You be the judge

Despite countless articles point out how unjust these new "Red Flag" laws are, they keep popping up like summer mushrooms in the cow pasture.  It seems everywhere the cows drop a steaming pile of excrement, there you will find a bill waiting to be pushed.

Today's bill comes from North Dakota, where a local newspaper, the Minot Daily News has an article entitled People Targeted by Red Flag Laws Would Have to Pay for Their Own Defense. Tom Knighton at Bearing Arms makes some good points. For instance, he points out, as does the article at the Minot Daily News that if you are targeted, you must prove a negative, that you are not dangerous. Interestingly, I suspect most people are, in fact, dangerous. Is a wild cat dangerous? A rattlesnake? Of course. And people are natural predators as well. What makes a person not dangerous is how closely one hews to God's laws concerning murder of another human being.

In this case, the law is framed as a "civil proceeding," but then prosecutors are encouraged to help a person file a complaint against a target.  But the target himself has to pay to defend himself.  In a civil case, the court assumes the plaintiffs case is correct, and the jury has to decide if the defendant has proven the plaintiff wrong.  This is backassword.  Since so called Red Flag laws are taking away a persons Constitutionally protected civil rights, the law should come under the criminal statutes, where one must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a target is likely to commit murder.  Is that a more difficult thing to prove?  Of course, but what is the point of the Bill of Rights if one can run roughshod over any right one wishes.

Imagine for a moment that there was a Red Flag law on the books pertaining to freedom of the press.  Suppose all it required was to be offended by an article to file a Red Flag complaint.  Today, being offended seems to be the National Pastime of at least half the population.  So, someone reads this article, goes down to the prosecutors office, where he gets help filling out the forms, files the complaint, at which point I receive a summons to court asking me to show cause why I should be allowed to continue publishing this blog.  How would I go about it?  As for hiring a lawyer, I am a poor retiree.

And there is the point of the article.  Such laws fall more heavily on the poor, who often live in more dangerous surroundings.  And since the poor includes a fair number of minorities as well, minorities will be impacted more as well.  In the article, Mr. Port doesn't say so, but every gun control act that has ever been devised has been aimed precisely at the poor and the minorities.  In the Jim Crow South, North Carolina had a law that required a person to pay $5.00 for a pistol permit from the Sheriff of the County of residence before someone could buy a handgun.  Now in the 19th Century, $5.00 was a lot of money, and it was no less a tax on a civil right than were the poll taxes charged to vote.  But let's say that a black man saved up the pistol permit fee to buy a $25 handgun.  Would any sheriff in his right mind have given the black man a permit?  That law is still on the books in North Carolina, by the way.  Every time the Legislature brings up the idea of repealing this fossil of racism, the Sheriff's association, along with the NAACP and a host of other liberal/leftist organizations raises a hew and cry that there will be blood in the streets if they get rid of a fundamentally racist law.

You be the judge.