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"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.
Ms. Holten had recently applied for and obtained an order for protection against Mr. Holten. 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.”
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 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 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 — 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."
Jesus Christ, what is wrong with you? Go and read the article. The police apprehended him in the house, where he had been holding his wife at gun point. The whole thing was caught on a 911 call. Made it up?! What is wrong with you people? You're not satisfied unless there is a bullet in the wife's chest? That would be the only proof that counts? He could very well have shot her and the children if the police hadn't come in and apprehended him. How much more of a close call do you want to have before you "believe" her?
Yes, she could have made the whole thing up. But then the police wouldn't have found him in the house with a gun pointed at her, now would they have? Why would she make it up? So that the police could come to an empty house with no gun an no husband present?
Sorry, that came AFTER the accusation. It is great proof that she was telling the truth, but not proof until it actually happened. What if he had not come after her? Would that be proof that she was lying? To take away somebody's civil rights you need to have the proof beforehand. In this scenario, the easiest way to keep her safe from him would be to lock HER up for her own protection. That would accomplish the goal of protecting her, but you would decry her loss of freedom and her rights. I am sure that her husband was not a model of behavior until the point he suddenly threatened her life. What changed? Did her behavior have any input to the situation or did he suddenly go insane for no apparent reason? Why deny his rights if she had ANY contribution to the situation without comparitively reducing her rights? How can we determine what is fair treatment to both parties without an incredibly intrusive investigation of everyone's actions and comments?
My daddy always taught me that life would not be fair, but I should try to make it as fair as I could. We have laws to protect victims and we have laws to protect the accused. Until we can find a way to be sure everyone is truthful both have to be in place. it sucks to be right sometimes, but we have to allow that we are not always 100%.
So, your inital posting was a lie, you post the wrong link and then get irriated that I called you on it.....
I was posting about the issue of gun rights and protective orders from the very beginning, which is very clear from the content of my post. I linked to the wrong page. There was no lie involved, simply a mistake.
Sorry, that came AFTER the accusation. It is great proof that she was telling the truth, but not proof until it actually happened. What if he had not come after her? Would that be proof that she was lying? To take away somebody's civil rights you need to have the proof beforehand. In this scenario, the easiest way to keep her safe from him would be to lock HER up for her own protection. That would accomplish the goal of protecting her, but you would decry her loss of freedom and her rights. I am sure that her husband was not a model of behavior until the point he suddenly threatened her life. What changed? Did her behavior have any input to the situation or did he suddenly go insane for no apparent reason? Why deny his rights if she had ANY contribution to the situation without comparitively reducing her rights? How can we determine what is fair treatment to both parties without an incredibly intrusive investigation of everyone's actions and comments?
My daddy always taught me that life would not be fair, but I should try to make it as fair as I could. We have laws to protect victims and we have laws to protect the accused. Until we can find a way to be sure everyone is truthful both have to be in place. it sucks to be right sometimes, but we have to allow that we are not always 100%.
Why don't we just lock up the children as well, since their lives were at risk too?
Yes. And unlike you I don't believe women would go to the trouble of doing that unless they had actually been threatened.
Sorry to break the news to you but with that concept, this country is not for you.
You may not believe that women would do that but there are plenty of them that admit to doing that.
I sound really young, and maybe you dont quite understand how law works yet, but you cant just be taking peoples rights away by hear say. Pick up some legal books and read up on it.
Yes. And unlike you I don't believe women would go to the trouble of doing that unless they had actually been threatened.
I saw one on Judge Judy last month that did just that. I also saw a mother-in-law that made a false report of child endangerment to get custody of her grandchild because she did not like the mother.
I think you need to wake up a bit and realize women can be just as deceitful and anyone on the planet.
Why don't we just lock up the children as well, since their lives were at risk too?
Sad to admit, but to accomplish your goal I suppose we should. The only sure alternate is to execute him as soon as she made the complaint if we must assume her complaint was valid without further proof.
Jesus Christ, what is wrong with you? Go and read the article. The police apprehended him in the house, where he had been holding his wife at gun point. The whole thing was caught on a 911 call. Made it up?! What is wrong with you people?
Nothing wrong with me. I'm simply applying reasoning. At the time he was apprehended the restraining order was already in effect. So his apprehension is not proof she was telling the truth at the time the restraining order was put into effect. Thus his later actions are not justification for taking his gun away due to the protective order issued at a previous point in time. This is just basic logic. Sequence of events. Cause and effect.
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You're not satisfied unless there is a bullet in the wife's chest? That would be the only proof that counts? He could very well have shot her and the children if the police hadn't come in and apprehended him. How much more of a close call do you want to have before you "believe" her?
I never believe him or her. That's the point of proof. When you have proof it takes it out of the realm of "belief" entirely. If she had an email, a voicemail, a text, a witness, whatever. All of those things are proof that counts. You are just taking the situation to exremes with your "a bullet in the chest" thing.
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Yes, she could have made the whole thing up. But then the police wouldn't have found him in the house with a gun pointed at her, now would they have? Why would she make it up? So that the police could come to an empty house with no gun an no husband present?
Hindsight is 20/20. The fact that cops found him at her house with a gun on one day is not "proof" that a judge should have ordered him to surrender his gun on a previous day. Your proof didn't happen until after the event you want to use it as proof for. Now earlier you argued that the potential danger to her outweighed his right to own a gun. That's fine. I disagree but at least that's a valid argument to make. But your argument now is just nonsensical.
Sorry to break the news to you but with that concept, this country is not for you.
You may not believe that women would do that but there are plenty of them that admit to doing that.
I sound really young, and maybe you dont quite understand how law works yet, but you cant just be taking peoples rights away by hear say. Pick up some legal books and read up on it.
So a woman makes a story up? And a guy loses his guns for a few months? So what.
So a woman isn't making it up. He doesn't lose his guns. And you have the deadly results as described here.
"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."
Oh really. Can you provide links to those studies? Because I will provide links once I find the studies I was referring to.
I could go to the trouble to track a bunch of them down, but you would only complain that you didn't approve of the source or there was a problem with the methodology, you have more numerous or more recent, or that there was some other reason they were not as good as the studies you cite.
A battle of studies does nothing but irritate everyone who has to wade through the pages and pages of links. I will stipulate to yours and expect you to stipulate to mine. If you are determined to review all of them and make a decision as to the ultimate validity, you can do that on your own time. Your search engine skills are surely equal to my own. I have confidence you can find them if you truly want to. Unless you want to dedicate years to the effort, I would suggest you just sort, stack and weight them and declare the most vociferous side the winner by tonnage.
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