The congressional architects of the new gun violence law signed by President Biden last month focused their efforts at stopping one particular type of perpetrator: the kind of young, angry and isolated men who harbor violent fantasies and exhibit worrisome behavior before purchasing weapons and tragically acting on their impulses in places such as supermarkets in Buffalo and Boulder, Colo., high schools in Santa Fe, Tex., and Parkland, Fla., or elementary schools in Newtown, Conn., and Uvalde, Tex.
Or now a community parade in Highland Park, Ill.
The arrest of 21-year-old Robert E. Crimo III in the deaths of seven Fourth of July paradegoers just nine days after Biden signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act has refocused attention on the all-too-predictable circumstances behind many U.S. mass shootings — and also provided a tragic new lens through which to judge whether the new law will, in fact, be effective.
Crimo’s background — as a reputed loner who made threats of violence and collected weapons, resulting in encounters with law enforcement — appears to be exactly what lawmakers were targeting in the new law.
“The mental health challenges of young, disaffected and alienated boys is a profile that’s all too familiar,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), co-author of the new law, said in a June 8 speech two weeks after an 18-year-old killed 19 students and two teachers in Uvalde. “In terms of their alienation and their developing mental illness and their willingness to not only take their own life, but other people’s lives, unfortunately, it paints an eerily similar picture.”
But the facts thus far known about Crimo’s background, his interactions with law enforcement and his weapons purchases illustrate that the new law — which was a bipartisan compromise measure that did not include more restrictive measures sought by Biden and many Democrats such as an assault weapons ban or higher minimum age for rifle purchases — will probably prove to be far short of a panacea.
Furthermore, the Highland Park case illustrates how the bill’s effectiveness will depend on the decisions of legislators and law enforcement officials at the state and local levels, meaning the nation could continue to see a patchwork approach to combating mass shootings for decades to come.
No aspect of the Highland Park shooting better illustrates that reality than Crimo’s ability to receive a state firearm license and purchase multiple weapons less than a year after police were made aware of violent threats he had allegedly made, prompting officers to seize knives from his home and report him to state authorities as a “clear and present danger.”
“The details are still coming to light,” said Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, a group that advocates for tougher gun restrictions. “But I think it’s fair to say that if the police come to your house and confiscate a knife collection after you’ve threatened to kill everyone, you should not be able to legally purchase firearms months later.”
Illinois has had a red-flag law on the books since 2019, allowing family members or law enforcement to petition a judge for a firearms restraining order to keep weapons away from individuals judged to represent a threat to themselves or others. But it also has a rigorous licensing law, requiring all gun owners to secure a firearm owner identification card, or FOID, from the Illinois State Police before purchasing a weapon.
The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act includes $750 million in new federal funding that states can use to implement red-flag laws, but it is silent on licensing regimes such as the one in Illinois. In any case, neither law prevented Crimo from purchasing weapons on four occasions from June 2020 through September 2021 — well after Highland Park police had filed the report in September 2019 flagging him as a potential threat.
That’s because the report itself was not enough to disqualify Crimo as a potential gun owner, the Illinois State Police said in a statement Wednesday. State investigators determined that the circumstances of his 2019 encounter with police — in which he denied making threats of violence and said he had no intentions of harming himself or others — did not reach the evidentiary threshold for him to be deemed a clear and present danger.
So when Crimo sought a FOID just three months later with his father’s sponsorship, the state police said in the statement that “there was no new information to establish a clear and present danger, no arrests, no prohibiting criminal records, no mental health prohibiters, no orders of protection, no other disqualifying prohibiters and no Firearms Restraining Order” that would justify rejecting his application.
“The available evidence would have been insufficient for law enforcement to seek a Firearms Restraining Order from a court,” the agency added — claiming that the September 2019 encounter alone could not have triggered the state’s red-flag law.
The Illinois State Police’s word on what was and wasn’t possible in Crimo’s case is not definitive, however, and advocates for tighter gun restrictions point out that Illinois has made scant use of its red-flag law since it was implemented three years ago.
Speak for Safety Illinois, a group that promotes use of the law, said 53 firearm restraining orders were sought in 2019 and 2020, of which only 22 were ultimately granted. By contrast, judges in Florida have granted roughly 9,000 orders since that state’s red-flag law went into effect in 2018.
That is where advocates say the new federal law could make a difference, by giving states that have already enacted red-flag laws more resources to ensure police, judges and the public know what options they have to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people.
“It’s a tool, and it has to be taken out of the toolbox — and when it’s not, tragedy ensues,” Watts said. “It is one thing to agree that red-flag laws work. It is another thing to actually use them. And when we look at what happened in Illinois, it is fair to say that red-flag laws [are] underutilized. … For them to work, people have to know what they are, that they are available and then how to use them.”
That educational effort could also help prompt members of the public to report more threats and troubling incidents to police, which could result in more red-flag filings and more robust cases for judges to review — a point law enforcement officials emphasized this week after the Highland Park tragedy. “Law enforcement is going to do everything they possibly can to ensure the community is kept safe, but if we don’t know about it, it’s hard for us to investigate,” Deputy Chief Christopher Covelli of the Lake County, Ill., sheriff’s office said at a news conference Wednesday.
But beyond red-flag laws, other provisions of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act could prevent another would-be shooter with a profile resembling Crimo’s from committing a future horrific act. Those effects, however, are for the most part speculative, given the known circumstances of the Highland Park case and the lack of detailed information about what treatments and interventions the alleged gunman may have had.
The broadest of those provisions, and the element with the most federal funding associated with it, deals with mental health. The bill provides for the establishment of a national network of community behavioral health clinics and puts $1 billion in grant funds toward the expansion of school-based mental health programs, plus another roughly $1 billion in funding for mental health and suicide prevention programs aimed at youth.
Cornyn was among the senators who argued last month that the mental health funding was the key element in stopping someone like 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, who killed 19 students and two teachers on May 24 in Uvalde. A Cornyn spokesman declined to comment this week on the new law’s potential to have prevented Monday’s shooting.
“Our goal with this legislation is to try to help people in crisis get treatment before they reach a point like Salvador Ramos,” Cornyn said last month. “I want to be clear, not everybody who’s suffering a mental health crisis is a threat to themselves and others. As a matter of fact, the opposite is true — many people suffer in silence with their parents, their families, their siblings trying to help them to no avail, but there is a small subset of people like [Ramos] who are a danger to themselves and others if they don’t get the kind of help they need.”
The other element of the bill that could have come into play with Crimo was a new enhanced background check for gun buyers under 21, which gives the federal background check system up to 10 days to determine if those young buyers have a disqualifying incident in juvenile criminal justice or mental health records. That would involve contacting the state agency that maintains those records as well as the local police department where the prospective gun buyer resides.
Even if there are no disqualifying juvenile records — and Illinois State Police statements suggest Crimo had none, citing only an underage tobacco offense — the new law’s supporters have argued that the involvement of local police could well be enough to intervene in a potential violent incident. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), in an interview conducted before the Highland Park shooting, said he was confident the provision would have stopped Ramos even though authorities have not released any information to suggest he had a disqualifying juvenile record.
“No doubt this kid had been involved with the local police department,” he said. A call to the Uvalde cops, he added, “would have been an opportunity for the police department to say: ‘Oh, there’s this kid who we know on his 18th birthday went to buy two assault weapons. Maybe we need to go to his house and check in on him.’ You cannot say for certain, but I think there’s a chance that had our under-21 provision been in effect before Uvalde, it could have stopped that shooting.”
The Highland Park tragedy has made one thing clear, however: The push for further federal gun restrictions is not over. Among those raising a need for new measures this week is Eric Rinehart, the Lake County state’s attorney who called on Wednesday for more awareness and better implementation of his state’s red-flag law — but also made clear that tougher federal gun restrictions would have made an even more clear-cut difference.
“The state of Illinois and the United States should ban these types of assault weapons,” he said, referring to the Smith & Wesson M&P 15 rifle that Crimo allegedly used in his attack Monday — a model that is part of the AR-15 family of semiautomatic rifles frequently used by mass shooters. “We had [a national] ban from 1994 to 2004 with bipartisan support. … My position as a public safety professional, as one of the many individuals responsible for the safety of the people in Lake County, is we should have a statewide and national ban on assault weapons.”
That, however, is not on the agenda for this Congress — or likely for many congresses to come. Republicans who supported the new federal law made clear that they did not see it as a first step toward any further gun restrictions. In fact, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and others have said they view the bill as the final word on the problem of mass shootings.
“The problem is mental health and these young men who seem to be inspired to commit these atrocities,” McConnell said at a Tuesday event in Paducah, Ky. “So I think the bill that we passed targeted the problem. We did open up juvenile records to background checks, and hopefully that will help us do a better job of identifying people who have these mental problems before they carry out these awful atrocities.”
But Watts said the fight will go on — if not on Capitol Hill, then in statehouses and city halls across the country. “We knew that this legislation was a first step on a longer path,” she said. “Our goal was to break the logjam in Congress that had prevented any gun safety legislation from passing for over 25 years. … That was a watershed moment in American politics, but more needs to be done.”