This past weekend our nation’s Vice President Kamala Harris visited the site of one of our nation’s worst school shootings to use it and some of the victims’ family members as political props to further the White House’s goal of disarming Americans. The vehicle to achieve one more part of this disarmament effort was pitched in the guise of red-flag laws, on the surface and without any real intellectual or constitutional probing, seemingly a good idea.
The basic premise is this: Let’s take guns out of the hands of crazy people who might randomly shoot up schools, malls, concerts and anywhere people congregate before they do it and try to save the unnecessary loss of innocent lives.
Not many people would argue against preventing gun violence and saving innocent lives. At least I hope not. It is a goal every society, and individual, should wish to see realized.
But how that safety is achieved is where the arguments begin. Depending on where a person falls on the issue, often divided along political lines, makes for two—really many—divergent paths to get to the same basic goal: reducing crime, protecting innocent life and securing a sense of safety in our communities.
More specifically, where red-flag laws are concerned, the goal is to keep firearms out of the hands of mentally unstable individuals who pose a threat to themselves and more significantly, others. it, too, is something most people, pro-2A as well as anti-gunners, can agree. The devil, as always, is in the details—and in the definitions and manner in which the laws are carried out.
The White House’s “fact sheet” defined red flag laws as laws “that allows a family member or law enforcement to seek a court order to temporarily take away access to guns if they feel a gun owner may harm themselves or others.” But what exactly is temporary? Two weeks? A month? A year? Until a judge or local official decides? And what is the process by which a person gets their rights restored? Do they have to hire an expensive attorney and petition a court, or are they to assume they will simply await a good judge’s ability to remember that time is up or the case needs to be revisited to restore them?
Guns can often be removed from an individual and their rights denied without any due process or hearing under red flag laws, which is a huge concern. Because of this, red-flag laws can be easily weaponized by anyone wanting to see someone disarmed i.e., a divorce dispute, a disagreement between neighbors, somebody upset at being fired from work, and many other situations.
And what and who exactly determines what level of behavior should be met before firearms are removed from a person? Somebody who makes threats in person and online, walks around talking to the voices in their head and exhibits high levels of mental illness are what most people think about when they think about red-flag laws. But what about the person who loses a loved one or is dealing with financial issues so is a little depressed? Should they have their guns taken away? Because they certainly can under the way these laws are being written.
In fact, just last week, Republicans placed a rider in the budget bill that restored the rights of veterans who had had their right to possess firearms removed because they needed help managing their finances. Democrats were angered that these rights were being restored.
What about gun rights being taken away from individuals who have a different political leaning than someone in power? Red-flag laws could even be used for such nefarious purposes.
Don’t think so? A Louisiana Illuminator article and others are noting how under the pretext of what took place Jan. 6 and even using President Trump’s political rhetoric on the campaign trail more states are banning firearms at polling places. Virtually all, if not every single one of these laws are being driven and passed by Democrats, despite laws that protect poll workers from harassment and intimidation already being in place in most states. Conversely, many Republicans are vehemently opposing them. So, the argument ultimately breaks down along party lines and any true debate over what works and what doesn’t immediately dissolves. It’s simply, as we used to joke using hillbilly vernacular, “yer either fir us or agin us.” But this is what the current manner of discourse in our political institutions has brought us to.
Interestingly, most polling places are also in schools, by one estimate as many as 60%, which would mean firearms are already banned from those polling places, so the law is largely redundant.
These laws are undoubtedly aimed not at criminals who are the ones who commit crimes, but at citizens legally carrying firearms for self-defense.
And while red-flag laws are ostensibly focused on preventing people with mental illness from possessing firearms and are almost universally pushed by Democrats, some recent articles have attacked Republicans for “focusing on mental illness” in the wake of mass shootings, saying, “blaming mental illness for gun violence is counterproductive and cruel.”
“The primary misconception that exists among many members of the public is that gun violence, particularly mass shootings, results primarily from mental illness, and in fact that’s not true,” Dr Paul Appelbaum, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, told The Guardian.
“This widespread belief has ‘diverted attention from ways of making it harder for people to get guns,’ he said, and instead focused attention on mental health interventions unlikely to prevent much violence,” the article continued unmasking the real goal of Ivy League liberals.
But the fact remains, anybody who indiscriminately shoots people because of some perceived slight from society or anger at the world, is not in their right mind. So, even liberals can’t agree on the issue, depending on who they are talking to.
Therein lies the argument and the short comings of today’s red-flag efforts. Keeping guns out of the hands of people who would do harm to others is a noble goal, but when it is being pushed by a single political party bent on simply disarming and weakening the country at any cost, it is a policy that simply can’t be trusted and one that everyone who cares about all of their rights should be very concerned about.
This is stupid. All 50 states already have laws on the books that can be used to take guns away from someone who may be a threat to them selves or someone else but they mostly allow for due process with legal recourse in most states. These laws have existed for at least 100 years.
They want one focused on ‘guns’ because with ‘guns’ a person can claim anything they want ’cause guns’ without having to actually show their claims are true. So, for example, an anti-gun person could gen up their fake outrage to claim ‘he told me to not let my dog crap in his yard. he owns guns and I’m afraid hes going to shoot me over this.” yet not have to prove they were really afraid of an actual threat or the threat condition even existed. And that’s all it takes, and some judge or police department is gonna say “Yep, go get him and take his guns.” because they will have to do that under red-flag simply ’cause ‘gun’.
All of it is ‘we say therefore its true’.
And watch, they will start with numbers again saying how successful for ‘confiscation and a life saved it was and over 90% of their numbers will have been based on false claims and there never was a threat of harm to self or others.
Its like their suicide claims. For example; The anti-gun claim taking guns out of homes prevents suicides. It doesn’t actually. The part they are not telling you is that in over 90% of cases the suicide ideation person still commits suicide later using other means, after the gun was removed from the home. But in their numbers they count it as a successful suicide prevention. Its bogus word games.
Another example: Nor do they tell you that of the ~100,000 suicide (including attempts) by drug annually almost 80% of those suicide ideation people had access to a gun in some manner (e.g. borrowed or stolen or owned) but still chose drugs but the anti-gun will tell you its more likely a suicide ideation person with access to a gun will use it for suicide and that simply is not true.
If people, who are determined through proper due process to be too dangerous to own firearms, are still walking freely among us in any regard, that perhaps is the real crux of the issue.
but “they” feel the more disarmed the less chance of an event. ah, no they don’t, they just want them all.
Twice a week from her courtroom, Florida 13th Circuit Court Judge Denise Pomponio decides who in Hillsborough County can no longer be trusted with a gun.
In just the last two months, she has taken away the firearm privileges of dozens of people, including a dad accused of threatening to “shoot everyone” at his son’s school, a woman who police say attempted suicide and then accidentally shot her boyfriend during a struggle for her revolver, a husband who allegedly fired multiple rounds in the street to “blow off steam” after losing a family member, a bullied 13-year-old witnesses overheard saying, “If all of 8th grade is missing tomorrow you will know why,” and a mother arrested for brandishing a handgun at another mom after a school bus incident between their daughters.
This is Florida’s “red flag” law in action. (June 1 2022)
enemas both foreign and domestic.
what happened to my post? It did not show up as going to moderation, it actually posted but I come back to the page and its gone.
If you are using a VPN sometimes the gremlins grab the post and eat it. Switch to a different server or turn off the VPN.
everything else has been posting fine with VPN, except this, and the vpn issue you outline has never happened to me before.
the moderation and mysteriously vanishing posts has increased with the new owners. my post posted fine, showed up fine, a few minutes later it vanishes..that has nothing to do with VPN as it did actually post.
it’s not just me either, others have been experiencing it that are not using VPN, and I’ve had it happen while not using VPN.
so I doubt its a VPN thing.
the posts were simply removed.
.40 cal,
Yep. I have experienced the same thing – comment posts, I can see it (without the ‘awaiting moderation’ message), and then a hour later, it’s gone.
At least the current management isn’t playing (so far) isn’t playing to old “oh, it’s not US; it’s the ‘algorithm’!” game. But, yeah, the moderation CONTINUES to be random, arbitrary, somewhat whimsical, and VERY individual/context dependent.
Looking forward to SNW building up its supporters so we can get some good comment threads going – so far, at least, most of the folks on there seem to (i) actually know something about guns, and (ii) aren’t there to campaign for a political POV.
Same here for me. Which is why you’ve been seeing fewer posts from me on TTAG in recent weeks/months. I’m also reading only perhaps 1/4 of the articles now. Being informed your comment is being held for moderation is one thing; being informed your multiple comments are being held on an increasingly frequent basis is frustrating.
But having them immediately (or quickly, minutes later upon page refresh) disappear without notice or reason is enough to discourage participation in the site altogether.
Man 40, if possum’s pun made it through, and your post didn’t, how bad was your post, anyhow?
Two of mine never posted last week, not even a “moderation” note for a trace, although a third did at least earn that. And I thought my posts were ok.
there wasn’t any of the ‘forbidden’ stuff it it, no curse words’ etc… just pointing out the stupid of this and why its dangerous and why they are lying by playing word games
I’ve gotten so that I usually copy/paste the text of a post into Notepad just prior to sending it. A couple times, I’ve had it either moderated, or simply disappeared, and I’ll try to post it again and it’ll go through. Once, I had one disappeared, so I reposted it and it went through that time, only to be followed by the original attempt half an hour later. Gremlins, that’s the only explanation. The same ones that infect people’s cars. “I swear, it made that noise all the way here! And now you’re telling me it’s quiet?”
It happens to me occasionally, I figure its Robo-Save for when I’m really drunk and /type/ stupid shit.
Robo-Save is like ArtiIntel only its different.
This is a problem I’ve noticed as well.
In combination with the moderation *issue* I increasingly find it not worth my time to deal with. Others *seem* to *agree*.
I suppose we could test that hypothesis, sort of, with just data from the comment section.
Statistically, since I built this stupid calculator and I might as well use it when I’m bored, let’s see if it’s likely that this observation is due to random chance… H(0)= observation is due to random chance and H(a)= observation is not due to random chance.
For the last 10 days the average comments/article is 36.47, Median= 30.5, Min = 8, Max = 158, Q1= 23, Q3= 43.5 and the sd = 25.84.
For comparison, the same time frame (March 17-27) in 2023 produced this:
Average = 60.59, Median = 54, Min = 28, Max =116, Q1 = 40, Q3= 72, sd = 26.14
Change (’23 to ’24): Average = -24.12 (-39.81%), Median = -23.5 (-43.52%), Min= -20, Max = +42, Q1= -5 Q3= -28.5, sd= -0.3
That would appear to not be random at a glance, but fuck it since I have this calculator open… I’ll throw it into a hypothesis test calculator, run a two sample t-test at 99% confidence and I get… T-crit = 0.0126, Test Statistic = 3.1464 and p=0.0036.
Since 3.1464 is farther away from 0 than 0.0126, we reject the null hypothesis, H(a) wins.
The drop in comments is not due to random chance based on these samples. That doesn’t mean it’s the moderation or the owners or something, it could be anything other than the null. It’s just not random. Something is going on.
[Note: Yeah, it’s true that this calculation doesn’t actually have any data for March 27, 2024 but, let’s be real, with a test statistic 249.7x larger than T-crit, the overall outcome is not gonna change if I wait until the end of the day.]
.
Nukes and F16’s shouldn’t be at theBidens disposal.
Red Flag that.
possum,
In support of your position, I understand that, on those rare occasions when “they” allow Senile Joe to eat his own food, they cut up any solid food first – they won’t even allow him to have plastic knives, or forks. But he’s TOTES “ready for four more years”, isn’t he??
Eventually the hormones synthesized from the pituitary gland of the Ruby Throated Hummingbird will wear off and ‘Our’ beloved Pestident will collapse.
However.
KH. , ,Huh?
The democratic party is kinda like a gunm pointing at your Baldwin isn’t it.
Let’s red flag Biden. He’s obviously mental illness impaired, has threatened to use the military against innocent American citizens, and has guns. He literally qualifies for being red flagged by every single ‘objective’ they want to apply.
I bash on ‘theBiden’, Joseph Robinett Biden, is not theBiden. TheBiden is a hydra. Worse yet not only a hydra but a tape worm.
Bidenomics.
JRB, Is not, but part of the hydra.
A big part. A powerful part.
56years+.
None Dare Call It Conspiracy.
The devil, as always, is in the details—and in the definitions and manner in which the laws are carried out.
LOL, no. Just no.
Stop debating the Left on its own terms. If you debate them on their terms then the ONLY POSSIBLE immediate outcome is a compromise between their position and the one they’ve convinced you to accept. You will always lose because this is a game where they always win. This is how they take bites at the apple.
Use your brain, yeesh.
The devil is not in the details. We already have the ability to adjudicate people as mentally defective. If that can’t be done “in time” then the blood is on the state’s hands.
If you want to deprive someone of their right to a firearm, do it in court BEFORE you strip them of property or the ability to legally acquire it. Not after.
Other than that, fuck right off. This is why FPC literally tells gun controllers on X “Fuck you, no”.
“Not many people would argue against preventing gun violence and saving innocent lives.”
Maynard would, on the basis that no one is actually innocent. Articles like this tempt me to agree.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ebr85ORhciU
Tool is a favorite of mine.
A lot of people in the ‘Nut House’ borrowed 4° album from me. I had on Cassette I think it was four°, I thought that one girl wasn’t going to give it back but she did.
I’ve still got that tape.
Also if you’ve got(LOL) a choice between NutHouse or prison take the NutHouse. The foods better, only the NutHouse don’t count on time served and the sentence is only what the physco nut doctor says it is. Like you might be locked up for 150 years before the nut doctor says your okay to be released into society. That’s different then the cereal murderer killer who gets life but is out in 25.
The difference is the food.
Quicksand.
I already live in a nuthouse, it’s called the USA.
Also, wait, there’s a 4° album?
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