Do you support red flag laws?

Most of our readers probably don't, though there are a few that might. After all, they take guns from people without due process beforehand and often do so over particularly shaky claims made by others. A prime example involves a challenge to the laws working through the courts right now where a code enforcement officer got a red flag order on a citizen because someone else told her he'd threatened her. Even if you agree with the laws in general, that hearsay evidence was accepted should worry the hell out of you.

But if you don't like the laws, that's even worse.

Yet a recent study found that people's attitudes toward red flag laws change when they know a "compromised" gun owner.

“Gun owners can recognize when there’s danger, and they’re willing to take steps to minimize that,” said Margaret Kelley, professor of American studies at the University of Kansas.

“When you know somebody who might be compromised, it changes the way you think about these laws. Red flag laws empower law enforcement to seek warrants to seize firearms from dangerous individuals. But the process often begins with a 911 call from someone close to that individual and is worried about them.”

Kelley's paper titled “‘I know it when I see it’: Public opinion on removing guns from compromised owners” evaluates “red flag” laws, finding that adults who believe they know a “compromised” gun owner — for example, someone dangerous, mentally ill or suffering dementia — tend to be much more supportive of such laws regardless of political underpinnings. The research appears in the International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice.

“People wary of red flag laws are concerned about individual freedom and government intrusion, and that it conflicts with the Second Amendment’s absolute right to have guns,” said Kelley, who co-wrote the paper with Neal Axton of KU Libraries and Christopher Ellison and Pablo Gonzalez of the University of Texas at San Antonio.

“Even if you’re more conservative, Republican, from a rural area and all these other things we traditionally might expect would put you in opposition, it changes that relationship. You become more likely to support these laws.”

Do they, though?

I looked at the methodology and Kelley's research found participants through an outfit called Qualtrics.

Qualtrics is an online platform that basically connects researchers with respondents who are interested and willing to take part in the research. Yet there are problems with using the platform for research. The questions cannot be open-ended, meaning that people are basically forced to choose one answer or another. This isn't unusual with any attempted survey, but sometimes, the question has a lot of nuance.

Yet Qualtrics also has some concerns with respondent issues, including bots and professional survey-takers who may not be giving honest answers, just clicking whatever answer they can get to first.

Moreover, there's really no way to vet whether or not someone is actually a gun owner, pro-gun, or anything else. They can say whatever they want to be included in certain categories of questioning and then skew the results.

So while I expect this study to make a lot of headlines all over the place, and no one is going to mention the issues with Qualtrics, there's also no reason to take it seriously.