The left doesn’t believe red flag laws stop crime
Red flag laws have got to be one of the stupidest ideas to come out of the left since banning firearms based on what they look like—unless the left isn’t sincere about who these laws are meant to target. Red flag laws don’t make sense. Not if you take them at face value.
Even given the assumption that lawmakers on the left are being sincere, these laws are another example of the left blaming the weapon rather than the criminal. Here they have a person they think is going to kill lots of people, and they’re so afraid this person is going to kill lots of people that they want to take that person’s firearms immediately.1
And then, specifically and deliberately, their law leaves the person free to kill lots of people with other firearms, or other weapons entirely such as gasoline, bombs, poison, and vehicles.
The more cynical take is that the left is more interested in ways to take away our guns than in stopping actual mass murder.
Because there are ways to keep criminals from committing murder. Most of the red flags that we learn about after a mass murder is committed are actual criminal acts that should have resulted in putting or keeping the criminal in jail.
Paying attention to those red flags would have kept the murderer from committing the murders that the left uses to justify red flag laws.
Other red flags are symptoms of serious mental problems for which there are already laws in place for committing the person to restricted care.
That also would keep them from actually committing the murders.
But the red flags that the left enshrines into law aren’t flags at all. They’re just one person complaining about another person, sometimes even anonymously. It’s Facebook social dysfunction brought into the real world.
Red flag laws are yet another example of criminals committing crimes, and the left wanting to take self-defense weapons away from everyone else.
They are yet another example of the left looking at laws not being enforced—criminals allowed to go free—and wanting more laws against the law-abiding rather than enforcing the laws that would have stopped the criminals.
They are yet another example of if the left believed what they’re claiming they believe, they’d act far differently. If the left believed that the people targeted by red flag laws were going to kill, they would work to lock up the criminal, not the weapons. Locking up a criminal’s weapons doesn’t stop the criminal from starting a fire, or renting a large moving van, or buying poison, or any of the many other trivially easy ways that killers can and do kill. If the left truly believed their red flags were targeting murders, they’d take the red flags a lot more seriously than that. They wouldn’t take away the guns. They’d quarantine the murderer.
They don’t. Because they don’t believe that the people targeted by their laws are murderers. They don’t believe their red flags because this is also yet another example of the left taking terms that everyone understands and using them in a way that means nearly their opposite, hoping nobody notices the shuffle. Before these laws, red flags meant red flags, serious offenses that should have brought the criminal to the attention of law enforcement. Those red flags should have resulted in prison time or confinement. As embodied in the left’s laws, red flags mean little more than vague feelings of unease, or minor neighborly or familial disputes. Things that happen to everyone and everywhere, and are thus not red flags at all.
They could apply to anyone, in other words, which is itself a red flag. When the left says they want to stop crime, but pass laws that disarm non-criminals, when they say they want to protect victims, but instead treat the criminals as victims and disarm victims, when they say they want new laws but ignore the laws that aren’t being enforced, that is a red flag. It means their real goals are not their stated goals.
The left’s gun control policies create more victims in vulnerable populations, and make existing victims more vulnerable, specifically by reducing the ability of victims to defend themselves against criminals. Their laws empower criminals. The left claims they want to control criminals, but they really want to control everyone other than criminals.
Targeting criminals isn’t where power lies. Targeting everyone else is.
In response to U.S. homicide rate compared to gun control measures: Extrano’s Alley lists the U.S. homicide rate from 1885 to 1940, and somebody else puts it into a chart.
California has taken this a step further. Their new ammo law has blocked 191 purchases correctly; and 62,000 purchases incorrectly. Further, those 191 still have their firearms even though they shouldn’t.
That’s because the law is meant to focus on the people who aren’t a problem, not the people who are.
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- California’s new ammo law hurts the wrong people—and doesn’t stop ‘bad guys’ with guns: Holly A. Heyser at The Sacramento Bee
- “In the first four months, the checks thwarted 101 ammunition purchases by prohibited persons, and a staggering 62,000 purchases by people who had every right to buy ammunition… And here’s the kicker: Those 101 bad guys were already on a list! They’re known to the state, but the state clearly hasn’t yet disarmed them, which is a huge problem.” (Hat tip to Stephen Green at Instapundit)
- What Will and What Will Not Improve Public Safety in Firearm Violence Prevention: Derek M. Cohen at Texas Public Policy Foundation (PDF)
- “Finally, most GVRO laws also fail to remedy the underlying cause for removing firearms. If an individual is mentally ill enough to pose an imminent threat to himself or others, simply restricting access to firearms will not necessarily stop or delay tragedy. Replacement firearms are available through legal and illegal means, and other weaponry such as knives or makeshift weaponry such as vehicles are ever-present.”
More gun control
- The Uplifters vs. the Forgotten Man
- From H.L. Mencken in the Baltimore Evening Sun, November 30, 1925.
- Why do gun owners think the left wants to take our guns?
- Gun owners think the left wants to take away guns because the left keeps refusing commonsense gun laws in favor of laws that ban guns.
- Civil rights vs. showboat killers
- If we want to take away people’s civil rights to stop the showboat killers that seem to have proliferated since Columbine, is it worth it?
- The Vicious Cycle of Mass Murders
- We now know what went wrong. Let’s ignore the ghouls on Facebook and fix it.
- The institutional forgetfulness of the press
- We no longer have to rely on the press as our institutional memory. The Internet has made it harder for the left to pretend the past doesn’t exist, or to say one thing here and another there.
- Nine more pages with the topic gun control, and other related pages
More Orwellian redefinitions
- White Supremacy: The Reincarnation of Stephen Douglas
- The modern Democratic Party, and the left in general, seems to be reincarnating Stephen Douglas and other early Democrat defenders of slavery and white supremacy. “That’s mighty white of you,” they say, when blacks show independence and reason.