BALTIMORE – With the future of two Maryland gun laws in question, the co-directors of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions held a briefing Thursday on new research and policy.
Professor Cassandra Crifasi said states such as Oregon, Delaware and Washington are taking steps to reduce gun violence, including passing a law to license gun buyers. She said research shows that these types of laws have been shown to reduce homicides and suicides in states that have them.
“If you plot all the states in the US by their gun death rate from the highest to the lowest, there is a very clear pattern. States that have the right kinds of policies in place (like) licensing of firearm purchasers, enhanced background checks, waiting periods, minimum age laws (and) safe storage. Those states have the lowest rates of gun deaths, and the states that are more gun friendly have the highest rates,” Crifasi said.
Last year, the Supreme Court ruled that judges must use a new legal test to consider whether modern gun control laws reflect what was in place when the country was founded.
Based on that ruling, a federal judge in September issued an injunction limiting the reach of a concealed carry law that was about to go into effect. The law had been championed by Governor Wes Moore and other state lawmakers.
In November, a federal judge overturned Maryland’s decade-old handgun licensing law, which required fingerprinting, training and a 30-day waiting period for handgun licences.
Crifasi said she was optimistic that the ruling would be successfully appealed.
“I would note that there was a recent Fourth Circuit case that struck down Maryland’s handgun qualification license, and we expect that to be successfully appealed, given the longstanding tradition in the US of prohibiting gun ownership by dangerous individuals. The second issue I wanted to touch on briefly is guns in public. We have several new studies from our centre that show that when you make it easier for people to carry concealed firearms in public, it’s detrimental to public safety,” she said.
Crifasi said it is important to remember that nearby states may limit what Maryland is able to accomplish as far as fighting back against gun violence.
“We didn’t just look at the outcomes in Maryland in terms of homicides and suicides, we talked to people in the underground gun market in Baltimore. We looked at where the guns that are recovered in crimes in Baltimore City come from, and we found that the majority of the guns that are used in crimes in Baltimore and in Maryland don’t come from Maryland. They’re coming from Tennessee, West Virginia (and) Virginia,” she said.
On Thursday, Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown joined 21 other state attorneys general in an effort to curb unlicensed gun sales by pushing for more background checks.