Prior gun charges against MSU shooter were dropped

FPI / February 16, 2023

The gunman who killed three students and wounded five others at Michigan State University on Monday would have been prohibited from owning a firearm at the time of the shooting had he not had felony gun charges dismissed by a George Soros-backed prosecutor.

Anthony McRae was charged in June 2019 with illegally carrying a concealed handgun without a permit. Those charges were dismissed by the office of Ingham County district attorney Carol Siemon. The Democrat DA's office allowed McRae to plead guilty to a lesser misdemeanor gun charge.

After shooting and killing MSU students Alexandria Verner, Brian Fraser, and Arielle Anderson and wounding five others, police said McRae was later found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

After the 2019 gun charges, McRae served a little more than a year on probation, which ended in May 2021. He initially faced up to five years in prison for the felony charge, the Detroit News reported.

​​Ingham County Sheriff Scott Wriggelsworth had in 2021 called on the East Lansing City Council "to reconsider" Siemon's internal felony firearm charging policy, which the sheriff said "does not hold people properly criminally accountable, and increases the likelihood of additional gun violence."

Siemon made it her office’s official policy in August 2021 to drop mandatory prison sentences for felony firearms charges. She said the sentencing enhancement led to "dramatic racial inequity" and was "not in any way linked to the goal that we share of keeping the public safe."

"Siemon is part of George Soros’s vast public safety network," the Washington Free Beacon reported. "She has participated in international criminal justice reform junkets with other Soros-backed 'reform-minded' prosecutors including Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner, Chicago’s Kim Foxx, and Los Angeles’s George Gascón. She also backed radical San Francisco prosecutor Chesa Boudin ahead of a recall campaign that eventually ousted him from office last year.

In 2021, the Vera Institute for Justice, a think tank funded by Soros’s Open Society Foundations, praised Siemon and other prosecutors who pledged to reduce racial disparities in prosecution. Siemon boasted about the changes she made in her office when she announced her retirement in November.

"I believe we have made substantial progress to reform the justice system and provide for a proportionate response to criminal charges," she said. "We have changed the prosecutors’ office’s charging and sentencing practices, to provide a greater range of options to hold people accountable for the harm they cause while reducing incarceration, and continuing to serve victims and to expand their services and support."

But a Michigan circuit court judge called her out weeks earlier for making Lansing less safe with her policies. "She is not a legislator, she is not a judge, and she is making our community unsafe," Judge Rosemarie Aquilina said.

Siemon’s successor, John Dewane, told the Free Beacon that "McRae would not have been able to legally purchase, own, or possess a firearm" if he had "been convicted of carrying a concealed weapon."

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