Attention, Maryland felons: Here's some news you can use - it's against federal law for you to possess bullets. You can't have a gun, of course, but you knew that already. Did you also know that, under federal law, you can go to prison for up to 15 years if you're found to be packing ammo?
I mentioned it because it's highly likely no one at the Division of Correction took the time to go over this with you before your release.
Or maybe you weren't paying attention during the warden's lecture on how to avoid returning to the good ole DOC.
So consider this a public service message, courtesy of Baltimore Circuit Judge Gale Rasin.
Rasin recently had before her Steven Morton, a 30-something fellow from Harford County with a criminal record, mostly drug-possession charges. In 2006, Morton acquired a handgun for $100. It was an illegal purchase and it was illegal for Morton, being a felon, to possess the gun.
Of course, the police didn't know he had the gun until the fall of 2006.
That's when Morton went to a Wal-Mart to buy a box of bullets.
Maryland law requires a background check for men and women who want to buy a gun, but not so for what goes inside.
"No background check required for ammo purchases," confirms Daniel Webster, co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research. "Felons are walking right up to the counter and buying all they want or need."
One day last summer, I was standing on Harford Road in Parkville, feeding a parking meter, when a guy approached, a little out of breath and in a hurry for information. He was young, dressed in a T-shirt and black jeans. "Do you know where I go to buy bullets?" he asked.
I'd never been asked this question before, but the answer was easy. I pointed to the gun shop at the corner and, in the next instant, I had one of those creepy thoughts: Did I just aid and abet a crime-in-the-making? I know: ugly, unfair assumption. But the guy was young and in a hurry, and he didn't seem to know his way around Parkville, and I'm human and I live in Baltimore, with all its gun violence, and so I think the speculation is understandable.
Still, what criminal goes into a gun shop to buy bullets?
Apparently, it happens.
But there's a catch.
