[Vision2020] NRA: Women's Best Friend

[Janesta]

It happened in 1975

On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 3:26 PM, Warren Hayman <whayman at roadrunner.com>wrote:

> **
> 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 <janesta at gmail.com>
> *To:* Art Deco <art.deco.studios at gmail.com>
> *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:
>
>>  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>
>>
>> ------------------------------
>> March 17, 2013
>> Ruled a Threat to Family, but Allowed to Keep Guns By MICHAEL LUO<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/michael_luo/index.html>
>>
>> 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<http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/audio/multimedia/bundles/projects/2013/DVGunsQuickLinks/holten_location.mp3#media/holten2>.”
>>
>>
>> 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<http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/audio/multimedia/bundles/projects/2013/DVGunsQuickLinks/holten_911.mp3#media/holten1>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<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_rifle_association/index.html?inline=nyt-org>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 <http://www.wscadv.org/> —
>> 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<http://newsok.com/murder-suicide-leaves-elgin-residents-in-shock/article/3478169>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<http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/audio/multimedia/bundles/projects/2013/DVGunsQuickLinks/burk_guns.mp3#media/burk1>,’ ”
>> 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<http://cjr.sagepub.com/content/26/2/193.short>,
>> 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<https://www.ncjrs.gov/txtfiles/billfs.txt>,
>> 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<http://trac.syr.edu/>,
>> 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<http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/16/2/90.abstract>,
>> 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<http://apps.leg.wa.gov/billinfo/summary.aspx?bill=1840&year=2013>,
>> 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<http://www.leg.state.co.us/clics/clics2013a/csl.nsf/fsbillcont3/24B586DC34FB057F87257B08007A98F7?open&file=197_ren.pdf>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 <http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d113:hr1177:>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 <http://www.vsdvalliance.org/index.html>.
>>
>> 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<http://hamptonroads.com/2011/11/man-kills-wife-self-suffolk-neighborhood>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<http://kotaku.com/5032443/xbox-developer-dead-in-murder+suicide>.
>> 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<http://seattletimes.com/html/theblotter/2015148297_16-year-old_charged_with_murde.html>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<http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/audio/multimedia/bundles/projects/2013/DVGunsQuickLinks/holten_guns.mp3#media/holten3>,”
>> 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
>>
>>
>>
>> =======================================================
>>  List services made available by First Step Internet,
>>  serving the communities of the Palouse since 1994.
>>                http://www.fsr.net
>>           mailto:Vision2020 at moscow.com
>> =======================================================
>>
>
>  ------------------------------
>
> =======================================================
>  List services made available by First Step Internet,
>  serving the communities of the Palouse since 1994.
>                http://www.fsr.net
>           mailto:Vision2020 at moscow.com
> =======================================================
>
>
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