(6-22-2007) The new Superintendent of Maryland State Police is Terrance Sheridan . Sheridan spent the bulk of his career as a Trooper at MSP, retired and then went to work as head of Baltimore County Police under County Executive Smith. It was as the county's top cop, with violent crime rising on his watch, that he endorsed strong gun control measures. In 2005 he sought half a million county tax dollars to expand gun squad operations, and, using the same contracting mechanism which bars police from working second jobs in disreputable places, he banned his off-duty officers from working in gun shops as if they were cat houses. It's not a good thing for our officers to be involved in. (If you think gun sales in shops are a problem, wouldn't you want police officers working at the point of sale?) The unions had justifiable concern, and got the ban struck down but only after substantial tax money was spent on legal fees.
Sheridan's expensive efforts to launch an unjustified social policy (and demagogue against gun ownership) without consulting the
public earned him a reputation as a political loose canon on deck. It hasn't taken him long to live up to that reputation while
at MSP, as the next article illustrates. His new conditions on buying handguns, which he launched without authority in law, were
distributed to dealers last month.
Yet even as that mailing was being prepared, he danced around the topic in an interview with a Gazette reporter,
saying only that policy on divulging mental health records is something best left to consideration in the next legislative
session. Obviously he chose not to be forthcoming with the press. It remains to be seen whether he was forthcoming with his Governor,
or if the O'Malley administration will be surprised to learn Sheridan has drawn them into a needless dispute with the firearms community.