About a week ago, Cam wrote about how The Oregonian sang the praises of red flag laws following a car bombing attack. Yes, you read that right. Go read that piece to see what that insanity was, but the short version is that since he didn't manage to hurt anyone else, the red flag law allegedly worked.
Yeah, right. Luckily for everyone, it seems some people who read that and live in that neck of the woods have more sense than the writer of that piece.
In fact, one called out the stupidity in a letter to the editor.
Car attacks like this — from Oklahoma City to Abbey Gate and dozens of places more — have killed thousands of people. That nobody but the suspect was injured in the MAC club attack is due at least as much to providence as it is to Oregon’s gun control laws. People too sick or too violent to possess firearms should be institutionalized. There are countless ways to cause death and destruction. Our obsessive focus on guns as one tool of violence diverts attention from the real problem: violent, unstable people walking free.
Now, I can't include more due to the rules of fair use, which is fine, because the rest is just pointing out how stupid it is to claim that this is proof that red flag laws worked, because, in this case, no one else was hurt from the car bomb. It's an asinine position, and the whole thing actually highlights the fact that red flag laws are a terrible idea because, if for no other reason, they focus on the tool and not the tool who might use it.
They take the guns out of the equation, sure, but this particular attack illustrated that dangerous people don't stop being dangerous simply because you took their guns away. It was dumb luck that there wasn't a massive body count from this attack, not because the bad guy didn't have a different weapon.
Yes, in this case, the lack of a gun might well have saved a few lives because all the stars aligned and things worked out relatively well, but anyone with more than half a neuron firing in their gray matter should be able to look at this and know it was, in fact, luck that saved lives. Nothing else.
Car bombs are serious business. There's a reason terrorist organizations have long loved them. They're flashy, scary, and they can kill scores of people. They don't even need a suicide bomber to be effective, as Oklahoma City made abundantly clear.
Dangerous people don't stop being dangerous simply because you took away their firearms. The fact that they're walking around, still dangerous, in a world where we have so many weapons just sitting around the average home--not the average gun-owning home, mind you, but even the most anti-gun households in the country--means that anyone who doesn't still hurt people isn't quite as dangerous as some might have assumed.
Or, thankfully, they're not as creative.
Personally, I'd rather not bank on a lack of imagination, especially since the other side of the coin is that good people who aren't really a threat and never were get disarmed because someone didn't like a bit of dark humor or something.
Red flag laws were never going to work. It's good to see some sense in Oregon, because it's easy to forget that most of the state is not Portland, which is the epicenter of some of the most idiotic talking points I've ever seen. Even California looks at Portland and tells them to chill out.
Unfortunately, Portland is what happens when all the idiots congregate in sufficient numbers to overwhelm the rest of the state, where people have some actual IQ points.
