'Red Flag Laws' Leave Gun Owners Defenseless

  • Source: Reason
  • by:
Responding to the mass shootings that took 22 lives in El Paso and nine in Dayton over the weekend, President Donald Trump said it should be easier to confiscate people's guns when they are deemed a threat to others. That prescription may or may not prevent any murders, but it will certainly hurt many innocent Americans by depriving them of their Second Amendment rights.

"We must make sure that those judged to pose a grave risk to public safety do not have access to firearms, and that, if they do, those firearms can be taken through rapid due process," the president said on Monday. "That is why I have called for red flag laws, also known as extreme risk protection orders."

Seventeen states and the District of Columbia have adopted such laws, most of them since the February 2018 massacre at a high school in Parkland, Florida. Although preventing mass shootings is the goal emphasized by advocates of red flag laws, data from Indiana and Connecticut, the first two states to enact them, show they are mainly used to protect people from their own suicidal impulses.

The evidence on whether they succeed in doing that is mixed, and so far there's no firm evidence that red flag laws prevent homicide. One thing is clear: Taking away people's guns based on predictions of what they might do with them raises thorny due process issues.

Gun Dynamics® in the Media

US News & World Report
NRATV
Fox Business
Nasdaq
Forbes
yahoo
Newsmax
GUN WORLD
NYT
guns.com
AAN
yournews
rocketnews
compuserve
srn news
Trumptrain
peoples trust toronto
dailyworld
bitcoinlove
techjollof
wgmd
Longroom
Christian Science Monitor
newstage
The Gun Feed
Forextv
investing.com