I understand why some people like red flag laws. I don't, personally, but it's not difficult to understand where some people are coming from in their support for them. They see it as just an extension of existing laws meant to disarm dangerous people. They figure that if the order is issued wrongly, it'll be corrected and all will be well.
But a Michigan report shows just how wrongheaded that "thinking" actually is.
After all, when orders disarm the families of six-year-old kids because the kid is reportedly a bit troubled, we have a problem.
Details from the latest annual reported on Michigan’s Extreme Risk Protection Order Act shows 89 percent of last year’s orders were issued without the subject of the order receiving notice.
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Moreover, the NRA-ILA pointed to a March 2, 2026, Detroit News article which claimed Michigan’s “red flag law has been used in select cases over the past year against individuals on college campuses and within the K-12 school system, including cases in which guns have been seized from homes because elementary-age children were deemed a threat to themselves or others.”
That's about 459 orders that were issued without notice, meaning the person being accused of being dangerous had no clue he was being talked about and risked losing his gun rights, even for a short time. This is a 30 percent increase from the year before.
Perhaps more troubling, though, is that only about 17 percent of these requests were denied.
In other words, there's a nearly 90 percent chance of a request being granted, all without any real due process of law. Couple that with families losing their guns because their child is depressed and has talked about self-harm, and suddenly you're seeing a nightmare scenario play out.
It's not about keeping guns out of dangerous hands. It's about making it easier and easier to take guns from people, period.
Each iteration of a red flag law seems to be a bit more expansive. It's a slow rise in temperature, and Michigan gun owners are the frogs in the water.
And all it takes is for a single judge to agree that someone's behavior is troubling enough. That's it. People don't get to defend their words or actions before that judge, either. There's no chance to present the other side of the argument. There's no chance to face your accuser in open court. None of that exists in these cases.
You just wake up one morning and find the police at your doorstep demanding you hand over all of your firearms.
And you hope it goes down like that. There's been at least one case of a man opening a door with a gun in hand when the police came to take his firearms. It did not work out well for the West Virginia gentleman.
These laws are billed as trying to keep people safe, and many of the people who like them think about them working perfectly. However, we've seen too many mass shootings in states with red flag laws to actually believe they'll work at all as they're ostensibly supposed to.
But they work really well at disarming regular people, especially those who upset family members for, say, supporting the wrong politician.
Now, with young children being red-flagged and parents losing their guns not because of their own actions, but because their kid said some troubling things to the wrong person, and it's just another degree in the water.
If we're not careful, soon taking guns from people will be far too normalized to stop. It's mission creep in legislative form.
And judges in Michigan don't seem to be interested in denying these orders very much. That's a big problem because it just heats the water even more.
