Tag Archives: politics

Red Flag Laws, Again

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Now The Wall Street Journal is beating the drum for red flag laws that would authorize seizure of weapons from anyone, and anyone associated with that one, that Government, or a Government-appointed/approved body deems a threat.

Consider one of the three cute anecdotes the WSJ cited via its drumbeat.

Police were tipped off by school officials that a 14-year-old boy had praised mass shootings. He used campus computers to search firearms and terms like “white power.” Taken to a psychiatrist, the student said he was joking.
The boy’s father owned a rifle and a pistol. A short-term red-flag order was obtained, and the two firearms were relinquished. After a hearing a one-year order was issued. [In all three anecdotes cited, the outcome was a “one-year order.”]

The WSJ right wondered whether

the father whose guns were handed over suggest[ed] that he was unable or unwilling to secure them from his 14-year-old son?

Then the Editors dismissed this trivial concern.  I ask, though, what happened to the father’s Second Amendment rights? I answer with dismay: they seem to have been trampled without a fare-thee-well. His firearms were taken for no better reason than that someone associated with him was deemed maybe a threat sometime in the future. The boy’s claim that he was joking seems to have been dismissed just as out of hand.

There are larger problems, though, than just a few carefully selected anecdotes.  What about false positives? Where will the wrongly accused—whether mistakenly or maliciously—go to get his reputation back?

What about false negatives? Now the true threat is both warned and angrified—and in the same household, perhaps, as the one who accused him.

With true due process, how can the system act quickly enough to forestall an imminent threat?

The WSJ‘s Editors closed their piece with—perhaps—a glimmer of understanding:

…red-flag laws are no panacea for mass shootings. But…if reasonably drafted, they appear to be a step forward: gun control for the dangerous and unstable.

But then they demonstrate their fatal misunderstanding.  Red flag laws cannot be reasonably drafted, not only for the reasons above but for the WSJ‘s rationalization of that step forward: the laws focus on the tools a dangerous and unstable person might use and not on the dangerous and unstable person.

No system is perfect, certainly, but no system should be put in place that threatens the liberty and fundamental rights of all of us because a tiny per centage of us are bent on mayhem, especially when that system is so badly flawed as the one proposed here.

The energy being pumped into this euphemism for an assault on our 2nd Amendment should be focused instead on finding ways to deal specifically with those tiny few dangerous and unstable persons.

Identity Politics

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In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal ironically headlined We Liberals Need Self-Criticism, Ioannis Gatsiounis, a writer who reports on race and politics, called for an end to Progressive-Democrats’ (whom he thinks are “liberal”) practice of identity:

[S]top obsessing over identity.

But in the very next sentence, he went right back to identity politics:

We can and should support policies that benefit disadvantaged groups, from criminal-justice reform to a higher minimum wage and affordable health care.

Pick one: either liberals Progressive-Democrats should stop obsessing over identity—stop singling out some groups of Americans for special treatment—or they should continue singling out some groups of Americans for special treatment—continue their identity politics.

Unfortunately, the 21st century segregation of identity politics is at the core of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s ideology.

Debates and Getting Things Done

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Some Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidates aren’t making the cut for Party’s September debate gala in Houston. So far, only 10, or so, have met debate criteria for get there, out of a field of some 20 candidates. The ones missing out are upset with the long-announced rules, and other now ex- candidates are dropping out of the race altogether.

If they’re serious about their complaints and not just whining like spoiled toddlers, those candidates who don’t make the “official” September debate would get together and hold their own debate at the same time and across the street from the DNC’s debate.

While they’re there, they could address an item Montana Governor Steve Bullock (D) raised:

As we’re losing governors from this race, maybe we ought to think about also, like, are these DNC rules for the debates disadvantaging folks that actually have to get things done?

Bullock and his confreres could debate why those governors are unable to “get done” their appearance on the big boys’ stage. Organizing their own debate would go a short way toward redeeming Bullock’s claim.

A Hypocrisy in Texas

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The Texas State government has passed a law making it illegal for government entities in the state of Texas to enter into a transaction with an abortion provider or an abortion provider’s affiliates.

Austin, the State’s capital, thinks it knows better and is working to get 150 stacks folded into its 2020 city budget to fund abortion services.  Here’s Austin city council member Greg Casar, making plain the hypocrisy:

In Austin, we believe and announce that everyone has a right to healthcare. We believe and announce that abortion is healthcare, and we refuse to back down on protecting our continuance basic rights.

Everyone but babies have a right to healthcare, that is.  The city is working hard to turn its collective back on a baby’s basic right to life.

Keep Austin Weird is the city’s unofficial motto.  With folks like Casar, and his supporters Mayor Pro Tempore Delia Garza and fellow council members Leslie Pool and Paige Ellis in the city’s government, the motto is closer to Keep Austin Bloody.

Gun “Control”

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The Wall Street Journal‘s student-written Future View column turned to gun control recently, and Rasmus Haure-Peterson, a philosophy and economics major at the University of Oxford, had a thought in his letter.  He wrote, in part,

Given the spree of mass shootings, some targeted gun-control measures are needed for the sake of a safer America, even if they curb some people’s rights on the margins. But gun-rights advocates won’t make that concession unless they know that giving an inch won’t cost them a mile.

Haure-Peterson was on the right track until he got to the first part of this. It’s wrong, morally and legally, to punish—especially under the insidious guise of “restrictions,” or during the hysteria of “mass shootings”—everyone for the crimes of a few. Go after the few.

He got back on track with the last. As long as the Left and their Progressive-Democratic Party flat refuse to say what their gun control limiting principle is, the only possible conclusion is that they’re after the natural limit: taking all of our weapons.