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The Aurora Shooting
The Aurora, Illinois shooting: five killed and five police officers wounded by an employee who had been fired by his employer.
It is time to start enforcing firearms laws that are already in place. The Aurora shooter was a convicted felon who purchased a firearm in spite of having an aggravated assault conviction for stabbing a woman in Mississippi in 1995. He had also been arrested six times by Aurora, Illinois police officers and his most recent arrest was in 2008 for violating an order for protection.
Court records show Martin was convicted of aggravated assault in the stabbing of a woman in Mississippi in 1995. He’d also been arrested six times previously by Aurora police, most recently in 2008 for violating an order of protection, (Aurora Police Chief) Kristen Ziman revealed Saturday.
Ziman said the assault conviction might not have appeared on a criminal background check when Martin applied and was approved in January 2014 for a Firearm Owners Identification card.
In March of that year, Martin applied to buy a handgun from an Aurora gun dealer, and he was approved within five days.
Five days after that, Martin applied for a concealed carry permit. When Martin’s felony conviction was discovered during the background check for that license, his application was denied and his FOID card was revoked.
However, his Smith & Wesson handgun — the same weapon used in Friday’s shooting — was never confiscated.
Martin’s conviction for aggravated assault did not show up on the background check conducted by his employer.
This shooting is going to lead to more demands for new laws in spite of the fact that Mr. Martin should have never had a firearm if the laws that exist now had been enforced. Regardless of the fact that his conviction had not been found in his approval for the purchase of a firearm it was found later when he applied for a concealed carry permit. A warrant for his arrest should have been sought by the Aurora Police Department, or the Illinois State Police for Mr. Martin, and the seizure of his pistol. He was a felon in possession of a firearm, not just a crime under Illinois state law, a crime under Federal law as well.
Clarification 02/18
The NCIC system is a two tiered system. A criminal background check may not reveal a previous felony conviction to a private employer conducting a criminal background check. A law enforcement agency has more information available to it concerning previous convictions. NCIC checks involving the purchase of a firearm are conducted by state police that have full access to the system. The mystery is that the felony conviction of Mr. Martin was not found at the point of purchase, but was found in his application for a concealed carry permit. A felony conviction is not removed from the database unless a request is made by a court that has expunged a conviction.
The State of Illinois does, and did send a letter demanding the surrender of the firearm so they were aware of the purchase. That is not enough. The timeline between the purchase and the application for the concealed carry permit should be enough probable cause, and a reasonable belief that Mr. Martin, a convicted felon possessed a firearm and a search warrant should have been sought to seize the firearm.
Federal Law, Prohibited Persons from Firearms Possession and Purchase:
• convicted in any court of a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year;
• who is a fugitive from justice;
• who is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance (as defined in section 102 of the Controlled Substances Act, codified at 21 U.S.C. § 802);
• who has been adjudicated as a mental defective or has been committed to any mental institution;
• who is an illegal alien;
• who has been discharged from the Armed Forces under dishonorable conditions;
• who has renounced his or her United States citizenship;
• who is subject to a court order restraining the person from harassing, stalking, or threatening an intimate partner or child of the intimate partner; or
• who has been convicted of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence.
I think the laws need to be changed: No more unqualified immunity for government officials whose negligence leads to such deaths. I don’t know what the right parameters should be, but in every other area of life we understand that the prospect of liability and accountability focuses the mind and reduces mistakes.
The sad thing is that the discovery of Mr. Martin’s felony conviction should have been followed up by seeking a warrant for his arrest. That is what I would consider good proactive policing.
I keep hearing, over and over, that we just need to apply the laws on the books. But it doesn’t happen. If they’re not applied properly, why does anyone think that new laws are going to help? I agree with @sonofspengler: accountability!
Police officers should have a well developed sense of curiosity. When the felony conviction was found in Mr. Martin’s concealed handgun permit application it should have been passed along to a detective. It is not enough to just revoke his FOID permit. The question becomes; he’s applied for a CHL permit, does he own a pistol. You don’t send him a questionnaire asking him if owns a pistol. Some investigation would have revealed his completed purchase of a firearm. You need to find him and assume he owns a pistol until you can verify that he doesn’t own one.
His 2008 arrest for violating a protection order would have been enough to take a more proactive approach in confronting this individual:
Federal law on prohibited persons
Confront him first, you can worry about the intimate partner relationship later. Get off your a** and start knocking on some doors.
This will be used to promote a registry. NICS can’t keep background check information for more than 3 days iirc, meaning NICS had forgotten about a possible pass by the time the second background check failed. There could be no warrant because he was just a felon, and there was no information linking him to firearm ownership.
I was just at a buddy’s house. He has a license to carry, and has had it for long enough that it expired last year, but only just got his first firearms (inherited).
A felony conviction has no expiration date when it concerns possession, or an attempt to purchase a firearm.
Yes, he got a LETTER from the Illinois State Police demanding he surrender the weapon! A LETTER?!? Why didn’t they get a warrant, go to his house, get the weapon and any other contraband, and arrest his ass?
So how did the initial gun purchase not come up with his ex-felon status? How often does this happen? Because that seems like a mighty big hole in the system.
That is a good question. In the case of the Texas church shooter the Air Force did not report his court martial conviction for domestic violence to the NCIC data base. Some state courts have been lax in reporting convictions.
That does not explain the mystery in the Aurora, Illinois shooting of a conviction that did not appear at the point of purchase, but surfaced in the concealed permit background check five days after the purchase. This really requires an in depth investigation of its own.
That’s just crazy talk! </sarc>
Seriously, how does this happen? I think @sonofspengler is correct: the government officials involved aren’t help accountable for these failures.
Often enough. The Sutherland Springs TX shooter should not have been able to buy or possess a firearm. The DOD/Air Force dropped the ball and never uploaded a conviction to NCIS. It’s not so much a hole as it is general incompetence.
Keep in mind, Illinois has essentially a two-permit system for handguns. There’s the Firearms Owner Identification Card (which covers handguns and long guns), and then the carry permit the Supreme Court forced them to create a few years ago. Apparently, the Wise Democrats that run Illinois’ state government will trust a violent felon to own a gun, but refrain from carrying it.
#gunsense
When you title something “The Aurora Shooting”, I think of the 2012 movie theater in Aurora, Colorado.
The world is kind of messed up when there are two Aurora Shootings.
Same. Especially since I lived next to Aurora, CO.
A state may have some leeway when it comes gun laws. Examples would be concealed carry, and open carry. Oregon does not allow private sales at gun shows without a background check. All gun sales at an Oregon gun show must have the NCIC background check completed by a Federal Licensed gun dealer. Private parties may sell to each other at a show if the background check requirement is met.
The State of Illinois cannot allow gun dealers to sell firearms unless an NCIC background check is completed and the buyer is not in the Prohibited Persons category.
True. However, the fact remains Illinois denied him the carry permit, but failed to take his gun.
Seriously! What’s the use of new gun laws when we have such slipshod bureaucracy?
Fixed that for you. =)
Yes, that is the problem, a demand letter is not enough.
Absolutely none, disarming the citizens that obey the law is the goal.
Since he purchased a firearm and completed the federal form for purchase he had to lie on the form (it specifically asks if you have ever been convicted of a felony and the dealer would have seen that and not sold it to him nor initiated the NICS check and lying on the form is punishable by law and would be a “fresh” offense for police to follow up on). The dealer would have the information of who they sold the firearm to and his contact information and the notification of the NICS failure would have indicated the dealer information making it relatively easy for law enforcement to find him…big time failure all the way thru the system.
@Valiuth, to cut to the chase, this happens a lot. One of the first lessons I learned as a novice investigator was never to trust one agency’s records to accurately reflect another agency’s records, no matter what reporting requirements existed. I could write a book.
Here’s another rub that may figure in here: on “pre-employment background investigations,” the background investigator is prohibited from reporting anything that is over seven years old. That’s right, you could have a record of felony burglaries, for instance, apply for, say, a carpet cleaning company, and if your last burglary case concluded over seven years ago, the BI investigator cannot report it. If s/he finds it, s/he must hide it. Some law, eh?
A doctor and his family in, I think, Sausalito, CA, were murdered a couple decades ago by a man with a felony record, who was hired by a furniture company to make deliveries. He returned to the house later, and the rest is history.
You can thank the Fair Credit Reporting Act for that brilliant law. Don’t get me started on why it’s in a law having to do with credit.
I guess government incompetence should not surprise anyone really…
Allow me then to play devils advocate here. Does the fact that even laws on the book can’t be enforced with iron clad efficiency not add to the argument that completely restricting guns would prove more effective? Ie. Drop the whole national supply and you dont have to worry about someone slipping through the cracks, the laws of supply and demand will make guns so expensive as to deter all but the most hardened and committed of villians.
Likewise, is this as good as it can get? I think we can’t reasonably expect any complex system not to have slip ups. We here aren’t too keen on banning guns out right. So then how much better can we make the system really?
And just how would that be done? It’s estimated that there are 300 million privately owned firearms. On average, American citizens buy enough guns each month to supply a division. The supply would never shrink enough to “…make guns so expensive as to deter all but the most hardened and committed of villians”.
As for “… laws on the book can’t be enforced with iron clad efficiency,” well no laws are enforced with iron-clad efficiency. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have them. How about we incentivize the current crops of government cubicle dwellers along Son of Spenglker’s lines and see how that goes? Or have the Attorney General direct his U.S. Attorneys to start hauling in and prosecuting straw-buyers, etc.?
I think that you have to investigate the missed felony conviction. You do this not just to assess blame, it is also done to assess your training model. In my time as a basic street cop I looked at the world as one of possibility, not probability. Whether it was a traffic stop, or any other encounter I had with someone because I encountered complete strangers.
One thing that LE in Illinois needs to do is examine whether sending a letter to a convicted felon to surrender a firearm is an effective means of disarming a convicted felon. I do not believe that it is.
In some cases an after action report may lead an agency to question their hiring model. There will always be a chance that someone will be overlooked, but you should try to reduce that possibility.
@valiuth, I really want to answer you in full, but I have to study for a test tomorrow. So this will have to suffice for now.
The idea of eliminating firearms & other weapons has not gone well in other countries. It is pure folly in any country with open borders and coastlines. Nobody who opposes a border wall can be taken seriously when s/he calls for any sort of gun control.
I forget who it was that said something to the effect of, if you’re armed, you’re a citizen. If you’re disarmed, you’re a subject. I’m afraid history bears that out.
And this: “An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.” – Robert Heinlein
This observation, then back to studying: Virtually 100% of mass shootings occur in “gun-free zones,” the euphemism for a place where firearms are barred. The Aurora, Ill business was a “gun-free zone.” (So was the Aurora, CO theater, but I digress.) So should we expect things to get better if we make the entire country a “gun-free zone?” The actual statistics are crystal clear – people are much safer when they have the opportunity to defend themselves.
There’s so much more.
LTC Jeff Cooper, at least as I’ve heard it: “Pick up a rifle and you change instantly from a subject to a citizen.”
Well if you go for maximalist restriction you ban the sale of ammo too. While people may have stocks of ammo and guns once the sale of guns and ammo stop attrition will slowly grind away at the supply, won’t it? How many guns get discarded every year? I would imagine it is almost as many as get bought, because gun levels aren’t rising exponentially are they? So again the market can do the work for you over time. Supplies start dropping, prices go up, gun levels drop even further.
That’s part of the problem. It can be done, and it would mean people would die.
The number of guns getting discarded every year is probably very low, compared to how many new guns are purchased by private citizens. Very, very low. Guns tend to last for quite a long time. About the only people wearing them out are competitive shooters, who shoot large volumes of ammunition very regularly.