Gun owners gathered at the Ohio State House to protest gun safety legislation on Sept. 14, 2019, in Columbus. The group stood against red flag laws proposed by Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and national politicians in the wake of a wave of mass shootings throughout the U.S.
If Michigan’s lawmakers had possessed the courage to pass a red flag law after Connecticut did so in 1999, Mary Miller-Strobel’s brother Ben might well be alive today.
If the state legislature, which has been dominated by the Republican Party for most of the past two decades, had passed red flag legislation after the mass shootings at Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, or any of the 50 mass shootings in the United States from 1999-2018 alone, gun safety expert Jonathan Gold says, the two friends he lost to suicide in recent years would almost certainly still be with us.
Now Democratic members of Michigan’s state House and Senate and gun safety advocates are once again pushing for extreme risk protection order legislation to give law enforcement officers the tools to remove firearms from people who are exhibiting signs they might be contemplating either suicide or yet another orgy of firearm-enabled mass murder.
Finally, after the country suffered through two mass shootings in a single August weekend, at least a few Republicans may for once go against the wishes of the “gun pimps” at the NRA and allow hearings and a vote on the legislation.
For Democratic State Sen. Mallory McMorrow, the issue is personal. “One of my closest friends in high school lost her older brother, somebody that I went to high school with, in the Virginia Tech shooting,” McMorrow told Daily Kos.
Sadly, that loss was just the beginning of McMorrow’s personal education on the dangers of allowing unstable individuals access to firearms. A friend of McMorrow’s knew both the Dayton, Ohio, shooter and the shooter’s transgender brother Jordan Coffer, who was also the shooter’s first victim. McMorrow’s younger sister attends Temple University, which was recently threatened by yet another angry young white man, who was buying boxes of .223-caliber rifle bullets.
But while that man was arrested before he could violently act out his personal issues, McMorrow’s sister still suffered a brush with gun violence during the August standoff in Philadelphia that left six police officers wounded.
“I'm one person, and this has come way too close way too many times,” McMorrow said of her passionate support of Michigan’s red flag bill, which would allow individuals, including family, friends, and law enforcement officers, to alert local circuit courts when someone with access to firearms poses a danger to themselves or others.
Read More
