Red Flag laws aren’t particularly popular with a lot of folks, us included. We don’t like them because they infringe not just on one’s gun rights but also due process rights. It’s bad enough to take someone’s guns because you think they might do something, but to do it without them getting a chance to defend themselves take the un-American nature of this stuff to a whole new height.
As a result, in a lot of pro-gun states, red flag laws are non-starters. It’s just not happening.
And while Kentucky may have a Democrat in the governor’s mansion, it’s still a pretty pro-gun state. So it seems that lawmakers there are trying to disguise their bill with euphemisms that are downright hysterical.
Police could seek court orders to temporarily remove firearms from people thought to pose an “immediate and present danger” of hurting themselves or others under a bill filed Thursday in the Kentucky legislature.
The measure from Sens. Whitney Westerfield, R-Fruit Hill, and David Yates, D-Louisville, respects constitutional rights and puts the burden on police to show why any weapons taken ought not to be returned, the sponsors said.
But they acknowledge that their “crisis aversion and rights retention” effort faces a challenging path in the Republican-dominated General Assembly, where some lawmakers have shown resistance to any actual or perceived gun control actions.
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The order could be challenged every 45 days. It also could be extended after 90 days.
“This isn’t a gun-grabbing bill. This is crisis aversion,” Yates said. “This has to do with people who are in a mental health crisis situation who are going to do harm to themselves or others.”
“We don’t want to start taking away guns from people who are law abiding citizens. We want to step in temporarily to keep people safe,” Westerfield said. “The whole point of this is to try and do something. We want to do something responsible, constitutional, to keep people safe.”
The problem here is that this is how literally ever red flag bill is presented. It’s never a gun-grabbing bill. It’s always about “crisis aversion.”
Yet they all boil down to the exact same thing: Taking guns away from people on the suspicion they might be in some kind of crisis then making them prove their own innocence later.
That’s not responsible or constitutional. It’s tyranny.
What’s more, this whole “crisis aversion and rights retention” is nothing more than a euphemism for a bill that will, at its heard, strip people of their rights. How is there “rights retention” when you ignore both due process and the Second Amendment?
Kentucky lawmakers can pretend this is anything but a red flag bill, but euphemisms won’t hide what it truly is.
What’s worse is that there’s already a law on the books in every state to deal with people in a crisis that doesn’t remove the guns from people but removes them from guns, improvised explosives, or any other weapon they might be able to find.
It’s clear they don’t really value anyone’s rights, which is bad enough, but then they try to reinvent the wheel in a way that really makes even less sense, which is all a red flag law really is.
And the fact that a Kentucky Republican is one of those pushing this piece of euphemistic horse dung only adds insult to injury.
If you’re in Kentucky, reach out to your state lawmakers and tell them what you really think. It’s an uphill battle for a bill like this, thankfully, but you can throw a lot of barriers in the way so it never reaches the top.
