others) to say we need yet more laws that the lawless will also disregard.

  60. What’s a weapon? To reduce things, I spent a lot of time in the dojo learning to be a weapon all by myself.
    The fascination with the AR15 is, I submit, a result of the drooling, incontinent horror with which it is described or how it is referred to. When some chump who doesn’t know from guns wants something slightly less deadly than an atomic bomb…he goes to the Thing which gets all the free advertising.
    But these are not gun crimes, they’re crimes in which the murderer chose to use a gun. Without a gun…he takes up knitting?
    Suppose the Uvalde shooter had not been able to get a gun. A two-liter Pepsi jug full of gasoline and with a cherry bomb attached pitched into a class room will do the job. And it’s less obvious in its carrying and its procuring right up until the last. And if a Pepsi bottle full of gasoline is suspicious, why not one of those two gallon cans you get to keep your lawnmower fueled?
    When working with our church security team, I was concerned about the less than murderous. Some fourteen year old with a deficient impulse control pitches four Gopher Gassers into the sanctuary and how many are trampled to death?.

    What concerns me is that, fifty years ago, with, even then, a surfeit of guns, this sort of thing didn’t happen. What’s changed?

  62. The father signed for the guns. He is fully responsible. He facilitated the murders and is fully responsible. Without the father’s involvement, the murders would most likely not have happened. Prosecute the Bastard.

    Is that simple enough?

  63. Seems to me that the father is certainly complicit.
    He HAD to know that his son had tremendous problems—threats, violence, a whole arsenal of knives confiscated.
    The question is, does such behavior translate into becoming a mass murderer (and it could well have been far worse if he had got to Madison, WI)?
    Well, if it doesn’t then WHAT DOES??
    And so, something is very, very screwy here—ESPECIALLY since the father denies any and all responsibility for the event.
    (Not that I usually advise people what to do…but he should have expressed deep remorse—or if not remorse then regret—and otherwise remained silent.)
    Very screwy.

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