Sponsored Content: A new bill passed in the Maryland legislature will prevent dangerous people from being able to own guns. In addition, the state will spend millions to increase security in schools.
Baltimore’s city council president went south to D.C. today to lobby for stricter gun control measures, citing his own jurisdiction’s issues with the stemming gun violence.
Assault weapons are not protected by the Second Amendment, a federal appeals court ruled yesterday in a case involving Maryland’s ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.
Yesterday, civil rights leader (and congressman) John Lewis led House Democrats in an act of old-fashioned protest: a sit-in.
Maryland has some of the toughest gun laws in the country, including a ban on assault weapons.
Capital News Service – Deer season may be over in Maryland, but lobbying season is well underway in Annapolis.
Hunters and gun enthusiasts held signs last week around the State House, protesting two bills that were debated in the House of Delegates Judiciary Committee Friday.
Yesterday afternoon a man was spotted on Northern Parkway with a gun — not far from many area private schools — which immediately sent the schools into lockdown mode. He was quickly apprehended on Northern Parkway, according to Baltimore City police.
Parents were calling each other to learn what was what — with assorted rumors coming home from students — but a message from the head of Gilman School gave the facts.
At just after 4:10 p.m., the school went into a lockdown upon hearing reports of a person with a gun in the area. The security staff initiated the lockdown, and the school remained in that mode for about 15 minutes.
As we look back on the year, let’s remember six moments that left Marylanders bemused, outraged, or even embarrassed, depending on one’s sense of humor.
6) There was the time Maryland schools exempted an unprecedented number of students from a standardized reading test to inflate our public schools’ national ranking.
5) And who could forget the plight of the Park Elementary second-grader who was suspended for chewing his pop-tart into the shape of a gun and making “inappropriate gestures that disrupted the class.” (This shake-my-head moment even spawned a sequel when Anne Arundel Republicans presented the kid with a lifetime membership in the National Rifle Association.)
4) 2013 was also the year Maryland got its own secessionist group, which hopes to take the five westernmost counties and form a more politically conservative state.
3) Remember when a brilliant Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon compared Obamacare to slavery — slavery! — on national television?
The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence just handed out their annual scorecard, and Maryland received an A-, putting it fourth in the nation behind California, Connecticut, and New Jersey.
The grade is the result of recent gun-control legislation in the state that placed a ban on several assault-style weapons and instituted a policy of fingerprinting all gun buyers.
Maryland’s new gun control measures take effect Oct. 1, but at that time there will still likely be a backlog of tens of thousands of applicants waiting on background checks.
As expected, when the state passed the Firearm Safety Act earlier this year many were inspired to apply for handgun licenses before the stricter measures — namely, mandatory fingerprinting and a $50 fee — took effect. In fact, police have received over 102,000 gun purchase applications so far this year, which is double the number of applications received in all of 2011.
