(June 2004) The proposed ban on semi-auto firearms may have dominated the news, but as usual many other gun bills clogged the system vying for consideration. Here's what happened that didn't make the headlines.
Ballistic fingerprinting. The final budget bill held some good news for us on ballistic fingerprinting. As part of its routine responsibility to audit funded programs going into the budget process, the General Assembly's research office prepared an independent assessment of Maryland State Police's ballistic fingerprinting system. The picture this report paints is far bleaker than the already stark self-assessment prepared by MSP last fall (as reported here at the time.) The report identified not only problems in the present system, but flaws with the whole concept.
The legislative report described how ballistic markings change with the number of firings out of a gun, a factor that causes the potential for any decent match of evidence to go down drastically. (Gee - just like our testimony back when this mandate was a twinkle in Glendening's eye.) It also observed that the complexity of finding a match goes up out of proportion to the number of shell cases entered in the database, further reducing odds of success. It even reported how extra add-ons to the expensive system bought by the state simply never worked and have been abandoned by both the manufacturer and police. (No word on whether taxpayers got our money back.)
MSP's ballistic fingerprinting fared poorly before the budget committees in light of this report. When all was said and done, every penny originally requested to maintain ballistic fingerprinting software - nearly $150,000 - was gone from the next operating budget. The law is still on the books - the only handguns lawful for sale are ones for which the manufacturer has provided a shell case fired from the gun for inclusion in the state's ballistic fingerprinting database. However starting in the new fiscal year, MSP will no longer directly bankroll the anti-gun operations of Forensic Technology Inc, maker of the state's system that has yet to solve its first crime.
As reported last issue, pro-gun legislators who championed repeal of the mandate won a commitment from MSP to support repeal based on results of an internal study going on now. Such a bill next year, having support of the state police, would be a powerful piece of legislation. The longer this law stays in effect, the longer it spotlights the failure of gun control and the fraud of those that implement it. It is now only a matter of time before the law goes.
Two minor losses slip through. With all eyes focused on the high-profile assault weapon fight, two bills we had hoped legislators would kill at the same time unfortunately slipped through. Our rank and file was correct to keep community attention on the proposed semi-auto ban, which would have had enormous impact on us all, but this fixation on the main mission made it harder to keep legislator attention on the demerits of HB 784 and HB 1148.
HB 784 gives Montgomery County its own fire marshals, normally a position under Maryland State Police. This seems to be an innocuous bill until you grasp what is really going on. The county's 'sniper task force' is still in operation to squeeze gun ownership, and fire safety codes remain one of many mechanisms they creatively use to either gain entry to a targeted gun owner's home or to exert leverage over him. You see, as a legal matter a fire marshal's assertion isn't as easily challenged in court as statements by street cops, so basically they can get away with more in front of a judge. More to the point, that is how Montgomery County police deploy them, as we see in cases tracked by our Legal Attack Fund. When fire codes before, MCPD had to involve an outside agency - the MSP fire marshals, who could occasionally balk at county overreach. Now the county has its own fire marshals and no pesky outside oversight. The bill passed by wide margins, and Bob Ehrlich signed it into law on May 11.
HB 1148 expands existing law concerning protective orders, making it a separate crime not to surrender firearms. (The list of violations of a PO which constituted a separate crime started longer, but was whittled down to only the gun provision.) Unnecessary measures like these teach the public "it isn't the person, it's the gun," demanding the disarmament of people in anticipation of some future crime when in fact he or she may never have been convicted of any previous crime. As with HB 784, this bill also passed by overwhelming margins and was unopposed by the NRA or other major gun groups in the state. Governor Ehrlich signed the bill into law on May 26.
Right to Carry. The top of any list of our most wanted reforms is consistently restoration of Right to Carry. We'd have it now if only there was proper interpretation of present law, but absent administrative fixes that haven't yet appeared on the horizon, our friends again submitted legislation to take police discretion out of the permit process. As expected, the several carry bills didn't go anywhere, but one surprise arose on the Senate side, where one bill almost did go somewhere - the wrong way. GOP staffers managed to get the carry bill onto a vote list in Judicial Proceedings, where it was otherwise destined to languish with the rest of the gun bills. The problem with this was that our side had worked hard to bottle up the bills, so this GOP action had the effect of undoing our handiwork.
You see, any pro-gun bill would have immediately become the semi-auto ban by a single amendment. Shades of Brer Rabbit! Getting a gun bill to the Senate floor is just what gun grabbers wanted. The GOP was unconcerned, saying they wanted an up-or-down vote on the bill for campaign purposes; the problem is we'd end up with the ban as a side effect of their political gamesmanship. This move was colossally stupid, and what saved us from disaster was Senator Giannetti casting the deciding vote to prevent it from advancing as a vehicle for gun control. His vote was about stopping an assault weapon ban, not about carry reform, but ironically the same braniacs who cooked up this plan think they can use Giannetti's vote to rally gunowners for a GOP challenger next election. That would also be colossally stupid. Oust the man who saved our bacon? Hardly!
Beretta Bill. It was autumn of 2003, when most handguns were no longer lawful for sale because of the "gun lock ban" and talk of an assault weapon ban rumbled in the distance. As storm clouds gathered, Beretta saw its chance to sell handguns in Maryland again and cashed in a favor it received from leadership for accepting the compromise Gun Safety Act in 2000: it got leadership to begin work on what became SB 547, a bill to loosen the definition of "integrated mechanical safety devices" to let the company satisfy the law by using cable locks.
The Beretta Bill looked like a sure thing. After all, compromise is a way of life in Annapolis where legislators love to say everyone got a little something they wanted. Never mind that it isn't clear why anyone would confuse Beretta business interests with gunowner liberty interests, but floating viable legislation 'gun people' want in an environment where gun grabbers want a bill begs for a trade. It has happened before: the "Saturday Night Special" ban was enacted in 1988 only after manufacturers and the NRA sought repeal of the "Kelly decision" (a landmark gun liability ruling impacting gun makers.) Both measures became law in HB 1131 that year. Why would Beretta invite assault weapon bans as trade for a fix of the IMSD ban now? Beretta sells handguns, not assault weapons.
[Long time readers know Beretta got special legislation in the past. Beretta fought hard in opposition to the Gun Violence Act in 1996, for example … but only until softening amendments were agreed to, at which point their lobbyist became instantly unavailable to pro-gun forces. The company's reward for taking a powder came later in the form of the first Beretta Bill, exempting the company from provisions of the Saturday Night Special ban. This was amazing: anti-gun legislators who voted for this went on record saying "junk guns" have no place in society … unless they are made in the home district of the Senate President, in which case they have an important place in our state's commerce. It showed that gun control is not about public safety, but rather about cash and power.]
This confluence of gun grabbers and gun sellers is what caused Senate President Mike Miller to predict on the first day of session that we'd see a ban but only at the level of the sunsetting federal law. (Remember, the initial form of the assault weapon bill went after all semi-autos, and that would have affected Beretta.)
But a novel thing happened on the way to de facto compromise: you! When Beretta started knocking on Senate doors to find bill sponsors, it found legislators who know that Beretta does not speak for citizens interests. It found Senators who were happy to put in a bill to fix the gun sales problem (after all, that fixes a gun availability problem for us too) but only if the bill would never be used as trade for an assault weapon ban in any form. Bravo! The specter of enraged gunowning voters poisoned the well of compromise. In the end, the Beretta Bill languished because the cost of advancing it would have been accepting some form of an assault weapon ban, which our friends would not permit. Proponents who asked our pro-gun Senators to draft it may scramble for cover, saying 'no trade!' but that can't erase the fact that they tried giving gungrabbers something to work with in the first place.
Everything else. A proposed ban on toy guns never caught on, and outside of the extreme fringe of the left wing (and an endorsement by Prince George's County government) most legislators distanced themselves from the idea of regulating toy guns more zealously than real guns. On the other hand, substance abusers got a break when the administration championed legislation to channel people convicted of drug offenses into treatment programs instead of jail. (In light of the governor's position on gun laws, this presumably empties prison cells of drug offenders to make more room for people convicted of technical gun crimes, though in fairness the administration did not go on record either way concerning this year's faux Exile bill, which thankfully failed again.)
A bill we favored proposed giving citizens civil immunity if we use force in defense of a crime of violence in our home; in other words, a thug couldn't sue us for pain and suffering if we injured him while repelling him from assault. This bill went the distance in the House but languished in the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee. Apparently JPR's chairman, Brian Frosh, has more sympathy for thugs doing home invasion than us. A companion bill proposed giving citizens protection from criminal prosecution after using force in the same circumstances, but was withdrawn by its sponsor, Delegate Carmen Amedori, shortly after its introduction.