If even Highland Park shooting suspect didn’t pose ‘clear and present danger,’ who would?

Even the Illinois gun laws that Second Amendment absolutists see as oppressive are so lax that the suspect in Highland Park’s Fourth of July mass shooting was able to legally purchase a high-powered rifle similar to an AR-15.

That’s shocking because the suspect, 21-year-old Robert E. Crimo III, was able to buy the kind of gun designed to kill as many people as possible as quickly as possible despite the fact that police had twice been called to his home in 2019, both times after he’d threatened violence.

Opinion

In April of that year, a week after an apparent suicide attempt, they responded to a report, came to his home and were told that mental health professionals were handling the situation. In September, after Crimo threatened to “kill everyone” in his family home, police not only showed up but also took away his 16 knives, plus a dagger and a sword.

Crimo posted many violent videos online and openly admired and envied mass shooters, and has been active on a site that aggregates footage of murders and other acts of violence.

Illinois has a red flag law, but if the bar on what looks like the sort of “clear and present danger” that should rule out gun purchases is so high that Crimo didn’t meet it, you really have to wonder what you’d have to do to get flagged.

That’s a white flag rather than a red one.

The latitude given to those who’ve proven they should be nowhere near a deadly weapon really only shows the chasm between how gun worshippers imagine blue states are restricting guns and what’s really happening here.

Point of pride: California’s gun laws are the strictest in the country, ranking first out of 50 in gun safety and 44th in gun deaths, 37% below the national average, according to the Giffords Law Center.

Illinois, by contrast, ranks eighth out of 50 in restricting guns, and 27th out of 50 in gun deaths, which puts it 3% above the national average.

The differences between gun laws in the two states? Illinois does not prohibit assault weapons or high capacity magazines, and does not require any training in gun safety.

If you want to get a better sense of the problem with high capacity magazines, listen to the sickening sound of the nonstop shots fired at the parade.

Let’s hope that sound won’t be the first memory of the NRA orphan who was found wandering around covered in blood. But loss will define 2-year-old Aiden McCarthy’s life regardless.

No surprise Crimo confessed to the mass shooting that same day; this is a man who’d said online that he hated seeing anyone get more attention than he did.

After watching bodies be blown apart, he happened upon another Fourth of July celebration in Madison, Wisconsin, and was tempted to end even more lives.

But then, he had standards to uphold, and because he hadn’t prepared for a second attack, decided it was better to rest on his deadly record than to go off half-cocked.

He was held without bail Wednesday on seven counts of first-degree murder. Because finally, the red flags were flying at half-mast.

Across the country, in Richmond, Virginia, another sick soul had planned a July Fourth mass shooting. Only he was reported first and actually did have his guns seized.

In September of 2019, Illinois State Police received a Clear and Present Danger report on Crimo from the Highland Park Police Department. But no family member was willing to file a complaint, so that was that.

Remarkably, and at the same time inevitably, because even states that want to stop people who’ve proven they aren’t stable have a hard time disarming the most obvious threats to public safety, Crimo still passed four background checks in 2020. “There was insufficient basis to establish a clear and present danger” required to deny the application, state police said in a statement.

So he got his Smith and Wesson M&P 15 semi-automatic rifle, ended seven lives, and upended many more. His uncle told reporters that he had never seen any signs of trouble.

We won’t remember his name, because there are just too many young men like — who was he, again? — Bobby Crimo competing for our attention.

Maybe those gun owners so ardent that they seem to want to marry their weapons should be allowed to do so, because love is love. But when they claim that blue states are denying their right to carry anywhere, anytime, that unfortunately isn’t true.