Red Flag laws don't suspend gun rights, they violate them

Hanna Scott of Seattle's KIRO radio reports that prosecutors in Washington state are wrestling with the question of whether or not the state's Red Flag law applies to minors, and trying to stretch it to do so.

Under the law, Scott writes, a judge can issue an "extreme risk protection order" to "temporarily suspend a person's gun rights, even if they haven't committed a crime."

Scott gets that part wrong. Judges who issue extreme risk protection order aren't "suspending" their victims' gun rights and constitutionally mandated due process and property protections. They're ordering police to violate those rights and ignore those protections. There's a difference.

Rights are inherent characteristics possessed by all human beings, not privileges to be granted or withheld at the whim of a bureaucrat in a black dress. And the point of the 5th Amendment's due process clause is precisely to protect the life, liberty, and property of Americans against arbitrary judicial edicts. Under the U.S. Constitution, "laws" which violate those protections are null and void.