Baltimore County Police Chief Lauds Obama's Gun Policy

The top cop in Baltimore County met with White House leaders—including President Barack Obama—Tuesday after the Commander in Chief laid out measures to reduce gun violence.

Baltimore County Police Chief Jim Johnson, who chairs the National Law Enforcement Partnership to Prevent Gun Violence, said he supports the President’s plan, which he called “reasonable.”

Obama outlined ways to ramp up personnel, processes and research around gun safety in a country he said has “become numb” to violence:

• To make sure gun buyers are fit to own weapons, Obama said the FBI was hiring 230 additional agents who could conduct background checks 24/7. He also supported the Department of Health and Human Services in removing barriers to information about those who could not possess guns for mental health reasons.
• To enforce gun laws, Obama said his 2017 budget would propose an additional 200 investigators for the ATF, which has set up an online center to track illegal firearms trafficking and is putting $4 million toward ballistics intelligence.
• To improve safety technology, Obama is asking the Departments of Defense, Justice and Homeland Security to research ways to make guns ”smarter,” noting that if we can make our smart phones and tablets do basic things to protect us (e.g., locking a phone) so too should guns have safety mechanisms informed by technology.

“These very reasonable enforcement actions will better protect all of our communities at a time of heightened concerns about gun violence and about terrorism, following the San Bernardino incident,” Johnson said in a statement.

“It is vital that everyone understand how critical these measures are to the safety of our communities, and that none of these measures adversely impact lawful gun ownership,” Johnson said.

Obama said that his goal was to reduce the violence that has claimed lives of loved ones nationwide.

“The United States of America is not the only country on Earth with violent or dangerous people....But we are the only advanced country on Earth that sees this kind of mass violence erupt with this kind of frequency,” Obama said.

“It doesn’t happen in other advanced countries. It’s not even close,” Obama said. “And as I’ve said before, somehow we’ve become numb to it and we start thinking that this is normal.”

Photo Credit: Baltimore County Government.