During the week of October 3rd, Maryland implemented stricter gun laws giving it one of the most rigorous codes in the US. One of the new laws that the state has passed is the Red Flag Law, which states that Maryland can prevent people who are thought to be a threat to themselves or others from buying or possessing guns. This measure was passed in an effort to limit gun violence, as they will be able to take guns away from the people who are seen as dangerous before anything bad can happen. This act by the Maryland State Legislature comes in response to a series of shootings in Maryland in a continued effort to move toward stricter gun control.
The state also passed a law banning bump stocks, which can make semi-automatic guns fire at the speed of an automatic gun. This type of attachment was made infamous in the 2017 Las Vegas shooting as it helped the shooter kill 58 people and injure 851 more in the chaos of the event. The state saw how dangerous this attachment can make guns and subsequently banned it the following year.
Another law that was passed is that all domestic abusers will be forced to give up their firearms to law enforcement to preemptively prevent any domestic abuse related to gun violence. This fixes a loophole in which the abusers were not forced to give up guns that they had owned before they were convicted of being an abuser.
Maryland has had four recent highly publicized shootings, one of which was not in the state, but rather a man from Maryland who killed two and injured 10 at a video game tournament in Florida. Another woman in Maryland killed three people before killing herself at a warehouse. There was also a school shooting in southern Maryland where a student shot his classmate and then killed himself. Finally, there was a man who killed five people in the capital newspaper company with a shotgun.
After all of these Maryland shootings, the state has had enough and made these laws even more strict.
