In the wake of mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, as Republicans move toward backing a national “red flag” law to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill, Bill Whittle Now asks “who decides?” What if the new law targets you, and the federal government comes to take your guns away? Before your representative votes, he should watch this video.
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What if the ‘Red Flag Law’ Targets You: Who Decides to Take Away Your Guns?
In the wake of mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, as Republicans move toward backing a national “red flag” law to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill, Bill Whittle Now asks “who decides?” What if the new law targets you, and the federal government comes to take your guns away? Before your representative votes, he should watch this video.
55 replies on “What if the ‘Red Flag Law’ Targets You: Who Decides to Take Away Your Guns?”
There is no reason to guess as to when one can engage in self-defense against a threat (Bill’s example of a nut waving a gun at a Republican convention). The standard is clear and has been in play for a long time. It is the AOJ (Ability, Opportunity, Jeopardy) principle. Lethal force is justified when your opponent has an Ability and Opportunity to do you grave harm, and a reasonable and prudent person in your situation would believe himself to be in immediate Jeopardy.
I don’t believe society’s standard for protecting itself against an individual should be any less strict.
As a related aside, if you haven’t done so (and if you can afford the hefty price), take one of Massad Ayoob’s MAG40 (née LFI-1) classes. Having recently done so, I cannot recommend it highly enough. IMNSHO, every responsible CCW holder should take it. Bill, there is one in Sacramento in September.
Bill, the difference between a search warrant and what you are discussing is that a warrant is supposed to be issued in response to what somebody presumably has done. What you are talking about is a state acting on what somebody has thought, as determined by… let’s not even go there.
There is a huge, insurmountable difference there that makes your analogy completely inapplicable and pretty terrifying (the Minority Report theme raised by others comes to mind).
I don’t suppose we could suggest that “modern” phycology’s effort to “main stream” individuals with obvious social disorders MIGHT have contributed to this problem? Nah there couldn’t be a connection. Ya know, I was in high school when “main streaming” was introduced into our school (1965). I sat next to an individual who later was hospitalized for stabbing to death two young girls during one of his therapeutic outings from the institution he called home. I wonder if my childhood memory of those events is in part responsible for my skepticism of any person’s ability to predetermine another person’s actions.
I have already had my guns taken away from me completely on the basis of the word of one other person, who ironically DID have a history of mental instability. Obviously, I have a VERY strong opinion regarding red flag laws.
It was temporary (SIX months), and I have subsequently lost all of those guns in a boating accident.
I would like to thank you guys for helping me think through this tough issue. I think one of the most important points that you made was that if someone trips the threshold for one of these red flag warnings, the removal of guns from the home is not the solution. Psychiatric help and counseling are needed. If the threat to society is not high enough to take away someones fundamental right to liberty then it should not be high enough to take away their right to defend themselves either.
No rights should be taken away without due process of a real court, not a kangaroo court (e.g., FISA courts with a 0.03 percent rejection rate).
Read “Enemies Foreign And Domestic” by Matt Bracken. It’s fiction, but disturbingly close to what could be playing out here.
Has anyone read Dov Fischer’s article “Thoughts on Mass Shootings: 75 Days is Ample … and Some Longer-Term Thoughts” in The American Spectator”?
This is such a slippery slope issue I don’t believe it should even be considered. Does the movie “Minority Report” come to mind for anybody else?
The red flag laws will be adequately vague and ripe for abuse. I do not trust our government. Weaponized IRS,FBI corruption,. Convenient lenient sentences or convenient suicides for the rich and powerful, steering funds/grants/contracts to friends & relatives…
Emotions are a good thing, but not the only thing. Let’s think mathematically for just a second. Suppose you are a company that has manufactured 320,000,000 widgets (US population). Each year you discover 10 or 12 of them have a significant flaw. Really, how big a problem is this? Are you going to recall and inspect 319,999,988 widgets that look and work fine to maybe find 1 or 2 more bad items? How many FALSE positives are you liable to find? Since Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel(not real people), there have been defective people. There is no way you can legislate away the defects of human nature.
If ONLY humans had that low a failure rate.
No, Bill, there is absolutely no role for government at any level to interject itself into “thought crime” or “future crime” deterrence. It boils down to giving authority to one lefty psychologist making a decision that wanting to own a gun is crazy. You own a gun. You are crazy. You must forfeit your gun. If you were crazy enough to own a gun, you can’t be trusted with knives or a car. This is not hypothetical. This is the status quo in London where there was a call by the mayor for all people to turn in their knives. The knife bureau was tasked with making the knives dull and returning them to their owners. No shootin’ Sherlock–this is what power hungry bureaucratic SJWs do.
If we’re going to have anything like these red flag laws, then there has to be due process of the law to allow the person who is being flagged to defend themselves before a court of law. Not doing that leaves open the chance that the law will be abused and used to take away anyone’s Second amendment rights.
One of the things that disturbs me about the typical discussion of how to go about making the decision to take someone’s guns is that there is an absolute lack of participation by the individual who is considered to be a threat. At a bare minimum, if this person is truly suspected to be an immediate threat, then it would have to be appropriate in any respectful process that this individual be immediately brought before the judge, presented with the concerns that have been raised, and allowed to respond to those concerns.
Absent of this, there is absolutely no due process of any sort. As a result, no respect is given to the individual in the least.
Having a debate while lacking an awareness of this concern is like trying to decide what the best method of execution should be for a prisoner without first deciding whether of not it’s a good idea to allow the prisoner to be present at their own trial.
One of my concerns about these Red Flag laws is for active and former servicemen, police officers, ICE agents, Secret Service, first responders and firefighters. Many, if not most, have been through traumatic events that may have left them vulnerable to symptoms that some “professional” would deem highly suspicious of future criminal/violent behavior. One mention in their service jacket/portfolio would set them up to be interrogated and possibly punished in some way. I see enormous potential for misuse.
Especially given that former Secretary Janet Napolitano have stated in the past that ALL veterans are potentially domestic terrorists. I doubt if she is alone in that opinion either. As a former Marine I found that truly offensive.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about red flag laws until I watched a video on YouTube that basically dissected the statistics on “mass shootings” and reveled quite easily that the rate of defending oneself with a firearm FAR outnumbers the rate of malevolent shootings in the USA. I had heard it before but this guys breakdown was really good. Matt Christiansen
Thank you! I’ll listen to more of his work.
Fantastic episode. I’m glad I’m not the only one struggling with this.
We shouldn’t be struggling with it. We should be fighting against it. The law WILL be abused. How do we know this? It’s already being abused in states where it’s been enacted. And people have already lost their lives in the process.
If this is done on a federal level, it WILL be weaponized and used against political enemies of the deep state (Conservatives). How do we know this? Because they’ve already weaponized every part of the federal government they can get away with, whole agencies have been turned against citizens for political reasons (IRS, FBI, DOJ, CIA, NSA, etc). It’s already happened.
It will happen with this type of law also.
I’m not struggling with this. It is an emphatic NO, NO, NO for red flag laws.
The problem is that removing a person’s rights is a punishment. How do you proactively punish someone? The dichotomy is that in our society, we are strictly reactive, not proactive. Proactivity, by its definition means that we are not free citizens but only subjects. In a reactive society, we use punishment as a deterrent to others but how do you deter someone who wants to die in the act? This is just like any other terrorism. The only deterrence would be that if more and more people were armed, the body count would be lower, thus lowering the “glory” factor. If you remove the “glory”, you remove the appeal of it for sociopaths.
We will always have evil among us. We can only keep vigilant. To use your “mowing the grass” analogy, when a weed pops up, we must remove it quickly before it can propagate.
Bill used the phrase Ambient Risk. This is interesting as it ties into a chart created by “Our Word in Data (dot) org. I will try to find the link. The chart has by % what people in the US die from, what they search on google and media coverage. in 2016 (They note CDC stats) Homicide (all types not just gun related) and Terrorism combined are less than 1%. Terrorism is searched >7%, and Homicide >3%. But the NYT and The Guardian cover Terrorism at 33-35% and Homicide at roughly 23%.
Found Link: https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die-from
So it seems that our ambient risk is not that high for being killed but it is covered in the media very highly.
I am not saying these are not tragedies. But this may fall under the don’t let a crisis go to waste.
Drug overdoses and Suicides are five times higher taken together.
Accidents over 7 times higher.
So yes, these high volume killings are horrible but do we give up a fundamental right because of it?
Perhaps my questioning comes from a severe distrust of any red flag system as I can see the abuse potential with red lights flashing.
BTW – great actual discussion both of you.
These Red Flag laws are useless and will do a lot of harm. Guns don’t kill people, people do and taking guns away from someone that is intent on mass murder isn’t going to stop them. There have already been people killed by police attempting to take guns away with no evidence these people meant anyone any harm.
Red Flag laws are targeting people for what they might do. Where does this end? Shall we arrest people for what they might do? How about a whole division of law enforcement devoted to precrime? We already have prisons full of people for victimless crimes, but why stop there, let’s incarcerate people before they commit a crime, cause we know they were going to do it, right?
I truly believe that a lot of the problem began back in the 70s when it was decided it was not right to institutionalize mentally ill people and to turn the loose on society and allow them to refuse treatment to control their mental illness.
Another point that needs to be aware of is that back in the times of bho we were told the greatest risk to society was the returning veteran. This attitude is still prevalent today and who will advocate for the veteran who may have a psychiatric diagnosis?
While I agree with you completely regarding the fact that the deinstitutionalization of the chronically mentally ill is a serious problem, I doubt that the criminally insane were released into the general population, not to mention that these people would be in their 50’s and 60’s today and are inconsistent with the profile of the majority of the mass shooters.
Many are in the judicial system these days because they don’t take their medication and commit a lot of petty crimes and are chronically homeless. They also are often brought in as a nuisance because in their probable psychotic state they cause disturbances in business districts. The only time they are medicated is when they are in jail. That’s the only real mental health treatment they get which is sad.
I agree with you also, our entire mental health system is broken. Red flag laws and continually throwing around the word “mental illness” when we refer to these mass shooters is going to make things worse, especially in combination. People who do need help won’t seek it, that is going to be another huge consequence of this action, if taken.
YES, WE NEED TO BE PROACTIVE!
Both in our daily lives (Situational Awareness) and in understanding that we now live with a continuing crisis (Mass Shootings) in our daily lives.
I recommend Dov Fischer’s article “Thoughts on Mass Shootings: 75 Days is Ample … and Some Longer-Term Thoughts” in The American Spectator” for a proactive view on addressing possible solutions to it.
The bottom line in my thinking is this mental disorder leads these people to wish for death by suicide, by their own hand or law enforcements. In the later, a “Blaze of Glory” can become a terrible venue.
I have no belief that a “Red Pill” will ever let us identify these disorders before their final act of desperation. They need to be removed as threats when identified and “Red Flag” laws my be a first step but with lots and lots of healthy discussion and adequate controls!
And YES, this might be a very slippery slope not only for conservatives but for everyone that is a citizen of the US.
The bold text summarizes the flaw in such logic. NO administrative control, no matter how “adequate,” is immune from corruption and abuse by people. Individual liberty and responsibility is the only viable solution for enhancing one’s protection and improving civilized behavior.
It will be abused. Just like the federal government was weaponized against conservatives, just like the federal government was weaponized to spy on a presidential candidate, then the newly elected President, all because the deep state didn’t like his tweets.
Any national red flag law WILL be abused. The federal government is rotten with over-zealous, self-appointed crusaders who won’t hesitate use this law to punish their political enemies.
It’s already happened, it will happen again. And this is the perfect type of law for them to do it with. No probable cause, no presumption of innocence, no due process, no indictment, no evidence necessary. Guilty, with no way to prove oneself innocent.
This is the worst idea EVER.
Real mass murders kill thousands and millions. To avoid thousand and millions being killed we might have to put up with these deranged people in our culture and change the culture to respect life.
Red Flag laws are already working.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/08/maryland-police-shoot-and-kill-a-61-year-old-man-while-trying-to-serve-a-red-flag-order-officials-say-it-is-a-sign-the-law-is-needed/
Working for who? A man is dead because of them. The death penalty without even so much as a trial.
They are working for those tyrants who wish to control every aspect of every individual.
Or a crime. Don’t forget that. There was no indictment, not even a charge, and he was killed. If that is done on a Federal level, the murders by police will FAR outweigh the deaths in mass shootings. And mass shootings will still happen. This won’t stop them.
About 40 percent of the homicides are not committed with a firearm. It is naive to believe taking the guns away from a homicidal individual has done anything but changed what weapon will be used, and many of the other options are far more lethal than guns.
Ah yes, so what do we do when those “appointed” to determine what are the mental illness factors decree that anyone who is an NRA member, or Trump supporter (when we’re all doxxed by big tech companies), or self avowed Conservatives, or better yet, anyone who has ever said anything against the “norm”, are subject to the new Red Flag law and cannot possess a firearm? Because well, surely no Conservative would ever be blatantly censored by big tech companies, right?! Because members of Congress would never abuse their power and blatantly call for violence against Conservatives, right?! Because the entire media complex would NEVER in one collective voice claim the President is a self avowed Nahzi bent on “exterminating” all Hispanics, right?! Because we can all trust the Federal Government to make the “right and fair” decision, and to never interject their political biases into the process, because we haven’t already seen this happen in the IRS, the FBI, the DOJ, the State Department, the ATF, the CIA, the NSA, etc, etc, etc, weaponized against Conservatives, or even a Presidential candidate or newly elected President, right?!?!?!?! This is the WORST IDEA EVER and will likely and SHOULD lead to the next civil war. Gear up folks.
Ditto! they’re already banning conservative “free” speech, so this will be an open door to get to conservatives for their guns. Grrrrowl.
As I understand these laws don’t specifically target mass shooters they say “imminent danger to themselves or others.” So that would potentially include the guy who’s depressed or the gal who caught her husband cheating on her, not just the full on psychotic.
Since a bunch of states have passed these types of laws already we could try that “laboratories of democracy” thing and see if they’re effective and how much abuse there is. Of course Congress or some federal judge probably won’t be able to keep their fingers off the labware, so we’ll just end up with some toxic mess on the floor.
See the link on John Doty’s post. We already have at least one man dead because of them AND the police are trying to “justify” it was warranted. Here’s one of the constitutional representatives in Congress (Thomas Massie from Kentucky) conducting an interview on the topic. https://youtu.be/T90fPuwxwCU
From the police officers perspective it sounds like the shooting was warranted. The question of whether the order they were following was warranted is a separate matter. I would tend to guess not but I can’t tell from the reporting. Maybe the person who requested it or the judge who issued it should be brought up on manslaughter charges.
It might be necessary, but I think it would be better if the people of these states got the laws altered or revoked themselves rather than relying on someone from above to swoop in and fix things for them.
I certainly hope they have body cams to prove it. How do we know that the victim’s (and he IS a victim) gun didn’t accidentally discharge when the officer grabbed it? It says there were other adults in the house, why didn’t they take him to the county psych ward for a 3 day hold for evaluation and observation (I’m sure Maryland has one) if he was perceived to be a danger to himself or others. I’m sure they could have made “plans” to go to dinner or out somewhere he’d be comfortable going, then take a detour there, then there would have been no gun involved.
I don’t doubt the police were in fear for their own safety, but it was 5am in Baltimore, how would you answer the door at 5am in Baltimore? It wasn’t in Pleasantville, USA.
The point is, this man was not a criminal, yet he got the death penalty. He didn’t deserve to die because someone said he might be in a mental health crisis. Did he need help from a mental health professional, maybe so, but there are other less dangerous ways to go about it.
It’s creeping tyranny
Correct! As someone else in the YouTube comment thread stated,
A crime MUST be committed prior to punishment! Just because an individual is mentally unstable or mentally ill or flat-out NUTS is insufficient justification for imposing punishment if he never commits a crime.
It’s not even about what somebody is thinking. It’s about what somebody thinks that someone is thinking. The person/committee in the middle making the determination might be unstable link in the chain.
I agree with the majority of what you’ve said, BUT the warrant issue is a problem. It MUST first be preceded with probable cause as determined by a person qualified to identify someone as “potentially” criminally insane. Judges WON’T deny these warrants because they’re too afraid to be wrong. I seriously doubt that ALL police/sheriff’s departments have a person on staff (or even on call) qualified enough to make this type of determination.
I am not being flip but it is important to note that some of the looniest lunatics that I have spoken with are mental health professionals. The mental health care establishment has so far expanded the definition of “mentally ill” (for want of a better term) that pretty much every person out there can be classified, voluntarily or not, as mentally ill. See ICD-10. Google it.
I can only imagine. The DSM-IV that I have was published in 1994 and is 886 pages and includes 12 pages of index with approx 50 different “mental illness” identified per index page – that’s approx 600 as of 1994.
Bill has a valid point about someone who wants to kill people can do so without a gun. Guns do make it easier though. In Ohio, a red flag law has been proposed that is about as good as can be. A complaint is done by neighbors, family or others. Guns are not taken away yet. Within 3 days a judge makes a determination and takes the gun away for 6 months. Then within a time I cannot remember a psych evaluation is done. After 3 months a petition to get the guns back can be done. And if the person who made the initial complaint did it frivously, it is a first degree misdemeanor. Of course, who knows what will come out of the legislature?
There is still no due process and no judge will deny the claim for fear of being wrong. He’s not qualified to make that type of determination. The person accused is guilty until proven innocent. Who pays the legal and medical costs for the accused so that he can prove himself innocent of being insane?
Let’s assume they actually use this law to take guns away from someone that really is homicidal. All that is accomplished is you forced this individual to use another weapon, and some of the other options are far more lethal than an “assault” rifle. In the end, you may have actually gotten more people killed, meanwhile, you have screwed with lots of other people who wouldn’t have harmed anyone. Red Flag laws spring from the minds of dipshit liberals that make decisions devoid of due diligence and based on nothing but their feelings and uneducated poorly thought out opinions.
If these red flag laws are a valid and reasonable form of control, then the logical conclusion is that nobody — not even the POTUS — qualify for gun ownership. I mention the POTUS because regardless of the political affiliation of any POTUS, someone always believes him to be crazy. This logical fallacy is completely lost on all supporters of such oppression.
Any law passed will be taken to its furthest most absurd extreme. I give you municipalities fining/shutting down children’s lemonade stands for failure to obtain a business license. This law would be no different. And once passed, there will be no way to stop its being used in the most absurd ways possible. The discussion should not be about who decides, but about protection of the individual from intrusive government regulation.
Barbara is quite right. What is as bad as any one being hurt or killed, is to spend your efforts on the smallest problem area. Many more people are lost in other ways. Abortion kills huge numbers of those that have done no harm.