Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/07/19/the-problem-with-red-flag-gun-laws.html
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Such a tragedy. My heart goes out to the victim. Good post.
It also seems to me to be an opportunity to Willy Horton the hell out of the Rhode Island Second Amendment Coalition. And before anyone points out that this is obviously a crass exploitation of a wholly preventable tragedy, may I point out that the 2nd Amendment absolutists would do this 24/7/365 if it suited their narrative.
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This is another case where mandatory insurance for buying and owning a firearm could help in part. Conviction or not, the insurer could deny it if there was an arrest for domestic violence on the record. It’s not a perfect or complete solution, but every additional barrier put up to easy accessibility to these weapons is a good thing.
Any effective solution is going to be unacceptable to ammosexuals, though. And the lobbying organisations that represent them are deeply enmeshed with an American conservative culture that increasingly excuses domestic violence as the patriarch’s prerogative.
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That’s an understatement. In fact, allowing the police to selectively enforce this type of red flag law likely makes it unconstitutional. And let’s be real. If you allow the police to selectively enforce a law, we all know who in our society is going to be more likely to be targeted by that law.
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Following up on the person mentioned in the article, he crashed his car running from police. He rolled his vehicle and died.
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Yeah, I hate that this was one scenario where the local police were actually in the right. But it’s not hard to imagine someone who’s been pushed to the fringes of society — whether because they’re Black, or queer, or neurodivergent, etc — being denied gun access just because a random cop got a “bad feeling” about them. (And that “bad feeling” could almost be “backed up” by digging some school record or something that says “So-and-so was insubordinate one time” without any context or perspective on it.)
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Unfortunately, where it failed was in the Red Flag laws. Despite the good intentions of those laws — and again, they make sense to me in theory, and are probably better than the alternative! — they are essentially ineffective unless you can ensure that a potential offender has already been convicted of a felony.
So why is it a failure of red flag laws, and not a failure of all the other laws he broke up to that point. If he’s a FELON, you don’t even need a red flag law in that case, because federal (and state) laws make ownership illegal.
Francis had been arrested for disorderly conduct… He drove erratically, causing an accident, and when he was arrested, Francis threatened the officer, exposed himself, and urinated in the back seat of a cruiser… And, Francis had been charged with cyber-harassment of a woman, a misdemeanor.
That’s a fair number of charges. You’re telling me ALL of them were misdemeanors? People do serve time with misdemeanors, was he convicted and sentenced? Was he on a probation that would kick up a later offense to a felony?. Was the cyber-harassment considered domestic violence, because that can strip your gun rights even as a misdemeanor. Were all of these charges just dropped?
It seems to me the Red Flag Law was just the last domino to topple, after all of the other laws he broke also failed.
they are essentially ineffective unless you can ensure that a potential offender has already been convicted of a felony. And in order to do that, you need to tighten up legal bureaucracies in ways that could very well end up harming other people.
So it’s a Catch-22? You tighten up laws so that people like this guy don’t keep worming their way through, but you end up cracking down on people who just fucked up and don’t deserve the same punishment?
I agree this whole situation is tragic and frustrating. In general the way we handle domestic violence is with indifference at best. Sometimes it feels like actual malice. This was even a clear case where I would agree with the use a Red Flag law being implemented. But the failure I think rests in the whole damn system which failed multiple times.
PS @thomdunn I appreciate your well thought out and nuanced post.
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… so is “being denied gun access” a harm there, or a benefit 
I think this is the unfortunate crux of it. The Red Flag law is prone to failure unless the rest of the system gets tightened up, which unfortunately creates another catch-22.
Glad you appreciated my attempts at nuance though, and thanks for saying so!
I’m a pacifist, and I wish that no one had a gun. But the only thing worse than the United States’ largely free-for-all approach to guns is if government agents (inc. military/police) were the only ones allowed to have guns.
Here in Massachusetts, I know of more than one queer-focused shooting club, and I can completely understand where they’re coming from (moreso than the random white suburbanite in Ohio or wherever who has been convinced to believe that a snarling gang of feral immigrants are ready to pounce on his home at any time).
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And I’ll add another problem that has happened locally–I forget the exact details but stripping gun rights wasn’t able to be plea bargained because of some court challenge. And the system couldn’t handle the load–prosecutors plead charges down to avoid triggering the gun ban.
In general I support gun rights-but it should be easy to strip for misdeeds, especially anything resembling domestic violence.
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I agree that we need to treat guns more like cars. They’re similar, in that not everyone really needs one, those who do don’t need as much as they own, and on the whole, people feel like they need them more than they actually do. But regardless of personal choice, potentially dangerous objects should be subject to safety design regulations, mandatory user registration/licensing/training, and liability insurance. Does that keep some people from being able to afford to own guns? Perhaps, but in that sense, it’s no different to certain politicians’ approach to healthcare - it’s technically available to everyone.
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