Mark W. Smith - First They Came for the Gun Owners: The Campaign to Disarm You and Take Your Freedoms

THROWING THE RED FLAG: WEAPONIZING MENTAL HEALTH TO DISARM AMERICANS, ONE GUN OWNER AT A TIME

THE PERILS OF INDIVIDUAL DISARMAMENT PROCEDURES

o really understand the gun lobbyists playbook, you must recognize that its thick, sophisticated, and stuffed with contingency plans. If one attack on your gun rights fails, theyll try another. And then another. The gun grabbers are like the velociraptors in the original Jurassic Park movie: They have keen problem-solving intelligence and they hunt in packs. They probe the fences for weaknesses scientifically, never attacking the same place twice. And they remember.

The anti-gunners are the samealways testing the American Constitution for weaknesses when it comes to the right to keep and bear arms. Theyll keep pushing in the courts, in the legislatures, and in the court of public opinion for major victories against the Second Amendment. But, if broad attacks on gun rights dont have traction this year, theyll put them aside and instead conduct focused raids targeting individual gun owners. Or they will push subtle bills that make gun ownership more difficult, and do so in a way that most wont notice until its too late.

Red flag laws make possible the slow erosion of Second Amendment rights on an individual by individual basis by furnishing a summarythat is, quick-and-dirtyjudicial mechanism to seize an individuals lawfully-owned firearms on a minimal showing that there are behavioral or other red flags raising doubts about the gun owners mental health. The enactment of red flag laws empowers millions of people to go after the liberties of American gun owners, one citizen at a time, largely without risk for abusing the process. Red flag laws outsource the war on gun rights to largely liberal psychologists, prejudiced police, leftist social workers, activist judges, pandering politicians, politicized district attorneys who often control the police, and litigious individuals (be they nosy neighbors or vengeful ex-spouses).

Red flag laws insinuate themselves into our lives by tapping into real fears that any one of us might legitimately have in the wake of tragic mass shootings. None of us wants to face a maniac wielding a gun or any weapon, for that matter. We can all agree on that. Just like violent convicted felons, people who are seriously mentally ill with violent predilections should not have access to firearms. Playing on that simple truth and those reasonable fears, enemies of the right to bear arms spin an intricate legal web of methods by which ordinary people, who pose no threat to anyone, can be arbitrarily demonized and stripped of their Second Amendment rights. If such laws keep getting passed, it could happen to me. Or to you.

All it takes is one person who holds a grudge against you and is willing to make a phone call articulating a credible-sounding story.

Maybe you dont believe that most liberals who have only disdain for the Second Amendment are willing to use such thuggish means to disarm Americans. If so, you do not understand the left. Ever heard of a man named Brett Kavanaugh? Hes on the Supreme Court now, no thanks to Democrats in the Senate.

The left opposes Kavanaughs constitutional views, especially his strong support for the constitutional right to keep and bear arms. The left views Kavanaugh as the ultimate gun rights supporter due to a dissenting opinion he wrote as a federal appeals court judge, in which he stated that D.C.s ban on ordinary semiautomatic rifles should be struck down as unconstitutional. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) called Kavanaughs constitutional views on firearms and the Second Amendment extreme.

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The opportunistic political vilification that seemed to be an aberration when Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas was vilified at his Senate confirmation hearing decades ago has now become the norm. Writing in National Review , Andrew McCarthy summed up what Kavanaughs confirmation process revealed about his opponents, who are the same activists and politicians who have only contempt for your Second Amendment rights:

The Left stands ready to eradicate any norm at any time if there is political advantage in it. The latest to be cast aside are the precepts that we never tolerate unbridled, abusive investigations, nor do we abide full-blown criminal investigations without solid evidence that a crime has been committedand even then, we demand adherence to time-honored limits. When the Left criminalizes political opposition, no crime is required; just gossamer-thin, incoherent, uncorroborated, often unverifiable allegations.

This is just how the left rolls nowadays in the era of #MeToo. If leftists would do all that to a prominent, extraordinarily credentialed, and highly respected judge and public servanta protg of the late Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote all the gay rights decisions that liberals, in particular, lovewhat do you think they will be willing to say about Joe Six-Pack when they want to confiscate his firearms?

MENTAL HEALTH ASSESSMENTS AND THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS

Lets go back to that common-sense, common-ground observation I made before: Nobody wants violent felons or dangerous mental patients to have firearms. We can also all probably agree that we dont even want these people walking our streets. Thats a genuine concern. And its the kind of thing that (especially after tragedies like what happened in Parkland, Las Vegas, and El Paso) leads reasonable folks to think, There ought to be a law that keeps guns away from the crazies. The problem is that those who want to take guns away from everyone are skilled at seizing on sentiments like that to advance their broader anti-gun agenda designed not so much to stop violent crimes but to disarm ordinary, law- abiding Americans.

You say, There ought to be a law that denies firearms to the dangerously mentally ill. What if I told you there already is one?

In fact, there is already a whole book full of laws written to restrict the mentally ill from buying guns.

Beyond this, there are laws for detaining and institutionalizing people whom the courts have determined, after proper psychiatric examination and diagnosis, are a danger to themselves or others. The law lays out a process for determining that. Its called civil commitment.

Before the 1960s, the civil commitment process was widely used, and sometimes abused, with hundreds of thousands of people landing in psychiatric hospitals, sometimes for years. Reforms scaled back the number and length of such commitments, and many mental hospitals closed. Now most psychiatric patients get short-term care, medication, and counseling that let them return to the community.

So there are already laws that prohibit the mentally ill from buying and possessing firearms. There is also an existing civil court process whereby individuals who are a danger to themselves and to others can be taken away from any firearms and, equally important, off the streets where they could hurt themselves or others. So why are the anti-gunners advocating for yet another legal weapon in their arsenal to stop the mentally ill from hurting people, whether with guns or otherwise? Whats the point of creating specific laws designed to take firearms away from the mentally ill, the strange, the creepy, the abnormal, or those deemed dangerous, while leaving those same mentally ill individuals in their homes and on our streets to commit violence against themselves or others with something other than a firearm? Perhaps because these laws have nothing to do with protecting society from those with mental illnesses and a proclivity for violenceand everything to do with demonizing guns and gun owners, while creating new incentives and opportunities to harass law-abiding gun owners.