Crumbley Parents Face Prosection Due To Son’s Shooting Spree, Nation Has Right To Expect Parental Responsibility

Gun control advocates continually press for reasoned and logical laws and consequences so as to better stem the rampant gun violence that impacts far too many communities and families. Today, one of those themes pushed on this blog came to fruition in a Michigan court case. James and Jennifer Crumbley, the parents of a teenager who killed four students and injured seven at a Michigan high school, will face trial for involuntary manslaughter. The ruling came from a state appeals court in what we need to recognize as a profoundly important and correct decision.  This is a groundbreaking case of criminal responsibility for the acts of a gun-toting child.

In December 2021, I posted the following.

The layers of possible responses to the carnage left by Ethan Crumbley and the 9-millimeter Sig Sauer handgun used in the shooting are many. From working on issues in school concerning being bullied to the drowning of the nation in too many guns available for purchase, and the ease that children can get their hands on a deadly weapon. There is no single avenue to address the gravity of the situation.

But when it comes to guns in homes this blog has been consistent and adamant that parents must be held legally responsible when their weapons are not stored and safeguarded correctly. When they are accessible to underage people, and crimes take place with the weapons, then the law must follow the parents right to the jailhouse door and usher them inside.

Let me be clear and place the weight upon the parents as these murders would not have happened if the parents hadn’t purchased a gun for Ethan Crumbley or if they had taken him home from Oxford High School on the day of the shooting.  That is not just my summation, but how the appeal court viewed the distressing matter of God-awful parenting.  The court held firm to the obvious necessity that the parents should have taken their unhinged child out of the classroom after school staff became aware of and rightly alarmed over his extreme drawings.

I have stressed bad parenting must be addressed in relation to guns repeatedly on Caffeinated Politics.  After reading the words of Lorrie Wagner about her son, Jakob, the Antigo prom school shooter, I called attention to her decision to allow a clearly troubled child to obtain a semi-automatic weapon. I stated it was an example that underscores why there needs to be some legal remedy for such absurdity. We came to know about her son’s childhood struggle with mental illness and diagnosis of depression his emotional breakup with a girlfriend a month before prom, combined with his mother’s decision two weeks before the dance to allow him to buy a semi-automatic assault-style rifle at a gun show. 

In 2009, the Waushara County Sheriff’s Department received a 911 call alerting them someone had been shot dead in Redgranite.  The initial investigation showed several young people between the ages of 5 and 17 were at the residence and the victim had received a gunshot wound to the upper torso.  A long-barrel rifle used in the shooting was recovered from the scene. At the time I asked where were the parents?  Why was a rifle unlocked with ammunition in the home?  There are many questions to be answered, and as painful as it might be, the parents need to be held responsible for the weapons that they had. 

We know that in 2006 in Sauk County a 15-year-old boy brought a rifle and handgun to school and shot a principal three times, killing him.  I wrote at the time “How guns are so carelessly left around in the homes of Americans is a mystery to me.  How a child walks out of the house on the way to school with a loaded shotgun and a loaded handgun baffles me.  How parents are so tone deaf to the problems that their child is having BEFORE a violent act of this kind, confuses me.”

This blog has repeatedly stated parents of young people who use guns to shoot, kill, and create violence also need to be held accountable.  Many times, an adult was responsible for the fact the shooter was able to place his hands on a weapon. There is no way that any sane person can say parental/adult actions, such as with this shooting in Michigan which led off this post, should not be addressed by the law that makes sure there is a responsibility shared by those who help to foster the violent outcomes.

The NRA has plenty of responsibility for the number of guns in our society and the ease with which anyone can get a deadly weapon. But when it comes to children with guns there also must be a question asked–where the heck was the parent? It might also be a good time to ask if parents are not able to control their offspring then perhaps, they should forfeit their children’s tax credits. The rest of society should not have to continually pay the price for bad parenting.

I applaud the court process playing out in Michigan. James and Jennifer Crumbley deserve to be wards of the state.

Father Of Highland Park Mass Shooter Indicted, Seven Counts, Adults Need To Pay Price For Bad Parenting

Robert E. Crimo Jr., center, father of mass shooter Robert Crimo III, Nam Y. Huh, AP Photos The courts need to swing hard at this poor excuse of a parent.

One of the points I continuously make as a step to stem gun violence is to legally go after the parents who assist in weaponizing their children.  Giving assistance so as to allow those with mental health issues or legal pitfalls to gain deadly guns must be addressed by our courts. Having parents act rashly either out of some ‘familial emotions’ toward a troubled child or for partisan reasons can no longer be countenanced by society.  As such, the news today from Highland Park was what we needed to learn, after far too many deadly mass shootings.

The father of the man charged in the Highland Park Fourth of July parade shooting was indicted by a grand jury Wednesday for helping his son obtain firearms.

Robert E. Crimo Jr. is to be arraigned Thursday on seven counts of reckless conduct for sponsoring his son’s state gun ownership application despite allegedly knowing his son had threatened to kill himself and his family.

Prosecutors filed seven counts, one for each person killed at the Highland Park parade last year. A reckless conduct charge carries a maximum sentence of three years.

Crimo Jr. has been free on bail since prosecutors charged him in December.  (It needs to be noted the victims of the mass shooting still reside in a cemetery.)

I am often reminded that family structures and values are essential foundations for our youth.  The parents of mass shooter Bobby Crimo are perhaps the epitome of what should be stressed in family planning classes for new parents on what not to become.  I was flabbergasted last year to read and sadly see, Denise Pesina, the killer’s mother, pull down her top and expose her right breast while confronting the professional SWAT personnel waiting to enter her home following the slaughter during the Fourth of July parade. That act was one more piece of the growing puzzle as to the lack of character of the killer’s parents and what type of home environment existed. It was not reported in the news if that photo was then used in her end-of-the-year holiday letter.  ‘Gosh, what a busy year we have had…..’

But as I noted last July nothing proved the lack of parenting skills or the total disregard for the community safety more clearly than when Robert Crimo, Jr., the father of the mass shooter, signed off on his son’s application for a deadly gun in December 2019. That occurred despite the son having two previous encounters with local police, including one in September 2019 where he allegedly threatened to “kill everybody” in his family.  Well, sure, get that unhinged one a deadly weapon!!

We know that Crimo, Jr, wanted to be the mayor of Highland Park, and desired his conservative views to be enacted in the community.  What those voters are discovering more and more is how unworthy Crimo was as a parent, let alone a potential (gasp) public servant. There is appropriate outrage being heard about this case on Chicago radio today.  I hear much agreement as to why parents must be held liable in courts for their child’s actions, especially when due to a deadly gun being placed in the hands of a very troubled person. This blog has repeatedly stated parents of young people who use guns to shoot, kill, and create violence need to be held accountable.   We know that in the Highland shooting an adult was responsible for the fact the shooter was able to place his hands on the weapon. There is no way that any sane person can say parental/adult actions, such as with this mass shooting, should not be addressed by the law that makes sure there is a responsibility shared by those who helped to foster the violent outcomes.

As a general matter, it needs to concern all of us how gun owners carelessly leave weapons around their homes. How a child walks out of the house on the way to school with a loaded shotgun or a loaded handgun baffles me.  How parents are so tone-deaf to the problems that their child is having BEFORE a violent act occurs, confuses me.  Why we as citizens do not tell the NRA that we have had enough death and violence as a result of their buying politicians, and thereby stopping needed gun legislation from getting passed, is in itself a crime. Inept and thoughtless parents are just another slice of the crazy pie.

It might also be an excellent time to ask if parents cannot control their offspring with guns then perhaps should forfeit their use of the child as a tax deduction. The rest of society should not have to continually pay the price for bad parenting.

Students Should Not Need Endure Both High School And College Mass Shootings

Every mass shooting in our nation serves as a gut punch to our moral compass.  The 67^th such shooting on the 44^th day of this year allowed readers of newspapers and television viewers to take in yet another sobering and very troubling statistic.  Some of the college students who were sheltering in place on the Michigan State University campus, after having read a text message from school authorities to “flee, hide, or fight” had already been through a mass shooting at Oxford High School in 2021. Three of their fellow campus students were joining the dozens of others already slaughtered this year in mass shootings.

The deluge of such shootings has left many in the nation shocked to the point new killings are viewed almost in a fog-like trance as if the soul of the nation deflects and tries to compartmentalize the carnage to stay calm.  But the reality of the continuous shootings needs to be addressed and in as direct a fashion as the students did this morning on their Michigan campus.

Though I am not a parent, I can imagine the absolute terror to learn at night the campus had a mass shooting, knowing a child from the family dinner table was a student, and not being able to reach them on a cell phone. Ever again.  For some families today that is the reality.  It is a harsh and brutal reality that too many of our elected officials will not confront as they allow the National Rifle Association to undermine reasoned and logical gun control measures across the land.  The sad fact is that the most curtailing all-inclusive gun laws could be passed and enacted and, still there would be far more guns than people in our nation.

We are to again have a national conversation about a litany of issues ranging from mental illness to online hate groups or those who have self-loathing issues. Some will pretend this nation has a market with such problems.  We do not.  The entire world confronts those same human frailties.  But they do not go about shooting scores of people and racking up mass shootings as this nation does. That is because they do not have wild access to guns or live in nations that glorify deadly weapons. Has anyone seen a member of the British Parliament saddled with guns while posing for a Christian nationalism photo? We have several in our Congress that have undertaken such dangerous behavior.

We know that the way to stem gun violence, and that is the best that can be hoped for in our current political climate as one party will not stand up to the gun lobby in state capitals or in Congress, is to press ever harder and more firmly, louder and repeatedly for sanity in our legislative bodies. When hearing about the “flee, hide, or fight” text message sent to those young men and women on the Michigan campus I was struck with the image of myself at that age. We all might ponder the same and rightly conclude it is not moral for our legislative bodies not to act at once so to address what every mom and dad is talking about at the dinner table. It is not acceptable that anyone by the age of 20 should have suffered through two mass shootings anywhere in our nation.

Wisconsin’s Role in Chicago Gun Violence Where One Zip Code Has 1,277 Homicides Per 100,000 People

Chicago Police Department on Dec. 4, 2022, posted a picture of the guns they confiscated in a single day in a single district.

Chicago mayoral elections are always a frothy affair, but this year’s primary season has taken on a far more sobering mood for many voters. The primary field is large and the verbal punches are given and replied to in equal measure. But for the voters what matters is not the campaign tactics of the contenders, but rather, the gun violence and mounting death toll in a city that seems at war with itself.

This weekend the Chicago Sun-Times reported sobering findings that will very much be a part of the closing weeks of a race that matters, perhaps more so than any in recent memory, for those who live in the Windy City. While many of us watch the politics of the city and follow those politicians who either merit attention based on skills (Paul Vallas), or are entertaining due to more bombast than actual gravitas (Willie Wilson) there must also be recognition of the role our state plays in the gun violence that plague parts of Chicago.

The risk of a man 18 to 29 years old dying in a shooting in the most violent ZIP code in Chicago — 60624, a swath of the West Side that includes Garfield Park — was higher than the death rate for U.S. soldiers in the Afghanistan war or for soldiers in an Army combat brigade that fought in Iraq, according to a study published in the medical journal JAMA Network Open.

Among men ages 18 to 29, the annual rate of firearm homicides in that ZIP code was 1,277 per 100,000 people in 2021 and 2022, the study found, compared with an annual death rate for U.S. troops in a heavily engaged combat brigade in Iraq of 675 per 100,000.

There is a term called “time to crime” which is defined as the period between the purchase of a gun and its recovery by the police in a crime. In Chicago, law enforcement is most concerned as data shows the time is far shorter than in New York or Los Angeles, according to a new report from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.  The Justice Department considers this a strong indicator of illegal trafficking.

The statistics from data regarding guns confiscated on the streets of Chicago continue to be most troubling. In Chicago, most of the traced guns, about 16,500 of them, were bought from somewhere within Illinois, with about 8,200 more coming from Indiana. Wisconsin, Kentucky, and Mississippi, each being the source of fewer than 2,000 guns.

Not for the first time does Wisconsin get put into the mix of how guns from our state find their way to the crimes we read about from Chicago, and then many of our citizens (shockingly) decry the violence they then find so alarming.  Lax gun laws in states near those with more restrictive laws have statistically proven negative outcomes. We simply must be far more aware of how Wisconsin plays a role in that gun violence. I am not suggesting our state has a more pronounced need to act than other bordering states, but the fact gun violence has ramped up and knowing we play a role mandates we act as moral people. 

A 2021 newspaper story about a gun dealer in Superior and a recovered weapon in Chicago is but one glaring example of why we must have tougher gun laws in our state, in this case with gun sellers.

It was a few hours past midnight on New Year’s Day 2016, a time when the working-class northern Wisconsin town of Superior keeps the bars open especially late.

Police were tied up with two bar fights, one of them a 30-person brawl at a local saloon called the Ugly Stick.

With no cops in sight, the burglar was ready to make his move on Superior Shooters Supply, a gun shop frequented by hunters and hobbyists.

It was just 12 days later, authorities believe, when one of those (stolen) pistols was fired from a car in the southbound lanes of the Chicago Skyway around 97th Street, killing a 25-year-old road manager for a rap group who was driving his new BMW coupe.

The ease with which anyone with a disturbed mind or cruel intentions can make an easy entrance to gun stores and steal deadly armaments is very concerning. In the above robbery, the store owner in Superior noted that the handguns were “stolen from one of her glass display cases”. The consequences of such brazen thefts are noted in the data. In 2019, of more than 11,000 guns confiscated by Illinois authorities, 460 were traced back to Wisconsin, which ranked third for states with the most gun traces outside of Illinois, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.

We need to re-examine the issues at play that allow for hundreds of guns to leave our state and cause injury and death.  The reason is most obvious. While mayoral hopefuls will press the issue with voters about ways to stem gun violence in their city those who look in on the campaigns from this side of the Illinois border must share in the blame for not pressing our legislature to be more mindful of the harm guns crossing into Chicago are causing.

24th Day of 2023, 39 Mass Shootings, 69 Dead

By the time I get to the end of this post, I will check my news feed to see if an upward adjustment to the number of mass shootings and deaths needs to be made. It is a hell of a situation we find ourselves in as a nation. At the age of 60, I find myself writing about gun deaths with the same sense of frustration as when a middle school student. That is when I wrote my first letter to the editor of our local newspaper, the topic being the number of needless deaths from cheap handguns.

This morning The New York Times started a news story about mass shootings in a fashion that underscores the enormity of the problem in the nation. Such violence is not simply a part of the large urban landscapes, such as Los Angles, or within the mean streets of inner cities like Chicago where drugs and gangs too often predominate.

There was the mass shooting near a youth center in Allentown, Pa., and the one at a Subway restaurant in Durham, N.C. Another took place behind a beer hall in Oklahoma City, and another at a strip club outside Columbus, Ohio. Two mass shootings ended parties in different Florida cities.

And that was just on New Year’s Day.

For many years I would write a blog post when the most recent and deadly gun carnage made headlines in the nation.  They happen with such frequency, however, I just instead opt to head to the front lawn and bring the flag to half-staff.  What more can be said about the barbaric slaughter from our fellow citizens, the frenzied desire from a sick subset of the populace to amass guns and weapons and bulletproof vests, or the spineless and cowering politicians who kneel to NRA lobbyists and gun manufacturers? What I do know is that we must never relent in our demand that reason and common sense win out over the complete insanity from the gun culture in our nation. We have witnessed 39 times this far what more guns, easily bought with few limitations, has brought upon our country.

I read with interest and much agreement the comment from a Minneapolis reader in the NYT when she made the following cogent argument. There is a real need to talk about what drives some men to act with such depravity and what social conditions allow them to believe their actions are ‘warranted’. I would add hyper-masculinity is very much a danger in the nation, and we need to have our schools, churches, and social organizations address it publicly while parents step up their skills to talk with their sons.

Something’s very wrong in American society, and the ridiculous availability of firearms of every description and capacity has been and is a symptom of something much deeper in the American psyche. That killing is so compelling and apparently so easy and irresistible for so many American men and boys shines a spotlight on the morality and values they are raised with, either by parents who inculcate those values or by the larger society that surrounds, advertises, coerces, and threatens that if you are male and are not comfortable with casual, angry, ego-driven violence, its endless expressions in sports and entertainment, and its gruesome instruments, somehow you are not a real “man.” Unrelenting, unthinking, “me-first” capitalism is also to blame. If you’re a man, having your own way in everything is a first principle of “success” in America. Just look around at the troubled and troublesome men America is obsessed with. Who is in the headlines day after day? How did they get there? If you can’t be one of them, just get yourself a gun and you can have all the power in your own hands, at least for a few minutes.

At this point in our gun-soaked and consequently blood-soaked nation, it is no longer the aim of gun control legislation advocates to stop gun crimes, but rather to stem the increase and start to roll back the numbers. The enormity of the issue can be seen in just the past three days in California where gun laws are on the books (and yes, I know the sound rationale for federal laws so weak states cannot be sources for gun sales) but even with more rigorous laws hell still broke out.  However, we must not lose sight of the data that consistently shows that sane gun restrictions make society safer overall. 

One of my reasons for this foundation can be found in a Rand study that was talked about on the news this weekend.  Due to California having tougher gun laws, only 28% of California adults with those deadly weapons in their homes.  As the reporter alerted viewers contrast that to Missouri where nearly 50% of homes had a gun inside.  The steps required to bend the curve towards sanity and away from the gun culture will be slow and come in a variety of ways.   The reason it must be done is in front of us daily.

Assault Weapons Face Wrath Of Illinois Citizens

When the legislative process works in accordance with the needs of society, and the desires of the majority for public safety there is a reason for general applause. Too often the monied interests and top-name lobbyists pull the levers in legislatures. Therefore, when long-simmering issues finally reach the committee process and the top half of newspapers, we can cheer both the governing process and the topic at hand. Simply put Illinois had more than 50 mass shootings in the state in 2022 and people are tired of the death and bloodshed.

Today, Illinois lawmakers held a hearing on legislation that would ban the sale and ownership of assault-style weapons.  The measure is akin to what both California and New York, upon listening to their citizens, have done with the enactment of similar laws.  House Bill 5855 would outlaw the manufacture, possession, delivery, selling, and purchasing of assault weapons, .50 caliber rifles, and .50 caliber cartridges.

It comes as no surprise why such a bill is clearly warranted as data proves firearm homicides increased by 35% from 2019 to 2020 nationwide, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  Legislators have heard the calls from Illinois voters and seen the polling from Global Strategy Group which shows support among registered Illinois voters at 58% for an assault-style weapons ban in the state while 66% said they wanted the minimum age to obtain a FOID card raised from 18 to 21.  (Illinois is one of four states to require a state-issued Firearm Owner Identification Card — known as a FOID card — to own a firearm, which it has done for decades.)

It likely does not need to be explained to folks in the Midwest what spurred this measure. The dastardly July 4th massacre in Highland Park gave impetus for sensible gun control legislation.  This bill will ban over 100 guns which include the AR-15 rifle which was used to kill seven people and also injured 48 others in that one shooting event alone.  I very much agree with the provision that makes it illegal to purchase or possess magazines that can hold more than 10 rounds and also bans the sale or purchase of “switches,” which can increase a weapon’s rate of fire. Equally important, in my estimation, is the aim of the bill to increase the age for people to carry a firearm from 18 to 21. The data shows what happens when unstable young men with mental health issues or feverish extreme political views have easy access to purchasing assault weapons that can kill scores of people in mere seconds.

I have been reading and following the politics of this measure, which is as important as the bill’s content.  I sense a strong move for passage. This bill will get over the finish line.  As of this morning, there are more than 25 co-sponsors and in interviews over the past month, top assembly leaders have promised the matter is not only a priority piece of legislation but could be passed in a lame-duck session in early 2023. Governor JB Pritzker is a solid supporter of the bill and will affix his signature as soon as the paperwork is placed on his desk. 

The gun epidemic is so pervasive and perverse that it will take a series of bills and avenues of strategy to start to stem the death and bloodshed. At this point, the aim is to reduce gun crimes by limiting the sale of certain types of guns and curtailing the ability of young men to purchase weapons designed for the battlefield. While we know the gun-toting NRA types will swirl about with lawsuits and legal procedures let us not forget that in the reality of how people are confronted with gun violence in churches, grocery stores, schools, and too many neighborhoods it is incumbent that elected officials grasp one solid fact. 

The tail should never wag the dog. Citizens have had their fill of selfish gun owners, easy access to gun sales, along with deadly and reckless outcomes.  Illinois is fighting back.

And we can strongly applaud their efforts.

UW-Madison Professor Places Gun Culture Roots In Post-Civil War South

The first thing I ever wrote to be published was a Letter to the Editor of my county newspaper lamenting the lack of gun control. I was a high school teenager who found it hard to fathom the stunning number of handgun deaths in the nation.  Several decades later and the search for an understanding of our gun culture continues to vex me.  I still am not able to square the tens of thousands of lives killed each year due to guns with a legislative process impotent to enacting meaningful corrective measures.  

How the culture for gun madness was born and how it took root in such a powerful way has intrigued me since I used a Smith Corona to type (or was that pecking) my letter to the Waushara Argus. On Sunday, an insightful and thought-provoking article from Nick Buttrick, assistant professor of psychology at UW-Madison, was published in the Wisconsin State Journal which demonstrates from a data-loaded historical perspective how and where our national gun culture took birth.

The South was a very dangerous place after the war. More than half a million men, with their weapons, returned to what rapidly became one of the most heavily armed societies in the world, and one of the most violent: The murder rate in the South during the 1870s was an estimated 18 times higher than in New England — largely driven by white men killing each other.

Elite white Southerners considered the empowerment of the previously enslaved population an existential threat and worked to repress Black political power as completely as possible.

As part of that project, white Southern leaders explicitly anchored the protection of their way of life in the private ownership of firearms, arguing that guns protected white people from an illegitimate government unwilling to keep them safe. The huge supply of firearms from the war made this argument salient.

Using data from the 1860 census, nationally representative survey data from more than 3.5 million Americans, and records of every death in the U.S. from 1996 to 2016, we found that the higher the rate of enslavement in a county in 1860 — i.e., where nascent Black political power was more threatening to post-Civil War white elites — the higher the rate of gun ownership today.

In other words, counties with a historical prevalence of slavery had both the most guns and the tightest link between guns and feelings of safety. These are the places where contemporary American gun culture took root.

Mass shootings and obituaries from gun violence are now part of the fabric of daily life in this country. While it is important to place our current dilemma into a historical construct the lay of the land does not allow one to think it leads toward an enlightened and credible congressional majority that works in concert with needed gun control measures.

There was no way as a teenager to imagine that mass murder from high-powered military-type rifles of the kind used in Las Vegas when 58 people were killed could ever occur. When I sat at our family kitchen table and typed out the newspaper letter it would have been hard for me to believe that, Telemachus Orfanos, a man who escaped with his life from that mass shooting would die in another mass shooting in Thousand Oaks, California. The fact that a person can find themselves in the midst of two separate mass shootings in America underscores where the gun culture born in the South has placed our nation.

Supreme Court Starts Session With Win For Gun Control Safety In America

The new session of the U.S. Supreme Court started out with an action that runs in alignment with a major theme of this blog, gun safety in the nation.  The Court rejected two appeals by gun owners seeking to overturn the federal government’s ban on the sale of bump stocks.  Those stocks are the shortened term for devices that allow a semiautomatic firearm to shoot more than one shot with a single pull of the trigger.  It is not difficult to understand why that item is most undesirable, and why the ban was implemented. The ban was one of the very few policy moves from the one term of Donald Trump with which I could voice strong agreement.

The only way to report this story is from the perspective of the safety factor as the ban is a way to stem the furthering of gun violence this nation faces daily. The action of the court in their rejection of the cases is a significant victory for gun control advocates and supports the role our government has undertaken–though far too timidly–with efforts to regulate very dangerous weapons.

Why these cases being shunted out the Court door matters is that knuckle-draggers who sought to undo the ban tried to suggest the government did not have authority to ban bump stocks under the National Firearms Act, a law enacted in 1934 to regulate machine guns. In 1968, the Gun Control Act expanded the definition of a machine gun to include accessories “for use in converting a weapon” into a machine gun, and the ATF concluded under the Trump Administration, when it issued the ban, that bump stocks meet that definition. I found fault with the ATF under the Obama administration when that agency ruled bump stocks should not be classified as a “machinegun” and therefore should not be banned under federal law. 

Bump stocks are accessories for semi-automatic rifles, such as the popular AR-15-style weapons that have been used in a plethora of mass shootings in our country. They use the recoil energy of a trigger pull to enable the user to fire up to hundreds of rounds a minute. That is simply insanity that needed to be curbed. It took the mass shooting in Las Vegas that left 58 people dead before the ATF acted during Trump’s time in office, and credit needs to be given where it is due. After all, what more needs to happen to show the bump stock ban was necessary. The Vegas shooter used assault-style rifles to fire more than 1,000 rounds in 11 minutes into the crowd of 22,000 music fans.

For rational and common-sense people in the nation who fully understand and desire that logical regulations be placed on the sale of guns and their “particular attributes”, today was a solid win. Not a bad way to start a Monday morning or the first day of a new session of the Court.