I’ve got a few pro-gun-control friends who say “I support common sense restrictions on people who shouldn’t have guns…”
So does every gun rights supporter.
“…including Red Flag Laws”
OK, we need to talk.
“Red Flag” laws have a bunch of problems:
1) They allow anyone – literally, anyone you’ve had a personal, business, romantic or habitation relationship with – to go to a judge and tell any story they want, literally, without you being there to defend yourself. And if a judge – whatever their motivations – agrees, then you’ll have armed cops swarming over your house, no different than if they’re serving a warrant on a drug dealer. By the way – Swat teams going after “armed subjects” have “assault rifles”, and get nervous.
What could go wrong?
2) You say you want to prevent suicide? OK – let’s say you actually *are* a danger to yourself. The laws allow the cops to take…your guns. Not the booze and sleeping pills, the rope, the gas ovens, the cars, the razor blades. They cart your guns away and apparently say “At least they won’t *shoot* themselves.”
Brilliant, huh?
And the thing is, there’s an actual law already on the books in Minnesota (253.05) that already allows people with legitimate concerns to get a 72 hour hold *for cause*, that *actually* is intended to keep people from hurting themselves!
3) And if someone is a danger to others? They, like Nik Cruz, have been legitimately threatening to hurt *others*? Yep, there’s a law for that – MN statute 518.01, if memory serves, which allows the cops to preventatively arrest people *for legitimate cause* if there’s an actual threat to *other people*.
“Red Flag” laws are less effective at preventing suicide than existing statute. They *do* less than current law at preventing actual crimes.
What *are* they good for?
Harassing law-abiding gun owners. Seriously – some local gun control activists have already promised to “Swat” local second amendment leaders if the laws pass. And you can already see the wheels turning in the minds of some sleazy divorce lawyers and political opposition researchers out there.
In states where these sorts of laws have been passed, that’s exactly what’s happened.
They are useless in dealing with suicide and crime, and good only for harassment.
What’s the defense?
And if your idea of a “defense” is “We’ve got to dooooooooo something” – just no. What you propose to doooooooo is worse than useless.
But give it a shot.
It struck me reading this as it has in the past reading similar things, that leftists really think of laws as magic spells. If some already existing laws are not working, laws that would work if enforced, well, then we need new laws. That is, new incantations. And then all will be meet and right.
The bonus part, of course, is that the non-magical people, who also happen to be political opponents, will re-interpret this magic spell as a law and obey it. And so accept being controlled.
Proposals like this pass because people only hear the concept, they don’t see the effect and don’t know the application. Kind of like Hubert Humphrey saying affirmative action wouldn’t lead to racial quotas, or he’d eat his hat.
I was a divorce lawyer when Orders for Protection came in. Great idea, right? Protect women from violence. But I watched volunteer advocates coach women what to say and saw judges handing out OFPs like Kleenex in ex parte hearings (husband not present, no notice). Why not issue the OFP? Who wants to be the judge who turned down the request only to have husband kill her?
When the deputy tracks down Husband to hand him the order, he’s told: “I don’t care that it’s all lies, there will be a full hearing in a couple of weeks to decide whether to continue the Order. In the mean time, don’t go home or you’ll go to jail.”
OFPs became Summary Divorces. Woman claims fear, woman is awarded sole custody without visitation, possession of the house, full child support and insurance and use of the car. Man is prohibited from going home for his clothes, tax returns, family photos and certainly not his guns. Oh, eventually, in a few months, he might negotiate a settlement and the deputy can stand guard while he retrieves his stuff, but he’s starting from a lousy position – there’s a protection order against him, he’s obviously dangerous or she wouldn’t need the order. Shared custody is likely out of the question. He’ll be lucky to see his kids every other weekend, one evening a week.
Oh, and here’s a news flash. If there’s a protection order against you, you can’t buy a gun. Obviously not – you’re dangerous, right? Otherwise there’d be no need for the Order.
Now, with this new proposal, we’re talking about stretching the concept even farther to protect even more people. Sounds good in theory, but I was there when this notion started. I saw how warped and distorted it became. I have absolutely no confidence the new law will be handled better.
Count me out.
So Citizen A can petition the courts to order the police swoop in and take gun(s) away from Citizen B.
Okay….
So then what?
Well, the activists will say, the police store the gun(s) until the court makes a determination.
Okay….
So who pays for the “storage”? Governments don’t do stuff like that for free.
Well, the activists will say, it should be the owner who pays….
I have a better idea. Why not (if we go down that route) require the petitioner to pay.
Well, the activists will say, we can’t have that….
I remember being told when my parents divorced that the protective orders were pretty much standard, and if the one leaving didn’t ask for one, the judge would try to persuade her. Thankfully my mom made sure that she didn’t take my dad for all he had, though I think she could have come close if she’d wanted to.
Dangers of handling legal matters without due process, really, and we see it (Title IX in colleges) all the time.
It used to be worse than that, Joe.
Remember WATCH and other similar groups?
Especially in the 90’s when things were really bad, a row of harpies perched on the back bench of every courtroom in the metro area. If they detected even a whiff of fairness, they went howling to the press and various legal “ethics” committees.
If ever there was Jim Crow north of the Mason-Dixon line, it was then.
And now, for something completely different.
“Ginsburg misses second day in a row on Supreme Court”
https://youtu.be/lDnS4pkmzis
I do remember them, Greg, and MADD, too. As the lowest guy on the totem pole, I also handled misdemeanors. Volunteers from Mothers Against Drunk Driving sat in the courtroom with notebooks, making sure everybody got the book thrown at them, whether they needed it or not. There were never enough extenuating circumstances to deviate from the “standard deal” that every plea bargainer got.
On one hand, I’m glad to that someone is watching, to make sure justice is done. It’s just a little frustrating that the watchers are all looking in the same direction – to the Left. I suppose that’s because everybody on the Right it too busy working to spend all day agitating.
You nailed it, Joe.
There is something about activism that pushes the most strident members to the leadership. I suppose it is because the less strident can’t stomach the manipulation and hectoring, so they drop out.
There is also something about activist groups that molds the character of its members. By the end of Christine Blasley Ford first sentence, I could tell from her little-girl voice that she was the product of therapy abuse, ie. another ‘Jackie’.
I don’t know how society can deal with these crazies – but the best alternative is to take care of the business that caused them in the first place.
MADD is the product of pure righteous anger at a system where too much value was placed on ‘getting clients off’. I remember back in the mid-70’s when a high school buddy of mine, killed a girl while driving drunk. He received a $300 fine and 30 days in jail, served on weekends.
We needed MADD – but then they served their purpose and didn’t go away. It is like the environmental movement. At one time, the air in the Twin Cities burned your eyes and tampons washed up on the beaches of Lake City. Activism provided the political will to solve those problems – but then they didn’t go away.
Maybe there should be a law (because everything can be solved by passing a law) that says every tax-exempt organization must have a charter containing a dissolution clause that terminates the group after its mission has been accomplished. 🙂
So liberals don’t like the constitution, or equality under the law, or due process.
Tell me again what it is about America that they like?
Oh yeah, the “diversity.”
And now the Democrats have filed a universal background check bill. Maybe….just maybe….we ought to see how much the Brady checks have done for crime (nothing) before we expand them?
One big thing that I’d love to see regarding the Brady checks is to allow organizations to use them to check the backgrounds of volunteers–no more dinking around with going by county or state, you’ve got a nationwide database of almost every crime you could be interested in except for DUI.
And with every teacher and Sunday School teacher going through a check, whatever records the FBI has kept–sorry, I don’t believe for a minute that those records are truly destroyed as required by law–immediately become worthless as a gun owners’ registry. Freedom FTW.