Seattle –
When he was convicted of killing three teenagers at a house party north of Seattle and seriously injuring another, Ellen Ivanov said he was sorry and could not explain why.
But he noticed a factor that allowed him to shoot – “easy to get a gun.” The 19-year-old had bought an assault rifle a week ago and was so unfamiliar with the weapon that he sat in his car outside the party and studied the owner’s manual before shooting his ex-girlfriend and others.
That theme repeats itself, again, in America’s most recent mass shooting – in Buffalo, New York; Uvalde, Texas; And Tulsa, Oka. – which killed 35 people in less than three weeks. It is renewing the debate over whether restrictions on young adults buying such semi-automatic rifles could save lives.
“If they had been in place, it would have made a difference,” said Paul Kramer, who led a successful 2018 effort to impose a 10-day waiting period on the purchase of semi-automatic rifles in Washington state, as well as a ban. Young adults were buying such weapons after Ivanov’s son, Will, was seriously injured in a shooting two years ago. “Those mass shootings would not have been as revealing as they did, and most likely lives were saved.”
Only nine states, and Washington, D.C., have clear waiting periods before people can buy at least some types of guns. According to the Giffords Law Center for the Prevention of Gun Violence, restrictions may give officers more time to conduct background checks and prevent impulsive, emotional individuals from immediately accessing weapons that could be used to kill themselves or others.
The federal government has no waiting period. A bill passed by the Democrat-led U.S. House of Representatives last year would extend the review period from three days to 10 for a background check, but Republicans have opposed it and are not part of the current Senate debate on how Congress can respond to the recent genocide. .
In Tulsa, authorities said the gunman who killed his surgeon, another doctor and two other people Wednesday, bought an AR-style rifle and a handgun a few hours ago on May 29. The shooter was identified as Michael Lewis, 45, of Muscovite, Oklahoma. ., Had just undergone surgery and blamed his doctor for back pain.
The 18-year-old shooter, who killed 21 people at Rob Elementary School in Boston, Texas, bought two rifles last week.
In California, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Rhode Island and the District of Columbia, there is a waiting period of three to 14 days for the purchase of all types of weapons. Minnesota and Washington have a waiting period for handguns and semi-automatic rifles, while Maryland and New Jersey have only waiting periods for handguns.
In addition, many other states, including Connecticut, Maryland and Massachusetts, require at least some types of firearms buyers to obtain prior permission, sometimes including completing safety classes. Those restrictions can act as waiting periods.
There is no law in Oklahoma mandating a waiting period, but some Democratic lawmakers have called for a special session of the legislature to address it in other measures of gun violence after the Tulsa shootings.
“Students in Oklahoma will be in school in two months,” said House Minority Leader Emily Virgin. “If we fail to act first, it will be because the legislature does not want to do that. This is something I hope all Oklahomans have noticed. ”
He suggested raising the waiting period for arms purchases, raising the state’s minimum age for arms purchases from 18 to 21 and allowing “red flag” laws to temporarily seize guns from people who could endanger themselves or others. Those proposals are unlikely to go anywhere in the GOP-controlled legislature that has pushed for years to delay state gun laws.
Republican Gov. Kevin Steit, who is running for re-election, said last week after the Texas shooting that it was too early to talk about gun policy.
Florida stands out as the Republican-led state that banned guns after the massacre. In 2018, after 14 students and three staff members were killed in a shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, then-Governor Rick Scott signed into law a three-day waiting period and raising the minimum age for buying a rifle from 18 to 21. .
Scott, now a U.S. senator, “encourages all states to look at the actions they have taken in Florida to determine what works best for their state,” his communications director, McKinley Lewis, said in an email Friday.
Nationally, one-third of the shootings took place within a month of their crime, according to James Densley, co-founder of The Violence Project, a non-partisan research group that tracks the 1966 shootings.
According to a 2017 Harvard Business School review, waiting period laws that delay gun purchases by a few days reduce gun homicide by about 17%. But Sam Parades, executive director of Gun Owners in California, called the waiting period “an ineffective policy to try to influence gun crime.”
“Our biggest concern is when people want to exercise their right to carry a weapon, especially when they are the first person to use a gun. There is a delay in their ability to get the equipment they need to keep themselves safe,” Parades said. Said.
Daniel Webster, co-director of the Center for Gun Violence Resolution at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said waiting periods are important, and it’s clear why more states don’t need them: Too many gun laws, he said, “people who sell guns have written. “
Proponents of her case have been working to make the actual transcript of this statement available online. Proponents of her case have been working to make the actual transcript of this statement available online.
“If, for whatever reason, you find a person buying a gun to harm others, the fact that they can’t immediately get a gun in their hand may give the opportunity to change the situation. Get it, assuming they deserve it in the first place,” Rhode Island said. Attorney General Peter Neronha said.
Giving law enforcement enough time to complete a full background check is another benefit of extending the waiting period, he said.
The longest waiting period in the US in Hawaii is 14 days. Alan Beck, a lawyer representing residents challenging various aspects of the state’s gun law, said the two-week period seemed arbitrary. If this is a cooling off period for an angry person, he said it would not affect potential gun buyers if they already have a gun.
But state Sen. Carl Rhodes said he believes the wait period combined with other stricter gun control laws has worked, noting that Hawaii has lower homicide rates.
“If you’re really angry about something and you go buy a gun and you get it right away, then you can act on your impulse,” Rhodes said. “If you have to wait a few weeks, you can calm down and think about it.”
Former Rip of Florida State. Jared Moskowitz, a Democrat who represented Parkland in 2018 and is currently running for Congress, said the waiting period alone was not enough. He said that it was necessary to increase the age of purchase, implement the Red Flag Act, increase the mental health expenditure and increase the security of the school.
“Any change will not make a big difference,” Moskowitz said. “But every change is intertwined.”
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Tallahassee, Fla. In the Associated Press author Anthony Izaguirre; Jennifer Sinco Kelleher in Honolulu; Michael Kunzelman at College Park, Md .; Jennifer McDermott in Providence, RI; Sean Murphy in Oklahoma City; Terry Spencer at Fort Lauderdale, Fla .; And Don Thompson from Sacramento, California contributed to this report.