[Vision2020] NRA: Women's Best Friend

[Paul Rumelhart]

My apologies.  I wasn't trying to "one up" you or to "high five" you.  I was simply replying to your post with something it made me think of.  I apologize if I accidentally implied anything about your position on the topic with my previous post.

Paul




________________________________
 From: Warren Hayman <whayman at roadrunner.com>
To: Paul Rumelhart <godshatter at yahoo.com>; Janesta <janesta at gmail.com>; Art Deco <art.deco.studios at gmail.com> 
Cc: vision2020 at moscow.com 
Sent: Monday, March 18, 2013 4:42 PM
Subject: Re: [Vision2020] NRA: Women's Best Friend
 

 
Mr Rumelhart,
 
My reply focused on burying evidence. The type of 
evidence was, I thought, secondary. It was not anti-gun, and I regret that it 
may have been taken that way in your response.

I rather doubt any MPD 
officer would do same today. Type of evidence is/was not my point.
 
Warren Hayman
 
----- Original Message ----- 
>From: Paul  Rumelhart 
>To: Warren Hayman ; Janesta ; Art  Deco 
>Cc: vision2020 at moscow.com 
>Sent: Monday, March 18, 2013 3:53 
PM
>Subject: Re: [Vision2020] NRA: Women's  Best Friend
>
>
>It  also feeds the "gun is evil" trope.  Did he remember to bury it in  salt?
>
>If this guy didn't have a gun, do you think it would have been 
  any less dangerous for her if he had grabbed a hunting knife or a baseball bat 
  or if he had just grabbed the nearest heavy blunt object he could reach?  
  The problem isn't the gun, it's the out-of-control ex-husband who is 
  irrationally angry.  I don't know what you do about that.  And 
  that's the problem.  Banning guns is a Simple Solution (tm).  It 
  doesn't affect the real problem.  That would require asking serious 
  questions about what you can do when you think someone is prone to violence 
  when they haven't done anything violent yet.  Do you lock him away for 
  making the threat?  How do you determine what is an actionable threat and 
  what is just words spouted in anger?  Is there some minimum of evidence 
  needed, or can anyone lock up any significant other with just a quick phone 
  call?
>
>Paul
>
>
>
>
>
>
>________________________________
> From: Warren Hayman  <whayman at roadrunner.com>
>To: Janesta <janesta at gmail.com>;  Art Deco <art.deco.studios at gmail.com> 
>Cc: vision2020 at moscow.com 
>Sent: Monday, March 18, 2013 3:26  PM
>Subject: Re: [Vision2020]  NRA: Women's Best Friend
>
>
> 
>A cop burying possible evidence, as in a gun? Sorry, and I'm not. This  constitutes travesty. I'm glad your friend is okay, but no... Wrong.  Immediately so.
> 
>Warren Hayman
> 
>----- Original Message ----- 
>>From: Janesta 
>>To: Art Deco 
>>Cc: vision2020 at moscow.com 
>>Sent: Monday, March 18, 2013 3:01  PM
>>Subject: Re: [Vision2020] NRA: Women's  Best Friend
>>
>>I once knew a woman in Moscow... Thirty-nine years ago, she  married her first husband. Thirty-seven years ago, they separated. One  night, gun in hand, he broke down her front door.. Between the time he  started pounding on the door, and the time it broke down, the police were  called. After a few hours of talking, the man finally gave up his gun. An  officer for the MPD took the husband's gun, and it was never seen again.. A  year later, the woman asked the officer what he did with the gun. The  officer replied he buried it in his back yard, deep enough no one would ever  find it. Knowing protective orders are about as good as the paper they are  written on, to this day, she is very thankful to the officer. 
>>
>>Janesta
>>
>>
>>On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 7:11 AM, Art Deco <art.deco.studios at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> 
>>>>>>________________________________
>>> 
>>>March 17, 2013
>>>Ruled a Threat to Family, but Allowed to Keep Guns
>>>By MICHAEL LUO
>>>Early last year, after a series of frightening encounters with her  former husband, Stephanie Holten went to court in Spokane, Wash., to  obtain a temporary order for protection. 
>>>Her former husband, Corey Holten, threatened to put a gun in her  mouth and pull the trigger, she wrote in her petition. He also said he  would “put a cap” in her if her new boyfriend “gets near my kids.” In neat  block letters she wrote, “He owns guns, I am scared.” 
>>>The judge’s order prohibited Mr. Holten from going within two blocks  of his former wife’s home and imposed a number of other restrictions. What  it did not require him to do was surrender his guns. 
>>>About 12 hours after he was served with the order, Mr. Holten was  lying in wait when his former wife returned home from a date with their  two children in tow. Armed with a small semiautomatic rifle bought several  months before, he stepped out of his car and thrust the muzzle into her  chest. He directed her inside the house, yelling that he was going to kill  her. 
>>>“I remember thinking, ‘Cops, I need the cops,’ ” she later wrote  in a statement to the police. “He’s going to kill me in my own house. I’m  going to die!” 
>>>Ms. Holten, however, managed to dial 911 on her cellphone and slip it  under a blanket on the couch. The dispatcher heard Ms. Holten begging for her  life and quickly directed officers to the scene. As they mounted the  stairs with their guns drawn, Mr. Holten surrendered. They found Ms.  Holten cowering, hysterical, on the floor. 
>>>For all its rage and terror, the episode might well have been  prevented. Had Mr. Holten lived in one of a handful of states, the  protection order would have forced him to relinquish his firearms. But  that is not the case in Washington and most of the country, in large part  because of the influence of the National Rifle Association and its allies. 
>>>Advocates for domestic violence victims have long called for stricter  laws governing firearms and protective orders. Their argument is rooted in  a grim statistic: when women die at the hand of an intimate partner, that  hand is more often than not holding a gun. 
>>>In these most volatile of human dramas, they contend, the right to  bear arms must give ground to the need to protect a woman’s life. 
>>>In statehouses across the country, though, the N.R.A. and other  gun-rights groups have beaten back legislation mandating the surrender of  firearms in domestic violence situations. They argue that gun ownership,  as a fundamental constitutional right, should not be stripped away for  anything less serious than a felony conviction — and certainly not, as an  N.R.A. lobbyist in Washington State put it to legislators, for the “mere  issuance of court orders.” 
>>>That resistance is being tested anew in the wake of the massacre in  Newtown, Conn., as proposals on the mandatory surrender of firearms are  included in gun control legislation being debated in several states. 
>>>Among them is Washington, where current law gives judges issuing  civil protection orders the discretion to require the surrender of  firearms if, for example, they find a “serious and imminent threat” to  public health. But records and interviews show that they rarely do so,  making the state a useful laboratory for examining the consequences, as  well as the politics, of this standoff over the limits of Second Amendment  rights. 
>>>By analyzing a number of Washington databases, The New York Times  identified scores of gun-related crimes committed by people subject to  recently issued civil protection orders, including murder, attempted  murder and kidnapping. In at least five instances over the last decade,  women were shot to death less than a month after obtaining protection  orders. In at least a half-dozen other killings, the victim was not the  person being protected but someone else. There were dozens of gun-related  assaults like the one Ms. Holten endured. 
>>>The analysis — which crosschecked protective orders against arrest  and conviction data, along with fatality lists compiled by the Washington State  Coalition Against Domestic Violence — represents at best a partial  accounting of such situations because of limitations in the data. The  databases were missing some orders that have expired or been terminated.  They also did not flag the use of firearms in specific crimes, so  identifying cases required combing through court records. 
>>>Washington’s criminal statutes, however, contain a number of  gun-specific charges, like unlawful possession of a firearm and aiming or  discharging one, offering another window into the problem. Last year, The  Times found, more than 50 people facing protection orders issued since  2011 were arrested on one of these gun charges. 
>>>In some instances, of course, laws mandating the surrender of  firearms might have done nothing to prevent an attack. Sometimes the gun  used was not the one cited in the petition. In other cases, no mention of  guns was ever made. But in many cases, upon close scrutiny, stricter laws  governing protective orders and firearms might very well have made a  difference. 
>>>The Times also looked at several other states without surrender laws.  In Minnesota, more than 30 people facing active protection orders were  convicted of some type of assault with a dangerous weapon over the last  three years, court records show. 
>>>And in Oklahoma, The Times found the case of Barbara Diane Dye. 
>>>Ms. Dye, 40, obtained an emergency order of protection in July 2010,  on the same day she filed for divorce from her husband, Raymond Dye, a  firefighter. Ms. Dye, who worked as a personal trainer at a gym the couple  owned, explained in her petition that since telling her husband she wanted  a divorce because of his infidelity, he had repeatedly threatened to kill  her. She wrote that she feared he would “have a violent reaction when he  receives divorce papers.” 
>>>When asked if there were weapons on the premises, she wrote, “Yes.”  In fact, Mr. Dye possessed an arsenal of weapons, which Ms. Dye and her  family would later beg the local police to help them deal with, to no  avail. 
>>>After obtaining the court order, which was good until a hearing about  a lengthier order three weeks later, Ms. Dye went into hiding in Texas but  returned to Oklahoma to attend divorce proceedings. Two weeks after  obtaining the initial order, she was in a bank parking lot in the city of  Elgin when her husband pulled up in his truck,  blocking her in. 
>>>Witnesses later told the police that Mr. Dye, 42, tried to drag her  into his truck. When she fought back, Mr. Dye brandished a .357 revolver  and shot her in the leg. She fell to the ground. Mr. Dye fired several  more shots into her, saying, “I love you, I love you,” according to the  police report. He then shot himself in the chest with a different gun, a  .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol, and collapsed, dead, onto his wife. 
>>>“We kept telling them, ‘He’s got all of these  weapons,’ ” said Ms. Dye’s mother, Barbara Burk, a local official  who has fought unsuccessfully in Oklahoma for a measure that would give  judges issuing protective orders the power to order sheriffs to confiscate  weapons and hold them for a “cooling off” period. “Is there nothing you  can do?” 
>>>Legislative Landscape 
>>>Intimate partner homicides account for nearly half the women killed  every year, according to federal statistics. More than half of these women  are killed with a firearm. And a significant percentage were likely to  have obtained protection orders against their eventual killers. (A 2001 study, published in Criminal Justice Review, of  women slain by intimate partners in 10 cities put that number at one in  five.) 
>>>It was in recognition of these converging realities that Congress  included a provision in the 1994 crime bill, over the objections of the N.R.A., that  barred most people subject to full protective orders filed by intimate  partners from purchasing or possessing firearms. In a nod to the concerns  of the gun lobby, the statute excluded most people under temporary orders,  on the ground that they had not yet had the opportunity to contest the  accusations in court. 
>>>The statute, though, is rarely enforced. In 2012, prosecutors  nationwide filed fewer than 50 such cases, according to a Times analysis  of records from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a research  center at Syracuse University that collects federal government data. 
>>>It has, therefore, largely fallen to a state-by-state patchwork of  laws to regulate this issue — or not. 
>>>A handful of states have enacted laws requiring that judges order the  surrender of firearms when issuing even temporary protection orders. The  strictest states, like California, Hawaii and Massachusetts, make it  mandatory for essentially all domestic violence orders; others, like New  York and North Carolina, set out certain circumstances when surrender is  required. In a few other states, like Maryland and Wisconsin, surrender is  mandatory only with a full injunction, granted after the opposing party  has had the opportunity to participate in a court hearing. Several other  states, like Connecticut and Florida, do not have surrender laws but do  prohibit gun possession by certain people subject to protective orders. 
>>>Although enforcement remains an issue, researchers say these laws  have made a difference. One study, published in 2010 in the journal  Injury Prevention, found a 19 percent reduction in intimate partner  homicides. 
>>>Washington State has seen several efforts to enact firearm surrender  laws. In 2004, Representative Ruth Kagi, a Democrat, introduced a bill  mandating the surrender of firearms with temporary protective orders. But  after strong opposition from the N.R.A., the bill failed to make it out of  committee. The N.R.A.’s lobbyist in the state, Brian Judy, testified that  the measure granted “extraordinarily broad authority to strip firearms  rights.” 
>>>Gun-rights groups stress that the subjects of temporary orders have  not even had the chance to be heard in court, and that many temporary  orders do not become full injunctions. Advocates for domestic violence  victims counter that the most dangerous moment is when such orders are  first issued, and that the surrender of weapons at this stage may be only  temporary. 
>>>Nevertheless, in 2010, they decided to lower their ambitions and  backed a proposal in the Washington Legislature requiring surrender only  after a full protective order was issued, restraining threatening conduct  against family members or children of family members. The measure also  would have made it a felony to possess a firearm while subject to such an  order. 
>>>Once again, the N.R.A. and its allies strenuously objected. The group  sent out a legislative alert to its members, who besieged legislators. A  veteran gun-rights lobbyist flew in from Florida to meet with  Representative Roger Goodman, a Democrat who had introduced the measure. 
>>>Mr. Judy, the state N.R.A. lobbyist, wrote in an e-mail to Mr.  Goodman that his organization considered the current Washington law  “already bad on this subject.” He added, “It is the N.R.A.’s position that  any crime that is serious enough to cause an individual to lose a  fundamental constitutional right should be classified as a felony.” 
>>>Ultimately, lawmakers stripped the gun measure out of a broader  package of domestic violence legislation. 
>>>Lessons of History 
>>>This year, the issue is pending once again in the Washington  Legislature, part of a number of gun-related proposals introduced after  the Newtown shooting. The proposed legislation, further narrowed in an attempt  to placate the N.R.A., seeks to mirror the language of the federal  prohibition, which bars most people under full protective orders from  buying or owning weapons. But in an e-mail to House Judiciary Committee  members considering the measure, Mr. Judy wrote that the federal law “does  not provide adequate protection” and argued that individual firearm rights  were more broadly protected in Washington’s State Constitution than in the  Second Amendment. 
>>>The bill seemed on the verge of being scuttled as the N.R.A. pushed  to amend it in a way that supporters argued would render it meaningless,  but House Democrats managed to close ranks and pass it. It faces a much  steeper climb in the Republican-controlled State Senate, where the N.R.A.  wields greater influence. 
>>>The issue has also gained traction in Colorado — a traditional power  base for the gun lobby but also the state where 12 people were shot to  death and 58 were wounded at a movie theater in July. A measure that would require the surrender of  firearms in protection-order cases is part of a gun-control package passed  by the State Senate last week, though not a single Republican voted for  it. 
>>>And in Congress, Representative Lois Capps, Democrat of California,  introduced a bill last week that would expand the federal prohibition  to include temporary orders and current or former “dating partners.” 
>>>Even so, across the country, any suggestion of a broad shift must be  tempered by history. 
>>>In the mid-1990s, Wisconsin became one of the first states to require  the surrender of firearms with full protective orders. But in 2010,  seeking to strengthen enforcement, advocates for domestic violence victims  pushed for the statewide adoption of procedures that had been successful  in a few counties. Among a host of provisions, people subject to  protective orders would have been required to list their firearms and  surrender them to the county sheriff or a third party within 48 hours. 
>>>The N.R.A. mobilized, calling the measure “a blatant violation of  Americans’ Fifth Amendment rights” in an alert to its members. Jordan  Austin, an N.R.A. lobbyist, expanded in his testimony on the bill before  an Assembly committee: “Once a person has an injunction issued against  him, he is already a prohibited person. He cannot, under the Fifth  Amendment, be forced to disclose whether he is in possession of firearms,  because that would be tantamount to forcing him to admit a crime.” 
>>>The bill died in the State Senate. 
>>>In Virginia, the gun lobby has repeatedly stymied efforts to make it  illegal for people subject to court injunctions to possess firearms.  (Currently, they are barred only from buying and transporting firearms.) 
>>>“There’s often recognition that firearms and domestic violence is a  lethal combination, but it’s followed quickly with concerns about taking  away an individual’s right to possess a firearm,” said Kristine Hall, the  policy director for the Virginia Sexual and Domestic Violence Action  Alliance. 
>>>The lack of a state surrender law helps explain what happened when  Deborah Wigg, a 39-year-old accountant in Virginia Beach, obtained a  protective order in April 2011 against her husband, Robert Wigg, whom she  was in the process of divorcing. In her petition, she described a violent  encounter in which Mr. Wigg grabbed her by her hair, threw her down,  ripped out a door and threw it at her. He was arrested and charged with  assault. She also made clear in the petition that her husband owned a  9-millimeter semiautomatic handgun. 
>>>She eventually won a full protective order, but Mr. Wigg kept his  gun, which he used in his business installing and servicing A.T.M.’s. 
>>>Ms. Wigg and her co-workers at an accounting firm openly fretted  about the weapon. She agreed that every morning she would call Marty  Ridout, a partner at the firm, so he could make sure she was safe. 
>>>On the morning of Nov. 8, 2011, Ms. Wigg left Mr. Ridout a voice mail  message saying everything was fine. 
>>>Around 11 p.m. that night, however, Mr. Wigg, 43, showed up at his wife’s home and began  ringing the doorbell and pounding on the door. Ms. Wigg called her  parents. Her mother, Adele Brown, told her to hang up and call 911. 
>>>But as Ms. Brown and her husband, who lived about a half-mile away,  were heading over, Mr. Wigg smashed through the door and into the house.  The Browns arrived to find a neighbor bent over their daughter’s bleeding  form, screaming, “Debbie, don’t leave me!” 
>>>“When we got to her, those beautiful blue eyes were already set,” Ms.  Brown said. 
>>>Ms. Wigg died of a single shot to the head. 
>>>After shooting his wife, Mr. Wigg drove to the Browns’, apparently to  kill them as well. He killed himself in their front yard. 
>>>“It astounds me,” Mr. Ridout said. “I cannot believe we have a  society where a person has physically abused another person and been  charged with assaulting her and that they don’t automatically take away  his weapon.” 
>>>A System That’s Working 
>>>One state with strict laws in this arena is California, where anyone  served with a temporary protective order has 24 hours to turn over any  weapons to local law enforcement or sell them to a licensed gun dealer. 
>>>Enforcement, however, has been inconsistent. So in 2006, the state  set up pilot programs to increase enforcement in San Mateo County, just  outside San Francisco, and Butte County, a largely rural area north of  Sacramento. The programs’ money dried up in 2010 with the state’s fiscal  woes, but San Mateo sought other financing because it believed that its  program was saving lives. 
>>>“We have not had a firearm-related domestic violence homicide in the  last three years,” said Sgt. Linda Gibbons, who oversees the program as  the head of the major crimes unit in the county sheriff’s office. 
>>>Last year alone, the program took in 324 firearms through seizure or  surrender from 81 people, out of more than 800 protective orders it  reviewed. 
>>>Every morning, Detective John Kovach, who handles a range of domestic  violence investigations, reviews a stack of protective orders filed the  day before — generally 15 to 20 a day — looking for any mention of  firearms. 
>>>Usually, a handful of orders a day will contain some reference to  guns, which Detective Kovach follows up on. He sometimes contacts the  person protected by the order to find out more. He also checks various law  enforcement databases, including one available in California that tracks  handgun purchases. 
>>>He goes out once or twice a week and serves the restraining orders  himself. Usually, he says, he tries to collect firearms immediately,  employing a well-honed sales pitch about helping the person comply with  the law. If he believes beforehand that the person might not be  cooperative, he will sometimes request a search warrant. 
>>>“My experience is the quicker you act, the more successful you’re  going to be,” he said. 
>>>Notably, given the gun lobby’s objections to seizing guns after just  a temporary order, Detective Kovach said he had handled only one or two  restraining orders involving firearms in the last year that were  eventually dropped after the court hearing. 
>>>In a typical case, a 19-year-old woman from Redwood City filed for a  restraining order against her husband in December, explaining that he had  become increasingly abusive and that she had recently moved out. She  checked off a box on the form saying he had used firearms to threaten her  and, on a confidential “weapons possession data sheet” provided as a part  of the San Mateo program, indicated that he owned an assault rifle and a  handgun. 
>>>The detective picked up her order the following morning and, with a  colleague, arranged to meet that day. She told them that after an argument  a year earlier, her husband had threatened to kill himself, sending her in  a text message a picture of himself holding an assault rifle to his head.  More recently, he had warned that if she started dating, he would shoot  the man, her and then himself. 
>>>Detective Kovach quickly secured a search warrant. He and several  other detectives staked out the man’s home and served him with the  protective order while he was walking his dog. In their search, they  turned up seven guns, including two AR-15 assault rifles. 
>>>“Every murder, when you look at it, there are always points where law  enforcement could have made a difference,” the detective said. “I don’t  ever want to be that guy who goes to sleep knowing he hasn’t done  everything to protect the public.” 
>>>Deadly Consequences 
>>>In Washington State, The Times’s analysis highlighted danger at play  when there is no broad mandatory firearm surrender law. 
>>>Under current law, judges issuing protective orders are required to  order the surrender of firearms only in very specific situations, like a  determination by “clear and convincing evidence” that the person has used  the weapon in a felony or has committed another offense that by law would  disqualify him from having a firearm. Otherwise, judges have the  discretion to issue a surrender order under a variety of circumstances,  including a finding that there is a threat of “irreparable injury.” (There  is also a court form specifically requesting the surrender of firearms,  but advocates say it is rarely used because few victims of domestic  violence know about it.) 
>>>All five of the Washington cases identified by The Times in which the  woman who obtained the protective order was later killed were  murder-suicides. In three cases, the woman wrote in her petition that her  husband or ex-boyfriend possessed firearms. In none of the cases did the  judges issue surrender orders. 
>>>In fairness, it was not always clear that such an order would have  prevented the deaths. Even so, those cases can show the existing system’s  weakness in the face of obvious peril. 
>>>Melissa Batten, a 36-year-old software developer for Xbox, secured a  temporary protective order in July 2008, describing a series of episodes  in which her estranged husband harassed her and also broke into her  workplace in Redmond. She said he also pointed a loaded gun at her in an  argument and then put it to his head, threatening to kill himself. 
>>>It fell to a mutual friend, however, not the courts or law  enforcement, to deal with the gun. He persuaded the husband, Robert  Batten, to sell his .22-caliber handgun back to the dealer, according to a  police report. But Mr. Batten later bought two more guns, a .357 Smith  & Wesson revolver and a 9-millimeter Taurus semiautomatic, according  to the police. It is not clear exactly when he bought them, but the police  found evidence that he went to a gun show a few days after being served  with the protective order. (In some states, the existence of the order  would have barred him from buying guns.) 
>>>Mr. Batten shot his wife eight times in the parking lot outside her  home before shooting himself, killing them both. 
>>>Ms. Batten’s case made headlines. Then there are the more  routine episodes that unfold outside the public eye. 
>>>Julie Lohrengel obtained a temporary order for protection against her  estranged husband, Shawn Lohrengel, in August 2010, detailing several  encounters, including one in which he had shaken her and grabbed her by  the throat. She checked off the box in the petition that indicated he  possessed firearms. 
>>>The court commissioner did not order Mr. Lohrengel to surrender his  guns. Several weeks later, Ms. Lohrengel and a friend, with Ms.  Lohrengel’s two children in the back seat, drove up to her home in  Centralia but stopped when they saw Mr. Lohrengel’s truck parked outside  the garage. As they started backing out of the driveway, between five and  eight gunshots rang out, but no one was wounded. When the police arrived,  Mr. Lohrengel ran out onto the front porch with a rifle, as if looking for  someone, the police report said. He eventually pleaded guilty to aiming  and discharging a firearm and reckless endangerment. 
>>>Sometimes, the person who takes out a protective order is not the one  ultimately victimized. 
>>>James Anthony Mills, 17, pleaded guilty last year to second-degree  murder for firing two shots that killed Adrian Wilson,  16, at a birthday barbecue in Auburn, Wash. Less than a year before, an  ex-girlfriend of Mr. Mills’s had obtained an order for protection against  him. She explained in her petition that Mr. Mills had threatened her with  a gun during an argument. Nothing was done about the weapon. 
>>>Even in cases where there was evidence that someone subject to a  civil order for protection possessed a gun in violation of state and  federal law, no move was made to remove it. 
>>>Dennis Pirone was arrested in Seattle in July 2009 and charged with  harassing his ex-girlfriend Jody Mayes. A criminal no-contact order was  issued, requiring him to surrender his firearms. He filled out a form  declaring that he had none. He was arrested again a few weeks later for  violating the no-contact order. Once again, after being ordered to  surrender firearms, he declared that he did not have any. 
>>>That December, Ms. Mayes sought a protective order, writing in her  petition that Mr. Pirone had bought a gun even though “he is a convicted  felon and is not supposed to have it in his own words.” 
>>>Two months later, Mr. Pirone flew into a rage at another woman, a  roommate, after she refused his sexual advances. He came back with a small  silver handgun, told the woman, “I will kill you,” and pointed the gun at  her before firing a shot into an old sofa, according to a Seattle police  report. The police later found two .22-caliber semiautomatic handguns in  the house. 
>>>More than a year after her ordeal in Spokane, Stephanie Holten still  cannot understand why the judge did nothing about her former husband’s  guns. 
>>>“I do believe in the Second Amendment,” she  said, “but at the same time, public safety has to be paramount.” 
>>>Ms. Holten, 39, who is still seeing a counselor about the episode,  said her mind relentlessly replays the scene of her on her knees, looking  down the barrel of a loaded gun. In the recording of her 911 call, she can  be heard sobbing and begging Mr. Holten to leave. He can be heard  responding, between expletives, that she is going to die. 
>>>Mr. Holten — who later pleaded guilty to attempted first-degree  assault and was sentenced to more than six years in prison — ordered her  upstairs to her bedroom, forcing her to show him that she still had their  wedding photos and other mementos. He then offered her a deal: he would  put the gun down if she promised to drop the protection order, give him  custody of their son and not call the police. When she tearfully assented,  Mr. Holten placed his 9-millimeter carbine — the same weapon Ms. Holten  believes she saw at his home a month earlier and cited in her court  petition — in a hallway closet. That was when they both heard a male voice  say “Police Department.” 
>>>Her legs buckled, and she crumpled to the ground. 
>>>“I wish in my case he had to surrender everything,” she said. “If the  cops had been able to take the firearms out of that household when they  served him, I think it would have averted the entire thing.” 
>>>Griff Palmer contributed reporting. Kristen Millares Young and Jack  Styczynski contributed research.
>>>
>>>-- 
>>>Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
>>>art.deco.studios at gmail.com
>>>
>>>
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