By Dave Workman | Senior Editor
One of the nation’s leading gun prohibition lobbying organizations moved swiftly to capitalize on the slaying of five people at the Annapolis office of Maryland’s Capital Gazette, sending out an email message that lamented the crime while asking for donations. Curiously, however, the general media response to this mass shooting has been relatively subdued.
The suspected shooter, Jarrod W. Ramos, has been charged with five counts of first-degree murder and is being held without bond. According to police, the five victims were killed with rounds fired from a pump-action shotgun, leaving anti-gunners without another chance to blame so-called “semiautomatic assault weapons.” The shotgun was also legally purchased within the previous 18 months, according to Anne Arundel County Police Chief Timothy Altomare, speaking to CBS News.
One newspaper staffer told CNN’s Anderson Cooper hours after the attack that President Donald Trump’s expression of “thoughts and prayers” was meaningless without some action on so-called “gun violence.”
Ramos had reportedly sued the newspaper several years ago for defamation, but the lawsuit was dismissed.
Killed in the newspaper office shooting were John McNamara, Rebecca Smith, Wendi Winters, Gerald Fischman and Rob Hiaasen. Journalist Winters has been credited with saving the lives of other newspaper staffers by charging the shooter armed only with trash containers. It is reported that six of the eleven people in the newsroom survived the attack because of her heroism.
There is no small amount of irony in that Maryland has some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation, all adopted ostensibly to prevent violent crimes with guns. But Baltimore is one of the most violent cities in the nation, racking up more than 300 slayings in each of the past three years, and on a pace to match that again in 2018.
Journalist Wendi Williams died while charging the assailant armed only with deskside waste baskets.
According to the FBI Uniform Crime Report for 2016 – the most recent year for which data is available – Maryland reported 430 homicides, of which 328 were committed with firearms. Of those, 309 involved handguns, two were committed with rifles, three more with shotguns and 14 with unidentified weapons. The previous year, Maryland logged 372 slayings, of which 279 involved firearms, the FBI report said. Of those, 266 were committed with handguns, 3 more with rifles and three with shotguns, plus seven with “unknown weapons.”
The question now appears to be how anti-gunners will demonize the firearm allegedly used by the suspect. How will they also demand tougher gun laws that concentrate on a commonly-owned firearm?
On the day following the late-June shooting, the Capital Gazette’s parent newspaper, the Baltimore Sun, published an Op-ed that could damage anti-gun Democrats because it focuses on that party’s adherence to the gun control agenda.
Gregg Lee Carter, a professor of sociology at Bryant University in Rhode Island, told readers, “Marching (e.g., March for Our Lives; the Million Mom March) is good. Calling and emailing your congressional representatives is good. Letting Dick’s, Walmart and other businesses championing some form of gun control hear from you is good too. Supporting political savvy and increasingly effective national organizations promoting stronger gun laws is money well spent (especially when directed to Everytown for Gun Safety, the Brady Campaign and the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence).
“But the most important and serious action you can take, if you really want serious federal gun control successfully legislated, is to vote Democratic in 2018 and 2020.”
This wasn’t Carter’s first foray into the gun debate, especially touting the idea that voting for Democrats is the only way to achieve the kind of gun control that Second Amendment activists find restrictive if not downright repugnant.
“Serious gun control,” Carter wrote, “includes dozens of measures, but at minimum it embraces those that the majority of the voting public currently supports: universal background checks (or even better, requiring a purchase permit in which a potential gun-buyer has been vetted by local law enforcement); regulating Internet sales of firearms such that transactions between anonymous buyers and sellers are thwarted; creating a federal gun-sale registration database; strong requirements for the safe storage of guns kept at home or at work; and resurrecting the federal assault weapons ban, which included restrictions on the size of ammunition magazines.”
Back in early April, writing in the Providence Journal, Carter observed, “However, national gun laws will not change unless Democrats control both houses of Congress, plus the presidency. There is no chance of this occurring until the 2020 national election. Republicans will not strengthen gun laws, despite the majority of Americans wanting stronger laws and despite research showing that strong gun laws can reduce the total amount of gun violence.”
Carter is described as “a gun owner and grew up as a hunter and target-shooter in the strong gun culture of the mountain states of Montana and Nevada.”
The Baltimore Sun acknowledged in one published report that the attack occurred despite Maryland’s strict gun laws.
