Two articles about Red Flag laws that somehow will not be enforced.
A most confusing matter… the world has gone amiss when this happens when we try and prevent mass/school shootings through legislation?
New York Times: Fearing a mass shooting, police took his guns. A judge gave them back.
The authorities in the Seattle area came across an alarming photo on social media at the beginning of October. It showed a man holding two AK-47-style rifles. The caption above read: “one ticket for joker please.”
With only a couple of days left before the opening of the “Joker” movie, law enforcement agencies scrambled to assess the threat level of the message. As detectives waded through the man’s online history, they encountered additional troubling posts: Charels Donnelly, 23, talked about threatening his mother with a gun and described fantasies about hurting women.
“i will shoot any woman any time for any reason,” he posted on Twitter.
Facing a spate of calamitous mass shootings, including three in the last week in California, 17 states have adopted “red flag” laws as a vital new tool to seize weapons from people they deem imminently dangerous. But as more authorities rush to take pre-emptive action against a rise in gun deaths, they are finding themselves colliding with the limitations of those statutes and the Constitution.
Now local courts are having to grapple with First Amendment and Second Amendment implications while trying to discern whether troubling comments are just crass shenanigans, isolated outbursts, or justifiable reasons to take a person’s guns.
CBS 60 Minutes: A look at Red Flag laws and the battle over one in Colorado
Thursday, a high school in Santa Clarita, California, was the scene of the 366th mass shooting in America this year. Each seems to reignite the debate over gun legislation. In recent years, 17 states and the District of Columbia have adopted Red Flag laws which allow the confiscation of firearms if a gun owner raises a Red Flag with threatening behavior. California adopted Red Flag in 2016. And there’s been a big movement toward the law recently with 12 states adopting it in the 21 months since the high school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Colorado is one of them but, in defiance, nearly half of the state’s counties have declared themselves Second Amendment sanctuaries. Colorado’s Red Flag law takes effect New Year’s Day. The story of how it works and why it’s fiercely debated begins with a tragedy on New Year’s Eve, 2017.
[From PERF News]
Improving Police: A Necessary Conversation 