I’m not on the fence at all - these red flag laws are an abomination to a free society and amount to outright theft by the state.
This is guilty until proven innocent and nothing more than asset forfeiture without even the pretense of a crime! (And notice how all the stories about the evils of asset forfeiture have suddenly disappeared from the media?)
You wanna take someone’s guns? The state should take them to court through due process like any other property grab.
Anything else is unamerican and leads us further to a totalitarian state.
2A Rights supporters need to scrutinize these cases very closely and apply vigorous legal challenges as needed.
Has anybody been shot or killed in the process?
Those in Florida should keep a few of their guns well hidden or buried in PVC pipe.
Any comment from Wayne LaPierre or the NRA on this?
The raw number of guns is not the issue.. the issue is how many individuals were flagged and for what reasons...
Need some more accurate reporting before folks go off all half cocked.
Florida has 21.3 Million citizens. even if this is a 1 gun per confiscation which I doubt, my guess is the typical gun confiscation under red flag is multiple guns per individual.. but lets just say its a 1 to 1... that equates to a 0.016% confiscation rate against the entire population...
Approximately 5% of adults experience a mental illness in any one year, so hardly are we looking at anything that looks remotely like its a wholesale systemic abuse of the law.
I have no doubt that you are going to find individual cases that are questionable, if you dig into them, but as a whole, this isn’t looking like any sort of huge evidence that the law is being abused wholesale.
These laws pre-emptively remove a person’s constitutional rights. There should be a heavy burden on the state to prove a clear and present danger.
The intention, or even the likelihood, of committing a crime is not itself a crime. Pre-emptive justice is no justice at all.
And FL is supposed to be a “conservative” state.
I wonder how many will eventually get their firearms back STILL IN WORKING ORDER.
All with merit no doubt. /s
What would be more helpful than number of guns removed, is number of citizens who have had their guns removed. And the percent of those citizens who had a history of violent offences. The percent that are elderly.
Unconstitutional, but will remain on the books until someone with enough financial backing can take it to the SCOTUS.
The law denies due process, and if for no other reason should be declared unconstitutional................
Just who determines who’s subject to red flag laws? PSYCHIATRISTS? Show me a shrink and I’ll show you someone with more issues than all the newsstands in Times Sq, Grand Central, JFK, O Hare, LAX and Heathrow combined. Dirty little secret, the reason most people either majoring in psych or in the field are there is to try and figure out why they themselves are so effed up in the head to begin with. A classic case of the blind leading the blind.
Before “Red Flag” laws, Prosecutors could and occationaly did request a Judge to require gun confiscation for conviction. That is due process.
As part of civil proceedings, esp where a divorce case was resulting in a restraining order, Judges did issue orders for the guns to be removed and the person with the restraining order was prohibited form possession of a fire arm.
The failure was in the lack of utilization of those due process enforcement options.
I am of the opinion that any law which deprives a citizen of their Constitutional rights, MUST past “strict scruitny”. Red flag laws do not and violate due process. They should be struck down as unconstitutional by SCOTUS. All of them - state or federal.
Nice PSL, gosh I miss mine.
This is sort of like the FISA court procedure.
Certainly the red-flag laws are
U N C O N S T I T U T I O N A L .
That is obvious and should be said often.
The legislation was passed in the panicked aftermath of Parkland School shooting. Rick Scott(R) is one heck of a campaigner and he won by a rather thin margin over incumbent Bill Nelson(D). Scott was something of a carpet-bagger and has so much money that he was essentially able to buy the elections which he won (IMO).
Since Tom Cruise’s “Minority Report” is fiction and none of us really have clairvoyance, there is no way to really determine whether the red flag laws actually work.
But, having been a concealed carry guy for over forty years and supporter of 2A,I also recognize that there are people out there that shouldn’t have firearms. The question becomes, how do you sort them out from the rest of society that should be allow to have firearms? And, how do you keep the people who shouldn’t have firearms, from having them?
We thought it would be a deterrent when we created laws that added mandatory jail time for the possession of a firearm in the act of committing a crime or for a felon to be in possession of a firearm. Now we hear story after story, time after time, where neither of those instances have been enforced. We could go on and on about the “laws on the books” that never amount to anything, so we ask ourselves, “why do we need another law,” especially since what have don’t work or don’t get enforced.
There DOES have to be a solution out there, but there is no way it can be found, unless both sides of this issue can be brutally honest about the facts.
Good, honest,law abiding people, according to the second amendment, have the right to own and bear arms without any infringements. Many non-law abiding people do not. As simple as that.
Good luck sorting them out.
Somewhat playing ‘Devils Advocate’ here but in a true sense,
‘WE’ ASKED FOR AND DEMANDED THIS.
Remember after the Parkland shooting it was revealed that kid was even on the FBI ‘watch’ list as well as local authorities and ‘WE’ demanded something be done.
Well, they went draconian on us and, as that ‘Mooslimb’ said, ‘somebody did something’.
Same as after a shooting ‘WE’ point out that under present laws the guy/gal would have been able to obtain the gun anyway so no sense passing new ones.
I don’t think that is the proper way to address that problem. Just gives ‘them’ more excuse to go after US.
I tell ‘them’ that if taking MY gun away will stop shootings etc would rapes and sexual assault stop if ‘we’ cut off ‘your’ tallywacker?