Arizona -(Ammoland.com)- Five people were murdered and two others were wounded in Maryland on 28 June, 2018. A lone murderer shot his way into the newspaper office of the Capital Gazette in Annapolis. Police response was swift, but it was not fast enough to stop the murderer before he put down his weapon and hid under a desk.
The entire state of Maryland is pretty much a gun free zone. No one at the newpaper was armed to oppose the killer. From wtop.com:
Officers were on the scene within two minutes of the first call about the shooting, Altomare said. Ramos was arrested by officers after he was discovered hiding under a desk.
Altomare said more than 300 officers from federal and state enforcement agencies descended on the scene of the shooting. There were no shots fired by law enforcement during the arrest.
Wes Adams, the state’s attorney for Anne Arundel County, told WTOP’s Neal Augenstein that Ramos barricaded the back entrance before coming to the front entrance, shooting out the front window and shooting into the newsroom.
Adams described it as an orchestrated plan to make sure no one could get out. He added that one of the victims tried to get out the back door, but couldn’t, and was killed.
One of the reporters at the paper tweeted how he felt terrified, hiding under his desk, as other people were shot and killed. He wrote of how he heard the killer reloading his pump shotgun. From the independent.co.uk:
Phil Davis, a crime reporter for the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, posted a series of tweets, explaining how he and others were in their office when the suspected shooter – said to be a lone male – entered and opened fire.
“There is nothing more terrifying than hearing multiple people get shot while you’re under your desk and then hear the gunman reload,” he wrote.
People who are familiar with firearms feel regret they were not armed, and could have cut the killing short. That is what happened to Suzzana Gratia Hupp, who had her parents murdered in a mass killing at Luby’s restaurant, in Kileen Texas.
Dozens of mass killings have been stopped by armed citizens.
The FBI says 8% of mass killings have been stopped by people with concealed carry permits from 2014-2017. About 6.5% of adults in the United States had a concealed carry permit in March of 2017.
Maryland had one of the fewest concealed carry permit percentages in the United States. As of March, 2017, the State had 17,414 active permits. That is the lowest number of permits of all but two other states, Hawaii and New Jersey. Maryland had a population of six million in 2017. That would be 4,662,000 adults. Very few permits are issued to anyone but the powerful, connected, or security personnel who had to have a permit to work.
An activist says he looked at the permit list in 2010. From thedailyrecord.com:
In 2010, I obtained the MDSP MAAFS list, that has all of the names and occupations of those who hold a MD CCW permit. When you remove the business people, the state politicians, retired police, prison guards, etc… In essence, if you remove the government, business, and people who require such for work, it leaves approximately 750 issued permits in a state of 5,000,000 residents, or less than 1/10th of 1%. The reason 95% of all permits are issued, is because only those groups aforementioned need apply. The average citizen does not apply, because they cannot obtain one.
17,411 would be .37 of one percent of the adult population. If we take the estimate of 750 in 2010 (4,483,00 adults in 2010). That would be .017 percent of the population who were not powerful, connected, or work related.
Maryland is one of only six states that has no protection for a right to keep and bear arms in its Constitution.
When people who are gun owners, who feel comfortable with firearms, think of themselves in such a situation, they know they would want to be armed. People who have made the decision to be voluntarily unarmed, wonder when armed protectors might rescue them.
©2018 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice is included.
About Dean Weingarten:
Dean Weingarten has been a peace officer, a military officer, was on the University of Wisconsin Pistol Team for four years, and was first certified to teach firearms safety in 1973. He taught the Arizona concealed carry course for fifteen years until the goal of constitutional carry was attained. He has degrees in meteorology and mining engineering, and recently retired from the Department of Defense after a 30 year career in Army Research, Development, Testing, and Evaluation.