(December 2003) Police confirm Dwight Eppard was on their radar screen since 1994. They knew that guns the Hagerstown man purchased regularly showed up at crime scenes on the east coast. A timely investigation about why this was might have prevented street crime, however, and that isn't so useful to police who are paid to streamline the spread of gun control. Eppard would stay on the back burner until BATF needed a poster child for enacting some new law.
They got it, tragically. At a traffic stop in Silver Spring earlier this year, a thug produced one of Eppard's guns and fought. When it was over Montgomery County Patrol Officer Kyle Olinger lay permanently paralyzed - as much a victim of cop politicians' gaming of resources to whore for gun control as of the criminal he stopped.
Gun control bigots already wave this case in an attempt to revive their proposal to mandate our reporting of lost or stolen guns. They want to make it a crime not to notify police any time we part with guns. That's mandatory firearm registration - it just relaxes the point where we are required to talk with police. Zealots say it should be illegal to supply criminals with guns. Gosh, it already is! Then they say a new law would give them additional ways to charge a suspect, yet private transfer of handguns is already illegal too. If Eppard broke laws, then indict Eppard, not the laws. Interestingly, Eppard is said to have filed a theft report just as required under the proposal. This raises the specter of citizens coming under police suspicion just for following the law. Cooperate with police, register your stolen property and become the subject of investigation anyway.
In fact there is no clearer example of a law that would only apply to innocent gun owners: In Haynes v. US the Supreme Court held that police can't enforce against criminals any registration requirement which would entail self-incrimination. Nobody who sells to criminals can be held accountable for failing to register a gun under the new law, since doing so would expose him as having broken the law against private transfer. The only burden this law would place is on honest citizens. Forget to list one gun out of a large stolen collection and you get jail.
Bottom line: Police failed to investigate a decade worth of clues about potential illegal gun trade, an officer was shot, and officials respond with proposals for new gun restrictions on you and me. Misdirection might distract from officials' culpability and sooth their consciences over administrative failures, but it doesn't make it right. Look for this to be another big debate in Annapolis. Last year Ehrlich proposed such a restriction but with a civil penalty for violation, instead of criminal. Anti-gunners smell they're close on this one.