Anti-Gunner Uses Plea Deal to Demand More Restrictive Storage Laws

A Maryland man whose second-grade child brought a gun to school and shot himself in the finger was sentenced last week to six months of unsupervised probation, and gun control activists and politicians are highlighting the soft sentence to demand more restrictive gun storage laws.

Those arguments ignore a couple of pertinent details which aren’t exactly helpful to their cause. For starters, Eashan Stefanski pleaded guilty to a charge of reckless endangerment, which comes with the potential for a five-year prison sentence. If the anti-gunners have a problem with the sentence that Stefanski actually received, they should be directing their ire at the prosecutors who offered the plea deal and the judge who actually delivered the slap on the wrist instead of claiming that the state’s gun control laws just aren’t tough enough.

Joshua Horwitz, co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, said he sees the issue as “not whether the penalty is severe enough but rather the consistency of holding people accountable for a violation.”

He said child access prevention laws should focus on whether a gun was stored reasonably, rather than whether the owner knew a child could access it.

Horwitz is now a professor at Johns Hopkins, but for decades he headed up the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (a job that is remarkably absent from his faculty profile for some reason). He’s not some neutral or nonpartisan observer, and as you might guess, his definition of “reasonable” is anything but.

“There is a glaring hole in Maryland law in that the state does not have a clear law requiring that all firearms be secured anytime they are not in the direct control of the owner,” he said. “Unfortunately, as we have seen, not every gun owner voluntarily takes this responsibility seriously, so that we also need to have robust laws to require safe storage and the consistent enforcement of those laws.”

Maryland’s law may not go far enough for a prohibitionist like Horwitz, who put his name on an amicus brief defending D.C.’s handgun ban in the Heller case, but the state statute is pretty clear.

Maryland’s firearms access by a minor law, known as “Jaelynn’s Law,” prohibits a person from storing or leaving a loaded firearm where the person knows or should know that an unsupervised minor has access to it. The misdemeanor carries a maximum fine of $1,000.

The 2023 law was named after 16-year-old Jaelynn Willey, who was killed in 2018 by a former boyfriend, who was 17, and used his father’s gun. It strengthened previous state legislation that prohibited people from leaving a loaded firearm accessible to a child younger than 16 by increasing that age to 18.

And obviously that law isn’t the only statute that prosecutors can use, since Stefanski was charged with felony reckless endangerment.

Maryland’s gun storage law is written so that it primarily applies to gun owners who have minors in the home. Horwitz wants to replace that with a one-size-fits-all policy that would apply to all gun owners, regardless of whether they live alone, with other adults, or with children.

Stefanski allegedly did have his gun locked with ammunition stored separately, so even under Horwitz’s version of a gun storage mandate he would arguably have been in compliance with the letter of the law. Stefanski is alleged to have left the key to the locking device as well as ammunition accessible to the 7-year-old who took the gun and ammunition to school.

That was pretty dumb, though I don’t know if it deserves to be punished by five years in prison, which is the maximum possible sentence for reckless endangerment. What I do know is that the gun control lobby will look for any reason possible to demand more restrictions on our right to keep and bear arms, even when the answer is better enforcement of laws that are already in place.