More Cultural Marxism, This Time on Guns

In all the fuss over the Kavanaugh appointment, I have overlooked a number of very bad laws that states like California, Maryland, and even Florida have enacted called "Red Flag Laws."  Red Flag Laws allow the government, in the form of the police and the courts, to take your weapons from you on the flimsiest of excuses, or even no excuse at all.  You do not have to be credibly charged or convicted of anything. Due process is out the window here. 

As a thought experiment, suppose the local paper printed up the names and addresses of all the concealed carriers in their coverage area.  Someone in the same neighborhood as you, that you don't know and with whom you have had no interaction notices your name and address.  That person happens to be a hoplophobe who is immediately offended that someone in his neighborhood carries a gun.  So your "neighbor" gins up a case where you have acted suspiciously and files a complaint against you.  Next thing you know, the police are knocking on your door and asking for your weapon.

This is the type of scenario that David Harsanyi is writing about at Townall.com today in an article entitled  Democrat's New Laws Are Also An Attack on Due Process

The notion that certain Americans are pre-emptively guilty of wrongdoing, whether there's any corroborating evidence to back up an accusation or not, isn't reserved for conservatives who happen to be in contention for a Supreme Court seat. In the hierarchy of progressive values, due process is a bottom dweller.

...snip...

Another area of American life where we continue to see egregious attacks on the presumption of innocence is gun ownership. You might remember that a couple of years ago, Democrats engaged in a much-covered congressional "sit-in" to support legislation that would have stripped Americans on secret government watchlists -- hundreds of thousands of people who had never been accused, much less convicted, of any crime -- of their constitutional right to bear arms.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, in fact, proposed legislation that would have restricted not only American citizens on faulty watchlists but anyone who had been on any watchlist at any time during the previous five years and anyone who had traveled to select Middle Eastern countries. Apparently, Democrats believe limiting the number of refugees from Syria is unconstitutional but explicitly restricting the constitutional rights of Syrian immigrants here legally is just fine.

Most of these laws were passed in the wake of the shootings at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School. None are based on anything that would actually work to stop such crimes. Indeed, the government had all the laws it needed before the shooting to stop it, if the people who run the government at all levels would have done their jobs. Instead, they passed on doing their jobs in favor of doing...who knows? Interestingly, the laws that obtained before did not require a suspension of the Constitution. They just required that people do the right thing.

Huh!

All it takes in many states is for a family member, neighbor or co-worker to accuse you of a pre-crime. One of Maryland's many new laws (signed by Republican Gov. Larry Hogan) allows the police to confiscate weapons for up to a year -- or until the next person accuses you of a crime you are only yet to commit.

There is risible evidence that these new regulations will stop mass shootings or lower gun crime. But as William Rosen, deputy legal director for Everytown for Gun Safety, explains, "red flag laws" are needed to "step into that gap." What gap? You know, the pesky space between protecting the ideal of presuming innocence and completely ignoring it when you feel like it.

Go read the whole thing. Vote accordingly.