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The South isn’t a place known for embracing gun control. It’s not that it can’t happen, just that it’s not very likely to.

That includes things like red flag laws, which some supporters try to claim aren’t really gun control. How they can manage the mental contortions on that one is beyond me, but they do.

However, one southern state just had a bill introduced for just that.

Durham County Sheriff Clarence Birkhead wants the state to pass a law allowing courts to order firearms temporarily taken from people considered dangerous.

Birkhead lent his support Tuesday to House Bill 454, which would allow a family member or law enforcement agency to seek what’s known as an extreme risk protective order from a court to have guns taken from a person considered to a threat to themselves or others.

“It’s another tool for law enforcement to use to protect our communities,” Birkhead said at news conference Tuesday. “I’ve long advocated for smart gun legislation, giving us the tools we need to protect our citizens and our residents who live in our counties.”

Rep. Marcia Morey, a retired District Court judge from Durham, sponsored the same bill last year after the Parkland high school shooting. That bill died in committee. Morey said Tuesday she would continue to push for what’s known as a “red flag law.”

“As a judge, often I heard cases of witnesses testify they knew something bad was going to happen,” she said. “It could have been prevented if they had this type of legislation.”

I’m sure Morey did hear that as a judge.

However, how many times more do we hear someone say that they know a person is going to do something, only for nothing to ever happen? People get this crap wrong an awful lot. When you’re in a position like Morey was, you only see one side. You see the side where something did happen. You don’t see all the times when people got it wrong.

That’s part of the problem with red flag laws. They permit non-mental health professionals to make a judgment on the mental health of an individual and deny them their constitutional rights because of that.

If you can’t see the problem here, you’re willfully blind to it.

Luckily, North Carolinian lawmakers showed a great deal of sense last year on this bill. Here’s hoping they do the same thing again.

Laws like this are a major problem, not just because of how it permits non-professionals to severely impact someone’s civil liberties, but also because they’re ripe for abuse. These laws will be used to punish people for holding the wrong opinions.

How many people are going to die because the police bust into a home of a law-abiding citizen and that citizen returns fire not realizing it’s the police? We all know what the police will do. I don’t blame them. If someone starts shooting at me, I’m shooting back.

People will die.

Yet that doesn’t matter to people like Morey. She’s convinced that her skewed perspective is the total reality and that’s all that matters.