In the early morning (4:30 AM), Montgomery County Police killed a man while serving a search warrant. According to a family attorney, Duncan Socrates Lemp was asleep in his bed when police opened fire from outside the home, killing him and wounding his girlfriend.

I found these statements in the news report interesting.

A police statement Thursday says members of the department’s tactical unit were serving a “high-risk” search warrant related to unspecified “firearms offenses” at the home around 4:30 a.m.
[…]
On his Instagram account, Lemp recently posted a photograph that depicts two people holding up rifles and included the term “boogaloo,” slang used by militia members and other extremists to describe a future civil war in the U.S.

Since I know Maryland has an “assault weapon” ban (Maryland Public Safety § 5-101 for “assault long guns,” Maryland Criminal Law § 4-303 for “assault pistols”), I was curious about the “rifles” picture posted to Lemp’s Instagram account. Fortunately, I got to it before the usual post-police shooting social media purge. This appears to be the post in question.

Those would seem to be “assault long guns” under Maryland victim disarmament law. Lemp was only 21 years old, so it’s rather unlikely he could lawfully possess a grandfathered “assault weapon” — the laws passed in 2013 — so I’m speculating that the police used that post as “evidence” that one of those arms was Lemp’s, putting him possession of a banned firearm. And since he is was reportedly a libertarian “Threeper,” that made him automatically dangerous.

I think Lemp was killed on the off chance that he “violated” an unconstitutional violence-enabling victim disarmament law.

Gun People control kills. It certainly did this time.

[Permission to republish this article is granted so long as it is not edited, and the author and The Zelman Partisans are credited.]