Friday, July 15, 2011

Felons busted for gun possession to be federally prosecuted under new initiative
Published: Thursday, July 14, 2011, 5:19 PM Updated: Thursday, July 14, 2011, 5:32 PM
By David Harris | Flint Journal The Flint Journal
FLINT, Michigan — More felons who get caught with guns in Genesee County could be looking at doing time in a federal penitentiary.

Federal and local law enforcement officials on Thursday announced a plan to use federal courts to prosecute felons arrested with guns.

Under state law, those charged with felon in possession normally get just probation, said U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade.

Taking those cases federal could result in prison sentences upwards of seven years, she said.

"We want to the criminals to know that they will do serious federal time," McQuade said.

The Genesee County Prosecutor’s office handled 161 felon in possession of gun cases last year and has had 64 so far this year, said Prosecutor David Leyton.

“Because we are faced with such a difficult situation in Flint, we have to do things differently than in the past,” said Leyton. “Today, let the word go forth that we will be getting more criminals off the streets.”

McQuade said she estimates the U.S. Attorney’s office will handle about 100 such cases a year.

In cases where there are additional charges to the felon in possession charge, such as a home invasion, county and federal prosecutors will work together to see which court will give “the biggest bang for the buck,” said Leyton.

Leyton said he will lend some assistant prosecutors to handle federal cases.
There will not be any additional federal prosecutors, just shifted responsibilities, said McQuade.

The initiative is a compliment to what’s already been going on with the increased state police presence and cleared jail space, said Flint Mayor Dayne Walling.

Flint has been riddled with crime, topping the nation in violent crime.

The crux of many of those crimes deal with guns and drugs, said Flint police Chief Alvern Lock.

“You’re hearing how law enforcement is preparing to work together to ensure the penalties are as stiff as possible under state and federal law,” said Walling.

Thursday, July 14, 2011

Will new gun laws backfire?

Owners OK with Markell's legislation, but fear its usage
By ESTEBAN PARRA
The News Journal
Gun owners agree that four pieces of legislation signed into law Wednesday make sense but they are concerned about how at least one of them will be interpreted by police.

Among the laws signed by Gov. Jack Markell is legislation making it illegal to possess a firearm in public while under the influence of alcohol or drugs. A person would be charged with a crime if found with a gun while having a blood-alcohol level of 0.08 or higher.

"You do not want to be out here on the skeet field with a beer in your pocket and shooting," said 76-year-old Richard Kane, a state and national skeet champion.

"But behind the lines, then I think that's a different story," because of how officers interpret the law, the Newark resident said.

"He can interpret it any way he wants," he said. "He can bend it to suit the situation and I don't agree with that."

Under the law, a first offense is a misdemeanor. Further convictions would be a "G Felony," punishable by up to two years in prison. It also prohibits those convicted from legally owning a weapon.

"It's another way in my mind to take guns away from people," Kane said.
But state police Col. Robert M. Coupe said that is not the intent of the law.

"What the law is targeting is someone who is actually in possession of a firearm when they are intoxicated, not so much ownership," Coupe said. "It's about possessing it in a public place."

Markell's office worked with the National Rifle Association (NRA) and Delaware sportsmen to ensure the definitions of "possess" and "readily operable" were narrowly focused so the bill applies only to those whose intoxication presents an immediate threat.

So if an intoxicated person is found in a vehicle with their weapon nearby, they would be violating the new law. But if the weapon was not loaded or locked in a case or the trunk, the person would not be in violation of the law because the gun is not readily operable.

Other laws Markell signed Wednesday:

» Allow police to dispose of weapons they seize during civil cases, such as in protection-from-abuse orders, if the owners do not come back for their weapons. Before the law, Delaware prohibited state police from disposing of these weapons unless the owner agreed. As a result, state police have more than 2,000 weapons seized over the years.

» Require Delaware to provide more information to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), which is used by federal firearms licensees to instantly determine whether a buyer is eligible to buy firearms or explosives. Delaware is not required to provide certain background information about people to the federal program, such as whether someone has a history of mental illness. Federal law bans those who have been committed to mental institutions from owning firearms. One bill would require the state to report such information.

» Create a community gun buyback program. The one-year "gun buyback" pilot program would offer $100 to anyone who turns in a firearm to participating authorities.
Sen. Robert Marshall, D-Wilmington West, who sponsored the bill, said different jurisdictions would be allowed to implement the program their own way, by buying weapons back with cash or other things such as food certificates.

"What the senator sponsored here was common sense," said Wilmington Police Chief Michael J. Szczerba, who was among several police officers at the signing. Szczerba said the program allows each jurisdiction to decide what its best approach will be in its community.

"He didn't put in a one-size-fits-all," Szczerba said. "He left it up to the professionals ... the people who deal with it every day."

Markell said it was a tough fight to get the laws passed.

"When we introduced them, people didn't really expect us to get these done," said Markell, adding that after the February news conference where he introduced the bills, people were saying he was trying to take their guns away. "That's not what this is about. This is about common-sense measures."

The laws were an important step in promoting public safety, but there are other issues that need to be looked at, including education, jobs and housing, he said.

Markell outlined a slate of gun-control measures during his 2008 campaign. With the exception of Marshall's bill, the other three were among the first he helped draft and recruit lawmakers to sponsor. One bill he announced in February that would have closed the "gun-show loophole" did not pass this session. That bill would have required all vendors, even hobbyists, to have a licensed firearms dealer perform a background check prior to the sale, delivery or transfer of any firearm at a gun show.
Markell said he was disappointed it did not pass but said he will push for it again.
Although gun owners interviewed Wednesday at the state's Ommelanden Firing Range agreed the new laws make common sense, they added there is always a concern when lawmakers consider gun control legislation.

"You don't want to be hindering the honest, law-abiding citizen for something that criminals are going to do anyway whether there is a law there or not," said 59-year-old Bruce Chamberlin of Wilmington.

Chamberlin said he was OK with the four laws, but is concerned about how police will enforce the one about possessing a weapon while intoxicated.

"Guns and alcohol of course don't mix," he said. "But you're talking about after the event and the guns are safely stored in the vehicle -- I don't see why that should be a problem."

But Robert Kocivar, 59, of Wilmington, has doubts about how the new laws will impact crime.
"I don't see how any of that effort is going to reduce crime overall statewide," Kocivar said. "I have a feeling their effort and resources could be used a little bit more effectively just trying to get some of the bad people off the streets instead of getting the guns off the streets."

Additional Facts

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Little impact locally from latest gun rule

By SILVIO J. PANTA
Imperial Valley Press Staff Writer
1:55 AM PDT, July 13, 2011

Not one to mince words about the federal government, Robert Hayes expressed dismay over a program requiring gun retailers to provide officials with information about the sale of high-powered rifles.

There’s only one problem, Hayes explained Tuesday. Such weapons of the kind drug cartels use cannot be bought or sold in California, said Hayes, owner of The Gun Shop in El Centro.

Furthermore, said Hayes, the new policy announced this week by the U.S. Justice Department won’t have much of an impact locally because the weapons legally sold in this state don’t fall under the category of a high-powered, assault rifle.

“Basically, it has no effect on us whatsoever,” Hayes opined. “It’s a huge tempest in a teapot and has virtually no impact on sales in California.”

Gun retailers in California and in three other states are being required to alert federal officials about the purchase of more than two semi-automatic rifles to anyone in a five-day period. The program is intended to help the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives stem the tide of gun-trafficking south of the border.

The three other states involved in the effort are Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. Authorities with the U.S. Border Patrol and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection declined to say anything publicly and deferred all comments about the merits of the program to the ATF.

Christian Hoffman, ATF spokesman, was not able to respond to questions about the gun retailer program.

While the federal program is aimed at retrieving information about the multiple sales of semiautomatic weapons, it comes after mounting criticism over the federal government’s Operation Fast and Furious gun tracing program which was aimed at combating gun-trafficking along the Arizona border with Mexico.

But congressional testimony revealed that under Operation Fast and Furious an estimated 1,800 guns were unaccounted for and roughly two-thirds of them are probably in Mexico, according to an Associated Press news story.

California law already requires gun retailers to report “long gun” sales of shot guns and rifles to the state government, said Bill DuBois, operator of Border Tactical indoor shooting range.

In addition, state law forbids anyone from purchasing more than one handgun every 30 days, DuBois said. Perhaps complicating matters, is that the state’s definition of an assault rifle differs from that of other states, DuBois said.

Gun retailers want to cooperate with the law, but DuBois said, “any new law has to be careful that it has any actual impact on crime.”
http://www.ivpressonline.com/news/ivp-news-little-impact-locally-from-latest-gun-rule-20110713,0,6938545,print.story

Staff Writer Silvio J. Panta can be reached at 760-337-3442 or at spanta@ivpressonline.com

Monday, July 11, 2011

Guns in Arizona: Concerns over safety, rights shape gunslinger attitude

Dan Nowicki and Dennis Wagner - Jul. 11, 2011 12:00 AM

Guns and the debate over whether the weapons need regulation has long been a mainstay of the political conversation in Arizona, where firearms violence spawned a counterculture long before statehood.

In the Old West, some of the wildest and woolliest Arizona towns wound up with local gun-control ordinances. The argument over guns came up again as the state's founding fathers drafted the Arizona Constitution. And in the aftermath of President John F. Kennedy's assassination on Nov. 22, 1963, Arizona's political leadership mobilized in opposition to calls for more firearm restrictions.

A gun-friendly political climate for decades has both reflected and supported Arizona's firearm lifestyle that started in the untamed territorial days and remains an element of the state's culture, economy and image.

Pioneer towns such as Phoenix and Tombstone were founded by tough men who always carried two guns and a knife, said Bob Boze Bell, executive editor of Cave Creek-based True West Magazine.

At one point, Bell said, Tombstone had 10,000 such residents and 66 bars, yet only 14 homicides over several years. Still, as women and children moved in, and as municipal governments took root, local anti-gun ordinances were adopted. Even in Tombstone, Arizona's legendary "town too tough to die."

The most famous gunfight in the state's history was, partly, a dispute over guns. An attempt by Wyatt Earp, his brothers and their ally Doc Holliday to disarm a group of cowboys led to the deadly 1881 shootout near the O.K. Corral, a confrontation immortalized in Hollywood Westerns.

"The laws are looser now than they were in the Old West," said Bell, a writer and illustrator whose books include "Bad Men: Outlaws and Gunfighters of the Wild West" and three volumes of his "Classic Gunfights" series. "You could not carry a gun in Tombstone."

Gun-control advocates will sometimes argue that Arizona's Wild West days are long over and that a different attitude toward guns is overdue. That call for increased regulation of firearms in the state actually is more than 100 years old.

During the pre-statehood 1910 constitutional convention, Arizona's founders included a special protection for individual gun rights in the state constitution that went beyond the language of even the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

"The right of the individual citizen to bear arms in defense of himself or the state shall not be impaired," the draft constitution said.

It was not without controversy, minutes of the proceedings show. A motion to scratch the provision was made on the grounds that "we are no longer a frontier country" and guns, in addition to being dangerous, weren't needed anymore.

The motion was watered down to give the Legislature the power to regulate the carrying of weapons "to prevent crime" but was narrowly rejected on a 23-22 vote.

Decades later, Arizona would allow legally carried concealed weapons, a reform that has expanded in one form or another to nearly every state, and for the past 20 years generally has been at the forefront of expanding gun rights on the state level.
Alan Korwin, the author of the definitive guide to Arizona gun statutes and operator of the website www.gunlaws.com, said the gun-control ordinances adopted by Tombstone and some other Arizona towns were tossed as Second Amendment violations after Arizona became a state in 1912.

But over the past half-century, federal gun restrictions ballooned out of control, Korwin said. In his book, he says U.S. gun laws now contain 83,000 words, with more than half of those adopted after 1970.

Strong feelings of tradition

For decades, the gun-control action was centered in Washington, D.C. The Arizona Legislature's emphasis on gun bills is a relatively recent phenomenon. Several longtime Arizona elected officials on both sides of the debate told The Arizona Republic that they don't recall state lawmakers spending much, if any, time on gun legislation in the 1960s or 1970s.

However, Arizona political leadership's support of gun rights and antagonism toward federal gun control date back at least to the dawn of the modern era of firearm regulation.

Long-serving U.S. Sen. Carl Hayden, D-Ariz., was a former territorial Maricopa County sheriff and an expert marksman who kept historic guns in his Senate office. A little more than two months after JFK's death, Hayden made headlines by holding up a .38 revolver at a Senate Commerce Committee meeting on legislation to ban the mail-order sales of guns. Hayden, who was born in 1877 and was then 86, found the pistol on a witness table along with other confiscated firearms.

"Who shall I shoot?" Hayden mischievously asked, according to an account that appeared in the Jan. 31, 1964, edition of the Washington Post.

Hayden and a contingent of Arizonans appeared at the meeting to oppose the gun-control measure, some on grounds that an armed citizenry was a necessary safeguard against a lawless government or an invading army. Others warned that the measure would hurt ranchers and farmers who lived in rural areas and relied on the mail to buy guns.

Arizona Gov. Paul Fannin, a Republican who would win election to the U.S. Senate later that year, turned in a statement that implored Congress "not to be carried away by the hysteria of our president's assassination." Lee Harvey Oswald had purchased the Italian-made, Carcano rifle he used to kill Kennedy through the mail, but Fannin suggested that a better strategy would be to crack down on the importation of "worthless, cheap foreign weapons."

"Coming from the West, there is no doubt that Western feelings are strongly imbedded in the American tradition of the right to keep and bear arms," U.S. Rep. George Senner, D-Ariz., told the committee in a statement.

Mail-order gun sales eventually were outlawed under the Gun Control Act of 1968, landmark legislation signed by President Lyndon Johnson after the subsequent assassinations of civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, D-N.Y. The law also made it illegal to sell guns to anyone indicted or convicted of crimes punishable by more than one year in prison, people who have been determined to be mentally ill or dishonorably discharged from the military, as well as drug addicts and illegal immigrants.

Hayden and Fannin, Arizona's two senators at the time, voted against it.
"Since '68, it's been one fight after another," said Bob Corbin, a former Arizona attorney general who served as National Rifle Association president in the early 1990s.

Battle over the Brady Bill

The 1968 bill was the first major gun legislation since the 1930s, when gangland warfare prompted Congress to regulate fully automatic machine guns and sawed-off shotguns. Decades later, Congress banned ownership of machine guns that were not registered as of May 19, 1986.

Federal gun-control momentum returned to Capitol Hill in the 1990s, and again Arizonans played key roles in the legislative drama. President Bill Clinton signed the Brady Bill, more formally known as the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, in 1993. It was named for Jim Brady, the White House press secretary wounded in gunman John Hinckley Jr.'s attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan outside a Washington, D.C., hotel in 1981. The following year, lawmakers included a 10-year ban, which has since lapsed, on certain semiautomatic assault weapons in an anti-crime bill.

U.S. Sen. Dennis DeConcini, D-Ariz., had led the way on the assault-weapon ban, introducing the legislation several years in a row. Back home, DeConcini was targeted by an unsuccessful recall campaign in 1989 and in 1993 was marked for defeat by Corbin and the NRA. He ultimately decided not to seek re-election in 1994.
Pro-gun activists and lobbyists decried the Brady Bill and the assault-weapon ban as unconstitutional.

In 1994, an Arizona sheriff challenged the constitutionality of the Brady Bill's provision that required state and local law-enforcement officials to conduct five-day criminal-background checks on gun buyers. U.S. District Judge John Roll, who was slain in the Jan. 8 mass shooting near Tucson that also wounded U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., agreed with Graham County Sheriff Richard Mack that the requirement was a federal violation of states' rights under the 10th Amendment.

The Brady Bill case eventually got to the U.S. Supreme Court, which also sided with Mack on the point. The sheriff became a cult hero to gun-rights enthusiasts, writing a book titled "From My Cold Dead Fingers: Why America Needs Guns."

Mack lamented that no armed citizen was able to shoot the gunman once he opened fire on Giffords and Roll and others attending the congresswoman's constituent event outside a grocery store.

"I wish I'd been there to protect him," Mack said of Roll.

Bold steps and controversy

The year 1994 also marked Arizona's passage of its original law allowing concealed weapons to be carried by state-permitted gun owners. The decade saw the start of the Legislature's more aggressive defense of gun rights and the national controversy it inevitably brings.

In 2000, Arizona House Speaker Jeff Groscost, R-Mesa, sparked a negative reaction by inviting actor Charlton Heston, then the NRA president, to deliver the invocation at the opening of the Legislature. Heston would speak even as then-Gov. Jane Dee Hull and some lawmakers were hoping to pass a bill that would upgrade the celebratory firing of guns in the air, a dangerous New Year's Eve practice in Arizona, to a felony. Gun-control advocates called Heston's appearance a slap in the face, even though Heston endorsed "Shannon's Law," named for a 14-year-old Phoenix girl who was killed by a falling bullet.

"I think that firing a gun in the air is about as stupid an undertaking as I can imagine," Heston told reporters at the Arizona House of Representatives. "Certainly no responsible gun owner would ever do that."

Read more: http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2011/07/11/20110711arizona-guns-special-report-history.html#ixzz1RmuibANo