Posted on 09/02/2022 5:16:12 AM PDT by rellimpank
Chicago is one of the nation's gun violence hotspots and a seemingly ideal place to employ Illinois' "red flag” law that allows police to step in and take firearms away from people who threaten to kill. But amid more than 8,500 shootings resulting in 1,800 deaths since 2020, the law was used there just four times.
It's a pattern that's played out in New Mexico, with nearly 600 gun homicides during that period and a mere eight uses of its red flag law. And in Massachusetts, with nearly 300 shooting homicides and just 12 uses of its law.
An Associated Press analysis found many U.S. states barely use the red flag laws touted as the most powerful tool to stop gun violence before it happens, a trend blamed on a lack of awareness of the laws and resistance by some authorities to enforce them even as shootings and gun deaths soar.
AP found such laws in 19 states and the District of Columbia were used to remove firearms from people 15,049 times since 2020, fewer than 10 per 100,000 adult residents. Experts called that woefully low and not nearly enough to make a dent in gun violence, considering the millions of firearms in circulation and countless potential warning signs law enforcement officers encounter from gun owners every day.
“It’s too small a pebble to make a ripple,” Duke University psychologist Jeffrey Swanson, who has studied red flag gun surrender orders across the nation, said of the AP tally. “It’s as if the law doesn’t exist.”
“The number of people we are catching with red flags is likely infinitesimal,” added Indiana University law professor Jody Madeira, who like other experts who reviewed AP’s findings wouldn’t speculate how many red flag removal orders would be necessary to make a differenc
(Excerpt) Read more at lasvegassun.com ...
These laws apply to legal gun owners with CCW licenses. Apparently, most of the criminals doing the shootings aren’t allowed to carry a gun anyway.
Why does Vegas care about Chicago?
Turns out criminals don’t telegraph to family, friends, and the public when they are about to go shoot someone.
They get used way too frequently in divorce cases as yet another tool to harass a soon-to-be ex-spouse.
They get used quite a bit in other family disputes to disarm troublesome relatives.
They have been used a few times to make an example of people who have been too annoying to the local authorities. The majority of Red Flag requests come from police in large urban centers. They use them against their "frequent flyers" - people who get too many calls to their residences and make offensive or threatening statements to the officers.
It is stupid to make threats, or even rude comments to police officers.
Police in suburban and rural areas do not commonly request Red Flag orders and are often quite unfamiliar with them.
What Red Flag laws do not is reduce crime. They were not designed for that purpose. They were designed to facilitate incremental confiscation of firearms in a fashion that would provoke the least amount of resistance.
They have not been very successful at that purpose either. “It’s too small a pebble to make a ripple,” says Duke University psychologist Jeffrey Swanson.
Right. More failure. So, they want to double down on their efforts.
We know that one murderer in New Mexico sneaked in from Hollywood.
BUT, we are a very conservative county and Sheriff was widely rebuked for supporting Red Flag law.
It seems to be some kind of odd finding for this author, that criminals don’t typically telegraph to the world THEY are violent criminals!
The exceptions to this rule are the mob, mafia, and other government-funded-alphabet-letter-agency-backed groups!! These groups of people talk about their rabid want and need to maim and murder people by volume! And the reason these groups tell everyone is they know 99.9% of the people within these groups will not cooperate with the police when push comes to shove!!
Other criminals have to seem like they have a somewhat normal life to keep the shade off their criminal careers!!
Red flag laws are simply a way for leftists to take guns away from conservatives.
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