(WASHINGTON) — A Massachusetts man was found to be carrying a gun after attending a tour of the U.S. Capitol as he left the nearby Library of Congress on Tuesday, police officials told ABC News on Thursday.
Authorities in Washington were alerted by police in Carlisle, Massachusetts, on Monday that a man with a gun who had expressed suicidal ideations on social media was headed to Washington.
The U.S. Secret Service and Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police found the man in a Washington hotel early Tuesday morning and interviewed him, sources said. They searched for a gun and found no weapon and no further action was taken at that time, they said.
Later that day, the man went through a Capitol Police magnetometer screening and entered the Capitol Visitor Center. The magnetometer sounded an alarm and “an officer performed a secondary hand search, and the man was let into the building,” according to a statement from U.S. Capitol Police.
After getting past security, Capitol Police were alerted to his presence and issued a bulletin to be on the lookout for the man. They located him after he had completed the full tour of Congress outside the Library of Congress a short time later and found that he had a 9mm handgun in his waistband, law enforcement sources said.
Authorities said the suspect was arrested for “Unlawful Activities, Carrying a Pistol Without a License, Possession of an Unregistered Firearm, Unlawful Possession of Ammunition, and Resisting Arrest.” The case is currently with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the Capitol Police statement said.
The officer who performed the screening at the magnetometer at the Capitol Visitor Center “is suspended while the USCP’s Office of Professional Responsibility is conducting an administrative investigation into the officer’s performance of that search.”
There is no indication he intended to cause any harm to harm the Congress, according to Capitol police. But sources told ABC News that a man who was possibly suicidal was able to take a full tour of Congress with a gun with members of the public and Congress nearby.
“A full review of this incident has already been ordered, as well as mandatory refresher training on security screening, so this never happens again,” Capitol Police said in their statement.
Members of Congress were briefed on the situation on Thursday.
(BALTIMORE) — Deep inside headquarters of the Baltimore Police Department, a vault holds thousands of artifacts from a generation of gun crime and clues to a tide that may be turning.
Most of the firearms lining the vault’s walls have serial numbers indicating origin and ownership, but many of the most recent additions to the collection are homemade and unmarked.
“You can buy the pieces online, put them together and you can have a fully assembled firearm that is untraceable,” said BPD Commissioner Richard Worley, who gave ABC News a rare inside look at the cache.
The number of privately made firearms, or ghost guns, recovered from crime and accident scenes nationwide has exploded into an epidemic in recent years, up nearly 17-fold between 2017 and 2023, according to the Justice Department.
Baltimore has been a microcosm of the problem. Just a dozen of the untraceable weapons were picked up by police in 2018. By 2022, there were more than 500 recovered from homicide scenes, mass shootings, drug busts and traffic stops.
But now, the city is cautiously celebrating a dramatic downward trend of ghost guns and what could be a harbinger of progress in the fight against gun violence across the country.
In 2024, 309 ghost guns without serial numbers were recovered across Baltimore. Eight have been collected so far this year, according to police.
Officials credit a series of federal, state and local restrictions imposed on gun kits in 2022 and 2023 with slowing online sales by requiring background and age checks of buyers and banning some kit sales in Maryland altogether.
“I think it’s made a huge difference for not just Baltimore city but the entire state,” said Worley, who added that the latest data prove that commonsense regulations can have a significant impact.
Daniel Webster, a leading expert on firearm policy at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, said the turnabout has been stunning.
“I want to underscore just how sharp that increase was prior to these policies going into place,” he said. “Now you see an abrupt change in a slope going exactly the other direction.”
Whatever progress is attributable to the regulations may now be at risk, according to some experts.
The gun industry has lobbied the Trump administration to roll back restrictions on gun kit sales and filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging treatment of gun parts the same as fully assembled firearms.
“We don’t sell firearms. So my company will never have a federal firearms license and therefore will never perform the NICS background checks,” said Cody Wilson, owner and founder of Defense Distributed, one of the largest do-it-yourself gun kit and 3D gun blueprint manufacturers.
Wilson is a plaintiff in a Supreme Court case this spring that will decide whether federal restrictions on gun kits, such as requiring background checks and serialization, should be struck down. The justices are expected to rule by the end of June.
“We’ve been developing technology in this direction, digital and physical or mechanical technologies, to help you make firearms, design your own firearms, reproduce your own firearms,” he said, adamant that gun kit manufacturers will continue to push boundaries of the law.
Ghost guns assembled from parts kits purchased online or manufactured by at-home 3D printing have increasingly turned up in high-profile attacks and mass shootings.
Last month, a convicted felon armed with a ghost gun allegedly shot and critically wounded two kindergarten children on a school playground in California. That same day in New York City, a man equipped with a homemade gun allegedly assassinated the UnitedHealthcare CEO on a sidewalk.
“Anyone, a felon, a teenager, anybody could order a kit online and within an hour and some handy instructions from YouTube put together their own working firearm,” Webster said. “It goes around every law, federal and state, that has been designed to keep guns out of people that it’s broadly agreed are too dangerous to have them.”
And it’s not just bad guys.
Until recently, do-it-yourself gun kits have been especially popular among teenagers who are not old enough to buy firearms in stores legally and instead obtain a gun kit online with only a credit card.
“This industry is really undermining parents’ ability to keep their kids safe and arming teenagers in a way that the laws are really set up to prevent,” said Eric Tirschwell, executive director of Everytown Law, a gun safety advocacy group.
Ghost gun violence has devastated families in nearly every state: a 15-year-old killed at a corner store near Philadelphia by another teenager, two teenagers murdered in Virginia after a fight on social media, a 10th grader nearly killed in a student bathroom at a Maryland high school.
Outside Detroit in May 2021, Guy Boyd was accidentally shot in the face by his then-best friend. He nearly died and lost his eye.
“Ghost guns. It’s in the name. It’s a gun,” Boyd said. “It’s a firearm. It’s projectile. It’s something that can take somebody’s life or almost take somebody’s life, in my scenario.”
Worley, of the BPD, said Baltimore is hopeful that the reduction in ghost gun violence since the recently implemented layers of restrictions won’t be fleeting.
“There were so many on the street that it’s going to take us years to get rid of them,” he said of the untraceable guns. “But our men and women work every single day tirelessly to take them off the street.”
(WASHINGTON) — The Senate on Thursday will vote on Kash Patel’s controversial nomination to lead the FBI.
If confirmed, Patel will be the 18th Cabinet official approved by lawmakers since President Donald Trump’s inauguration one month ago.
Republicans have rallied around Patel, arguing he would bring reform to the nation’s top law enforcement agency they allege has been corrupted.
“Mr. Patel should be our next FBI director because the FBI has been infected by political bias and weaponized against the American people. Mr. Patel knows it, Mr. Patel exposed it, and Mr. Patel has been targeted for it,” Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said last week as the committee met to consider his nomination. The panel advanced Patel in a party-line vote.
Democrats, meanwhile, have objected to Patel up until the last minute. Sen. Dick Durbin, the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, held a press conference outside FBI headquarters on Thursday morning railing against Patel’s “bizarre political statements” on Jan. 6 to retribution.
He accused Republicans of “willfully ignoring red flags on Mr. Patel,” who he argued has “neither the experience, the judgment or the temperament” to be FBI chief for the next 10 years.
“Mr. Patel will be a political and national security disaster,” Durbin said.
Patel, 44, is a loyalist to the president and worked in a number of roles during Trump’s first administration, including acting deputy director of national intelligence.
Shortly after the November election, Trump indicated he would fire then-FBI Director Christopher Wray and tap Patel to take his place. Wray, first appointed by Trump in 2017, stepped down at the end of the Biden administration.
Patel has been a vocal critic of the FBI for years, and previously said he wanted to clean out the bureau’s headquarters in Washington as part of a mission to dismantle the so-called “deep state.”
He faced pointed questions from Democrats on those comments and more — including support for Jan. 6 rioters and quotes that appeared favorable to the “QAnon” conspiracy movement — during his confirmation hearings last month.
Patel sought to distance from some of his past rhetoric, and told lawmakers he would take “no retributive actions” despite his history of comments about targeting journalists and government employees.
Patel, if confirmed, will take over an agency facing uncertainty and turmoil amid firings and other key changes.
The Justice Department’s sought a list of potentially thousands of FBI employees who worked on Jan. 6 cases, ABC News previously reported, prompting agents to file a lawsuit to block the effort.
(WASHINGTON) — Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the leaders of Trump’s new “Department of Government Efficiency,” have found themselves at odds with some of Trump’s far-right supporters over their support for H-1B visas, which allow foreign skilled professionals to work in America.
The debate was sparked over the Christmas holiday when Laura Loomer, a conservative social media figure who faced criticism when she traveled with President-Elect Donald Trump on some campaign stops, criticized Trump’s appointment of Silicon Valley entrepreneur Sriram Krishnan as his senior policy adviser for artificial intelligence.
Criticizing a post from Krishnan where he advocated the removal of country caps for green cards, Loomer called the appointment “deeply disturbing,” prompting an online battle between the business leaders who say the work visas are essential to employing high-qualified foreign workers and Trump supporters who argued it was a way for business leaders to have cheap labor rather than provide job opportunities for Americans.
Both Ramaswamy and Musk made numerous posts on X claiming H-1B visas are essential because American culture doesn’t prioritize success in science and engineering careers compared to other countries.
“Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG,” Ramaswamy posted on X.
“A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers,” he added.
Musk, who has said he once worked in the United States on an H-1B visa, said he has depended on these work visas for the operation of his tech companies and that they are essential due to the number of skilled workers needed to handle the rise of new technologies.
“OF COURSE my companies and I would prefer to hire Americans and we DO, as that is MUCH easier than going through the incredibly painful and slow work visa process,” he posted. “HOWEVER, there is a dire shortage of extremely talented and motivated engineers in America.” Loomer and other far-right conservatives have also argued that the expansions of such programs would go against Trump’s immigration crackdown.
While she and others have accused Musk and Ramaswamy of hindering Trump’s aggressive immigration proposals, the business leaders have argued that any such reforms would not hinder the program’s extensive vetting process.
“Maybe this is a helpful clarification: I am referring to bringing in via legal immigration the top ~0.1% of engineering talent as being essential for America to keep winning,” Musk wrote on X.
“This is like bringing in the Jokic’s or Wemby’s of the world to help your whole team (which is mostly Americans!) win the NBA,” he said, referencing two foreign-born basketball stars.
Now, the business leaders are being accused of using Trump for their own personal gain.
“We are substituting a third world migrant invasion for a third world tech invasion. Same shit,” Loomer posted on X. “Except this invasion won’t be done by rapist foreigners who look and smell like garbage. It will be done by career leftist tech billionaires who hate Trump deep down inside.”
Further showing a divide among conservatives over the issue, former Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley also weighed in, pushing back on a post from Ramaswamy and arguing American workers should be prioritized over foreigners.
“There is nothing wrong with American workers or American culture,” she said. “All you have to do is look at the border and see how many want what we have. We should be investing and prioritizing in Americans, not foreign workers.”
In June, David Sacks, who will be the president-elect’s AI and crypto czar, interviewed Trump for his “All In” podcast and asked Trump if he would expand H-1B work visas for tech workers after fixing the border — to which Trump said “yes.”
In that same episode, Trump also promised to award all international graduates with green cards, saying, “I want to do, and what I will do, is you graduate from a college, I think you should get, automatically as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country. That includes junior colleges, too.”
His campaign later walked back that promise, saying there would be a vetting process.
“He believes, only after such vetting has taken place, we ought to keep the most skilled graduates who can make significant contributions to America,” Karoline Leavitt, incoming White House press secretary, said in a statement to ABC News at the time. “This would only apply to the most thoroughly vetted college graduates who would never undercut American wages or workers.”
ABC News’ Zohreen Shah contributed to this report.
