A gunman who killed three and wounded five others at Michigan State University on Monday would have been barred from owning a firearm at the time of the shooting had he not had felony gun charges dismissed by a progressive prosecutor.Anthony McRae was charged in June 2019 with illegally carrying a concealed handgun without a permit, but later had those charges dismissed by the office of Ingham County district attorney Carol Siemon (D.). Her office instead let McRae plead guilty to a lesser misdemeanor gun charge, and he served a little more than a year on probation, which ended May 2021. He initially faced up to five years in prison for the felony charge, the Detroit News reported.

Ingham County Prosecutor Carol Siemon said, when she was elected in 2016, one of her main goals was to reduce systemic racial bias and racial disparities from law enforcement, but not everyone supports the policies she’s put in place to do that.“I was raised here in Lansing, in a diverse community,” Siemon said. “I’ve always had an interest in civil rights, all aspects of civil rights. As a woman, I’ve been a feminist all my life. LGBTQ Rights, racial disproportionality, immigrants rights. So, when I was elected as prosecutor, my goal was to try and create a more criminal and equitable legal system.”In the past month, Siemon has pushed out two policies meant to decrease the number of Black people behind bars.“We look at the data and that statistic shows that racial disparity is so unambiguous and so extreme that I couldn’t even justify,” she said.