Then gunfire broke out. Ms Morrison found herself running for safety and later asking how a mass shooting happened in a place with some of the strongest gun laws in the country. “Are there gaps?” Mrs. Morrison asked on Wednesday. “Unfortunately, now we have a chance to see that.” The suspect in the shooting, Robert E. Crimo III, 21, had drawn the attention of police more than once, and despite warnings about his disruptive behavior, he had obtained a gun license and purchased several guns. How a young man who had sent disturbing signals ended up with a semiautomatic rifle in Illinois is a question that haunts not only survivors of Monday’s deadly massacre in Highland Park, a suburb of Chicago. It’s also an issue of federal importance, coming just days after President Biden signed into law the most important gun legislation passed in decades. As details about Mr. Crimo’s past continued to emerge, and as a judge ordered him held without bail on murder charges on Wednesday, it remained unclear whether the horrific episode revealed weaknesses in the state’s gun restrictions or the limits of even strong safeguards in a system ultimately based on the judgments of people — authorities, families, observers. Ms Morrison acknowledged that the effectiveness of some gun laws was often limited by how people responded to them, including whether people informed the authorities of friends or family members who were exhibiting worrying behaviour. “I don’t know how much we can legislate human reaction. we can only provide the tools,” he said. “It’s personal,” he said. “I’m angry. And that has to change.” In an initial court appearance Wednesday, where Mr. Crimo appeared by video, Ben Dillon, a prosecutor, described in yet more detail how officials say Monday’s attack unfolded. Mr Dillon said Mr Crimo used a fire engine to climb onto a rooftop in the city center during the holiday parade. There, Mr. Dillon said, he opened fire — emptying a 30-round magazine, firing another, then loading a third. Officials recovered 83 shell casings, Mr. Dillon said. For hours after the shooting, which left seven dead, authorities searched for the suspect. Chief Deputy Christopher Covelli of the Lake County Sheriff’s Office said investigators believed he fled to Madison, Wis., after the attack, but then returned to Illinois, where he was arrested. Chief Covelli said the police believed Mr. Crimo saw a celebration in Madison and considered using a second rifle he had in the car to shoot there, but decided not to. At an Illinois State Police news conference on Wednesday, officials defended their handling of Mr. Crimo’s application for a gun permit and released records showing that he had told Highland Park officers in 2019 that he was depressed and had been using drugs. Under Illinois law, there are many opportunities for authorities to intervene if a gun owner is deemed a dangerous danger. This begins with the application process for a gun permit, known in Illinois as a firearms owner’s identification card. The application includes a long list of questions about prior felony convictions, failed drug tests, or recent hospitalizations for mental illness. It is submitted to the State Police, where it goes through dozens of steps, involving electronic and manual checks of national and state databases. At any point in this process, the state could determine that a person is ineligible. However, the vast majority approve. According to a 2021 report by the Illinois auditor general, less than 4 percent of nearly 600,000 applications were denied in 2018 and 2019. Brendan Kelly, the director of the Illinois State Police, said on Wednesday that he believed his agency acted properly in handling information about Mr. Krimo. He had no information that would have allowed the agency to deny him a license to own a gun, Mr. Kelly said. The law governing the permits authorizes local authorities, such as police or school officials, to file a report with the Illinois State Police indicating that a person may present a “clear and present danger.” State police can then decide if the report meets the burden of revoking that person’s card. Highland Park police had filed a “clear and present danger” report for Mr Krimo in September 2019 after seizing 16 knives, a dagger and a sword from his home while responding to reports he was making threats. According to State Police, his father told officers he owned the knives and they were all returned the same day. It was the second time that year police had responded to reports of Mr Crimo’s behaviour. the first involved a report of attempted suicide. But Mr. Kelly, the director of the State Police, said the Highland Park report did not clear the legal threshold for determining that Mr. Crimo, who denied to officers that he wanted to harm himself or others, was clear and present danger. Mr Kelly said how well gun laws worked was not just about law enforcement, but the vigilance and vigilance of family members and friends. “This depends so much on the people who may be closest around the person of interest, the person who may be a threat to themselves or the person who may be a threat to others,” Mr Kelly said. . Under the policies in place at the time, Mr. Kelly said the state still would not have had a copy of that report from the Highland Park police when Mr. Crimo sought the identity of the gun owner three months later with the sponsor of his father. He had no barring convictions, no restraining orders, no psychiatric admissions, no “clear and present danger” designation when he applied for a gun license. Approved. By the end of 2020, he had purchased several guns, including the Smith & Wesson semi-automatic rifle that police say was used in Monday’s attack and another rifle found in his car when he was arrested. Officials did not say what they believed might have motivated the attack, but said they had no reason to believe it was motivated by racial or religious hatred. Some in Highland Park’s large Jewish community said they recognized the accused. Martin Blumenthal, who is in charge of security at the city’s Lubavitch Chabad synagogue in the northern suburbs, said he had recalled the man from a Passover service this year. Finding his appearance suspicious, Mr. Blumenthal said he secretly knelt down at one point during the service and reached under the man’s seat to retrieve his small backpack. He did not appear to have any weapons, Mr. Blumenthal said. He said he was now convinced the man went to the synagogue to study it as a possible target. “He was definitely bringing the place out,” Mr. Blumenthal said. Prosecutors declined to say Wednesday whether they are considering charges against any members of the suspect’s family. Steven Greenberg, an attorney representing the father, acknowledged his client had supported his son’s gun permit application, but said the father did not believe there was a problem and may not have fully understood what happened during the police visit in 2019 when police confiscated knives from his son. Filing a “clear and present danger” report wasn’t the only point in the past three years where a suspect’s intent to buy and carry a gun might have been thwarted. In 2019, the state’s Firearms Restriction Act, legislation sponsored by Ms Morrison and often referred to as the Red Flag Act, came into effect, allowing police to confiscate firearms if a judge determines that the owner of weapons “poses an immediate and present risk of personal injury to himself or another.” Speak for Safety Illinois, an advocacy group, found that only 53 firearms restriction orders were filed in the law’s first two years, nearly half of them in just one suburban Chicago county. There is no indication that a gun restraining order was ever sought in Mr. Crimo’s case, despite his disturbing behavior. This presents one of the difficult realities of public safety law: red flag laws only come into play when someone in close proximity to a potentially dangerous gun owner requests an order. “This was a case of a textbook red flag law that wasn’t used,” said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety, which has called for more restrictive gun laws. “The tool for invoking a red flag law was there and no one took the tool out of the box.” Reporting was contributed by Robert Chiarito, Adam Goldman, Michael Levenson, Glenn Thrush and Luke Vander Ploeg.
