I certainly think so. One of the problems with "red flag" laws is that even when the system identifies someone who truly does pose a threat to themselves or others, the "answer" involves taking their guns away but leaving them access to all kinds of other things that they can use as a weapon. "Red flag" laws treat gun ownership as the bigger problem, not the underlying mental condition that makes someone dangerously mentally ill.
One family in Atlanta, though, is proposing something that makes a lot of sense. Johnathan Hamby is accused of stabbing a man to death in an Atlanta park over the summer. Hamby has a history of arrests and stints in both jail and psychiatric hospitals, and his family says they've tried for years to get him the serious help that he needs. According to their own account, he'd been arrested more than 30 times. On one occasion, he brought a three-foot samurai sword into an elementary school while suffering from a delusion. According to his family, he was briefly behind bars but was quickly released without his condition being stabilized.
Obviously, a "red flag" law wouldn't have prevented him from owning a knife or a samurai sword, and it wouldn't have prevented the murder he allegedly committed. His family, though, says something called a Structured Decision-Making (SDM) plan might have.
I ran across the open letter from Hamby's family in a post at CWB Chicago, where managing partner Tim Hecke suggests this might also have prevented the murder of 7-year-old Eddimar Hernandez Chacon, who was allegedly stabbed to death by a woman named Shavon Gayden. According to CWB Chicago, Gayden's mom has also spoken about her daughter's severe mental illness and the repeated attempts to get her help over the past decade.
The problem, as Hamby's family identifies is it, is that "current laws offer only two extremes: brief jail stays that treat psychiatric illness as a crime, or total guardianship, which is incredibly difficult to secure and often resisted by the courts." A Structured Decision-Making plan is a middle ground that's already used for individuals with Alzheimer's or severe dementia.
When a medical condition strips a person of their executive functioning, the law allows a willing, accountable family unit to step in and manage high risk decisions. For Johnathan, an SDM plan would have legally empowered our family to prevent him from purchasing weapons, secure his housing, and enforce treatment compliance before a crisis occurred. Instead, the courts repeatedly dismissed our pleas, citing strict legal thresholds regarding immediate danger.
Johnathan’s case is a tragic symptom of a statewide and national failure. Data from the Treatment Advocacy Center shows that a tiny fraction of individuals with untreated SMI cycle continuously through the justice system – with just 10% of these “super-utilizer” cases accounting for up to 70% of psychiatric emergency and jail intake resources.
That's striking to me. We know that a small portion of a city's population is responsible for a disproportionate amount of violent crime. Hamby's family is pointing to a similar phenomenon in the mental health arena.
Police departments across the country are engaging in targeted deterrence aimed at those prolific offenders. Why aren't we bringing that same sense of urgency to the relatively small number of seriously mentally ill "super-utilizers" who cycle through hospitals, jails, and the streets, especially when they've already demonstrated violent or dangerous behavior?
I'm very intrigued by the Hamby family's proposal. There are obviously due process questions that would have to be addressed before giving a family member this kind of authority over another adult, and the criteria would have to be more narrowly drawn that what we see with Extreme Risk Protection Orders. In theory, though, Structured Decision-Making makes a lot more sense to me than a "red flag" law.
It would allow family members of seriously mentally ill people to have more oversight over them, without the difficulties of obtaining complete guardianship. It addresses the dangerous individual, not just the guns they may have access to. And it offers them a pathway towards treating their mental illness, which they may not be capable of doing on their own because of how debilitating that illness is.
Would this stop every seriously mentally ill person from committing a violent crime in the future? Of course not. But when the families of these individuals are crying out for help and proposing a realistic way to provide that assistance, it would be incredibly foolish to not give it serious consideration.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their extreme gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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