Wisconsin’s Bad Dad And Deplorable Republicans
This post was originally published on this site
Last December, a teenage girl went to school armed with some guns and started shooting. Ten people were shot, a teacher and a student were killed before the shooter took their own life. There is still one victim of the shooting who is still in the hospital.
Subsequent investigations revealed a young person who had unsettling thoughts about how society was trash and that they deserved to die. The child also expressed suicidal ideation. Investigations also showed that her father, Jeffrey Rapnow, thought her behavior was just “attention seeking” and bought two guns for her and was about to give her a third.
On Thursday, Rapnow was arrested and charged:
According to the criminal complaint, which was unsealed Thursday after Rupnow’s early morning arrest, Rupnow purchased two guns for his daughter: a 22-caliber handgun and later a Glock 9 mm pistol — the weapon that was used in the shooting. He said Natalie helped pay for the Glock and he purchased it for her from a gun store, the complaint states.
“All of these weapons, including [a third] one that was about to be gifted to the same teen, were purchased legally,” Madison Police Department Acting Chief John Patterson said at a Thursday afternoon press conference.
“There was a gun safe in the home. Based on our investigation, it did not stop the teenager from having regular access” to the contents, he said.
Rapnow faces up to $30,000 in fines and/or 18 years in prison if he is convicted.
On the very same day, just a few hours later, the state Assembly Republicans took up and eviscerated Governor Tony Evers’ proposed budget, removing over 600 pieces of it in a single vote. Some of the parts the Republicans gutted included common sense gun safety laws
Among more than 600 items stripped from the governor’s budget, Republican lawmakers also removed a handful of proposals Evers had included that would have established a series of safety measures aimed at decreasing gun violence.
The governor proposed establishing universal background checks for all firearm purchases, a mandatory 48-hour waiting period to buy a gun and a provision allowing police to issue extreme risk protection orders, a policy known as a red flag law. Such an order would give police the power to temporarily remove guns from a person deemed to be a danger to themselves or others.
Police in California used this type of law to temporarily confiscate weapons from a 20-year-old man who had been in contact with the Abundant Life shooter and who authorities said planned to carry out his own attack.
When asked about gun safety legislation in the days after the Abundant Life Shooting, Republican leaders dismissed the idea that such laws could prevent future tragedy.
Like most states, Wisconsin has a law for if two or more people work together to commit a crime and one of the perpetrators gets killed, the accomplice(s) can be charged with murder. They should have charged the father with murder under that same principle. But then again, if there were any real justice, the Republicans who allow this shit to happen over and over as long as they get their payments from the NrA would be charged as well.