States Are Depriving Innocent People of Their Second Amendment Rights
SHORTLY AFTER 5 a.m. on November 5, 2018, two police officers arrived at Gary Willis’ house in Glen Burnie, Maryland. They were there to take away his guns. They ended up killing him instead.
According to the Anne Arundel County Police Department, the 61-year-old man, who at that hour presumably had just been awakened by the officers’ knocking, answered the door with a gun in his hand. He put it down when he saw who was there. Upon learning that the two officers had come to serve him with an “extreme risk protective order” (ERPO) that barred him from possessing firearms, police said, Willis became “irate” and picked up the weapon again. As one officer tried to wrestle the gun away from Willis, it went off, whereupon the other officer shot him.
Police Chief Timothy Altomare subsequently argued that the incident illustrated the need for Maryland’s ERPO law, which had taken effect barely a month before. “If you look at this morning’s outcome,” he told the Annapolis Capital, a newspaper whose headquarters had been the site of a mass shooting the previous June, “it’s tough for us to say ‘Well, what did we prevent?’ Because we don’t know what we prevented or could’ve prevented. What would’ve happened if we didn’t go there at 5 a.m.?”
Well, for one thing, Gary Willis probably would still be alive.
Altomare invites us to speculate that Willis might have used a gun to kill someone. Yet at the time of his death, the only evidence to support that concern seems to have been a complaint from his sister, who reportedly obtained the temporary ERPO against her brother after a family argument during which he said something that alarmed her. Willis had no opportunity to challenge that claim, and he had no idea he had been stripped of his Second Amendment rights until police arrived at his door early in the morning with the court order in hand.
Anne Arundel County police did not respond to my inquiries, and the Maryland courts have declined to provide records of the case, which are confidential under state law unless a judge rules otherwise. Based on interviews with relatives, local news outlets reported that the ERPO stemmed from an argument the
