Shooting in Highland Park, Illinois. Near July 4th parade. 6 deaths..

A couple of things. Highland Park is about 12 square miles in area, so an assault weapons ban is pretty meaningless there. Any assault weapons ban needs to be nationwide. Even statewide bans are easily skirted. Secondly, if an AR-15 or a rifle similar to an AR-15 complies with an assault weapons ban, then the ban needs to be changed to include AR-15s and weapons similar to them.

 

Pretty much the whole AK and AR families are banned by name, as are Mini-14s, the HK rifles, Augs, Tavors, and Galils.

If it’s a .223, my bet would be it’s one of the odd Kel-Tecs (the SU-16 or RDB maybe).

Edit: I think the RDB would probably fail based on features actually. So probably a SU-16 or some generic .223 hunting rifle.

 

Groomed.

 

You'd be the first and loudest crying foul if he was labeled a commie.

...you'd be micro-splicing the finest nuances to distinguish whatever type of whatever he might possibly be, from the proper qualified true Marxist ideologue...

 

Agree that the background check provisions need to be improved. I'm not sure about your point regarding gun laws, though. According to this list, Illinois is not in the top 25 for firearm mortality.
Stats of the States - Firearm Mortality

The states with the worst mortality rates are presumably states with the loosest gun control laws (MS, AL, LA, WY, AK, AR, etc.). States with stricter gun control laws (HI, NY, CT, MA, etc.) have the lowest mortality rates. IL is likely near the middle, and an outlier, due to the gun homicides in Chicago. For whatever reason, strict laws have not prevented gun deaths in Chicago, but they appear to in other places.

 

Local gun laws don’t mean much. Gun laws are only as strong as the weakest link. Chicago has extreme gun laws, that doesn’t stop black market guns from pouring in from Indiana. So if some municipality has an assault rifle ban, that’s not terribly helpful if the ban can be evaded simply by driving 15 or 30 miles.

If it’s true red flag laws are in place, AND he passed a backround check. Then the process of the backround check itself needs to be looked at. The idea of this guy being able to pass a backround checks seems ridiculous on its face, but by design the backround checks don’t say much (it’s not like they are required to check his social media profile). Outside of violent criminal history, what does it take to FAIL a background check?

 

Any felony conviction, a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence conviction, pending charges on one of those, being a fugitive from justice, admitting to drug use (or having some record that you are a drug user - I think some states cross-reference medical marijuana registries when performing background checks), having been involuntarily committed to a mental institution or adjudged mentally defective, a dishonorable discharge from the military, being subject to a restraining order, having renounced US citizenship, or being unlawfully present in the US I think is the list. If you look up ATF form 4473, it’s the stuff in all of the subparts of Question 21.

 

The problem with any of these types of restrictions is that they are ripe for invalidation by right-wing courts. The argument being that any non-criminal restriction on gun purchases unduly burdens a person's right to self-defense under 2A.

By analogy, the government can't place education requirements on voting, or use red flag laws to deny the franchise, because everyone has a right to vote. Even if they seem like crazy nut jobs who are going to vote stupidly, until they are actually convicted of a crime, they have the same right to vote as anyone else.

Given we're already in right-wing wet dream territory, it's only a matter of time before we reach the same point with gun laws, where the only allowable criteria for restricting purchases are age and prior criminal status.

IMO the solution is to put the burden on the sellers. They can do a full background investigation or not. Pay attention to red flags or not. But if it is found that there was a reasonably discoverable cause to believe the purchaser would act violently, the seller is responsible for all damages caused by that purchaser.

Since the "well regulated" portion of 2A has been written out in toto, make the gun community self-regulate.

 

February 27, 2019, House Democrats passed H.R.8, a universal background check bill that is the most significant gun violence prevention legislation to make it through the chamber since the creation of the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS, more than two decades ago. The system screens people when they attempt to buy firearms at licensed dealers and is the government’s first line of defense against gun crime.

The bill establishing NICS spelled out 12 reasons why a person can be denied a gun purchase. Since the system launched in late 1998, NICS has put a stop to more than 1.7 million attempted gun transfers by people with records falling into one of those categories.


The 12 Reasons Why Americans Fail Federal Gun Background Checks

 

They should test for drugs if they don’t. That may be the only thing that would have “caught” this particular guy, short of examining his insane social media profile. He almost has to be a meth junkie, looking at him.

As I said though, background checks need to do a deeper dive. I wouldn’t be opposed to using social media to deny people (or perhaps at least refer them over for mental health assessment before moving the gun application along).

 

Indeed.

We have been going the wrong way for a long time now. Basically since the Assault Weapon ban was allowed to expire. It’s a mass shooters paradise.

 

Current SCOTUS would find a way to invalidate self-regulation too.

 

Wore women’s clothing in his escape

 

Authorities have said that he purchased the gun locally and legally in Illinois. This is not an illegal gun/black market gun. The point being this town had benchmark gun laws and they did not stop a nutter from doing what nutters do. We need to stop focusing on the weapon and start focusing on stopping the people using them.

 

Why do people suppose that there is some kind of ideological monopoly on violence? You can get guns easy in America, and people are going to use them to kill or intimidate people for all kinds of reasons, this is the society conservatives (and maybe some other people) want, from what I can tell.

 

I think probably rightly so. There’s no duty for a seller to independently investigate the buyer of essentially anything else that is sold in the US, and trying to statutorily impose that liability would seem to just be an end run around a constitutional prohibition on the government imposing those limits itself.

That’s the challenge of a right to arms being a constitutional right: you can’t really put the burden on someone to affirmatively prove that they should be allowed to exercise that right or deprive them of it without constitutionally sufficient process.

There are certainly FFLs out there who will decline a sale based on a “funny feeling” (or kick people out of the store because they seem like an unsafe buffoon), etc., and while I think that’s probably a good thing, I don’t think you could mandate it at the point of vicarious liability.

 

OMG. Not only did he kill people, he put on a drag show in front of children. Unclear which is worst

 

Though this court would never permit it, I don't know that it's a crazy extension of existing law to suggest potential liability the part of sellers depending upon how many "red flags" were present. The way this court interprets the Constitution, which I disagree with, there may not be an additional duty to investigate potential buyers, but their generalized for duties to act reasonably to avoid foreseeable damages (I am shorthanding the formulation), which has been applied against prior employers who fail to give an adverse reference to a prior employee demonstrated dangerous behavior while in their employee and then goes on to commit violence at the subsequent employer. That's by the closest comparison I came up with immediately off of the top of my head.

There are a lot of applications of the duty to appropriately secure as applied to premises liability, but I'm not sure I can apply beyond invitees to your property.

Plenty of other manufacturers/sellers have potential downstream liability. This is another area where it's the opposite of what Clarence Thomas has suggested; Second Amendment is actually less subject to regulation than other goods, including specific statutory liability provisions to absolve firearm manufacturers of liability based on the content of their advertising that other sellers do not enjoy.

 

FFL Gun sellers are the ones that catch the red flag folks, the straw buyers and those they deem shouldn’t own a gun. They do a lot more than you geniuses who know squat about the process you proclaim domain to. Please give them credit for doing their jobs.

Responsible for some one else’s actions? Good god almighty. Black and white world time.

 

We need to ban these types of weapons nationwide.