Red flag laws are one of the pet methods that gun control advocates keep pushing for in order to take legally owned firearms from people.
Now, in case you aren’t familiar with the idea, red flag laws skip due process and use the accusation of a person (even anonymously, in many cases) along with supposed expert testimony (even though the mental health “experts” consulted have never met the person whose guns will be taken), in some cases, to try to justify taking legally owned firearms from people who haven’t committed a crime.
And you might be saying, “Well, we want to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people!”
I understand that sentiment. I don’t want to see innocent people hurt, either.
The thing is that there are already provisions in place to keep guns out of the hands of those who aren’t safe to have them. Yes, really. So, red flag laws are, really, just an excuse to make it even easier to take firearms from people using any baseless excuse.
To make things even worse, though, trying to keep firearms out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them doesn’t work. Those people find other ways to get guns even though they can’t legally have them.
And if you need proof of that, check out what The BlazeTV staff wrote about just one particular incident where that failed:
[Steve] Baker notes that “the most curious aspect of them all” is that Routh has had over a hundred charges, including one where he supposedly was in possession of a weapon of mass destruction.
“He held off the Greensboro North Carolina police department and the Guilford County Sheriff Department for three hours with a machine gun, and then that was suddenly pled down to a concealed weapons charge,” Baker says.
“Most curious, with all of these charges, 74 arrests, how much time did he spend incarcerated? None. Zero,” he adds.
So, the would-be Trump assassin who tried to kill Trump while he was playing golf had an extensive criminal record and shouldn’t have been able to get his hands on a firearm.
Yet, he had a so-called “assault rifle.”
And even when he’d shown dangerous behavior with a firearm in the past, he wasn’t given any prison time.
So, advocates for red flag laws need to explain how they will be able to make red flag laws work when laws already on the books to do the same thing didn’t work in this case.
And this isn’t the only case like that, not by a long shot.
Red flag laws, really, are just an excuse to take the guns from law-abiding people. They aren’t really for the purpose of saving the lives of innocent people. If they were, the laws in place for that kind of thing would be savings lives.
And they aren’t.