It seems like the political and media orgy immediately after any criminal outrage like a mass shooting drives people to come up with proposed “solutions.” It’s “same old, same old” for the most part as certain power players nibble around the edges with “common sense regulation” and calls for “compromise.” The other side demonstrates all the “compromise” since the early part of the 20th Century, cites the Constitution and the beat goes on.

So let’s take a police practitioner view of the proposals in order and see where we’re at in terms of practical application.

Bans – One of the first plans always trotted out is a redo of the 1994 Clinton Gun Ban. Prohibiting new ugly guns with certain cosmetic and operational aspects, the Ban sunset in 2004 – along with the post-9/11 military build up, the sunset drove the purchase of record numbers of American semi-auto rifles, among other things, pushed along by a Democrat-Congress and Executive. What do cops think about “assault weapon” bans? I don’t know. Information from Pew indicated “About two-thirds of Americans (64%) (sic) but only about a third of police (32%) favor outlawing assault weapons.”

Why is this? Everything is a good idea until you’re the person who has to enforce it. We all know that bans don’t work. First, if bans worked we could just ban heroin and the drug problem would solve itself.

Next, the nuts and bolts: you have to define with precision what you ban – and from whom. Now, someone has to sell all those bright, smiling faces out there that we have concluded that making owners of those “certain defined things” into criminals will solve an unrelated problem: criminal violence. Criminal violence is usually accomplished by someone who is in a serious criminal lifestyle, plagued with substance abuse issues and gang affiliations or a marginal person who goes off the rails – sometimes due to past trauma aggravated by news coverage of mass homicide.

Let’s not forget another bad part of the old federal gun-and-magazine ban: driving the wedge between peace officers and their constituency. Did they really think it would go unnoticed that cops could buy those proscribed items with a letter from their agency chief? That’s in the current iteration of the “bad idea” gun-and-magazine ban, one that’s set to possibly pass in the House this fall. People who are lawfully armed citizens see cops with privileges in exchange for silence when the law gets passed. Cops see having to buy their own gear with the boss’s permission and then get the rare opportunity to turn it in when resigning or retiring . . . what a good idea!

What about red flag laws? It’s a focus on a ‘thing,’ the tool – not the person. Someone dedicated to criminal homicide will simply find another way to reach a ‘superstar status’ of mass killers. As to dealing with the person, it’s why there are statutes covering involuntary psych commitment in many (if not all) states. These are laws that require that someone “speak up” and, like all laws, can be misused, underused and improperly used. Domestic violence restraining orders -- DVRO – work only when the restrained party is not that much of a threat; not so much when the restrained party is actually dangerous. Its performance has been spotty because the domestic violence restraining order is just a piece of paper. Even when it’s aggressively enforced (and the restrainer doesn’t allow or asks the restrained to drop by), it can go badly quickly and it has.

Only a few decades ago, we had regular contacts with a drug-addled veteran of the Southeast Asia War Games during the bad old days of VA hospitals. A number of the calls were “check the welfare – suicide likely.” One of our sergeants (quite unwisely, I thought at the time) actually picked him up one day from one of those calls for service. Took him to coffee. A couple of us sat “over watch” on the outside, just in case. Once he was seized for evaluation and his guns seized (for safe-keeping, he lived alone). In the state statute of the time, it was a violation to transfer firearms to known drug/alcohol abusers, people threatening suicide and mental health cases. His guns were returned to him, I found out and wrote the offense report citing the property officer in the agency.

That created quite a stir and the whole thing was hushed up. As it turned out, he got clean, went a few years with no issues at all and had few official contacts with the law. Once, I saw him at a local store. I sat with him, had coffee and chatted about our acquaintance over the years. He was just fine. A few years later he hanged himself.

If the respondent of the ERPO (extreme risk protection order) is weak tea, the process will likely work to one extent or another. If the restrained party is really an “extreme risk,” he’ll just find other ways to get the job done – so, seize the person. Prepare documentation of and execute an extreme risk protection order and knowingly leave that person posting the “extreme risk” out there, there’s the potential for you to have problems when something happens.

The question will – or should – arise, “why didn’t that person get an emergency psychological evaluation?” If the answer’s “We did an ERPO,” that may not be good enough – but legislative types will quickly try to “plug that loophole” with more laws you can’t effectively enforce.

Local cops and agencies already have more on their list of duties than they can do; adding more is a nonstarter. Like the DVRO, the ERPO is only as good as (1) reporting parties, (2) judicial assets and (3) police response. If due process isn’t observed, it’s a huge problem.

Let’s not leave out the impact of media, social and otherwise. “Legendary Lawman Marshal” Chuck Haggard noted in social media the contagious aspect of the mass killer – marginalized, flaky types who go on a mass killing because he was emboldened by what he saw in news and social media. Chuck had posted a message saying that local media discontinued reportage on suicide cases due to the so-called ‘contagious’ nature of those stories leading to others committing self-destruction. There was a relationship between coverage of those incidents and the number of suicides occurring after the report – as there is with intense media coverage of mass killings moving another “disturbed” person to act out in their own derangement.

Do media companies fan the flames? Pour gas on the fire? Well, if it bleeds, it leads. It was a responsible decision for media to stop its coverage of suicide. It would be responsible to craft its coverage of mass killing events.

If you’re looking for answers, I don’t have them. We’ve faced intense social change in the decades since WWII and we’re on a rolling deck. We know what doesn’t work – laws that address “things,” not behaviors.

When you’re in a hole, stop digging.

-- Rich Grassi