I won’t hold you hostage. I’ll proffer my opinion right now.

No.

Why? Because I know where Leftists are going with the matter. And because Red Flag Laws (or RFLs) can vary in so many different ways.

I write this in spite of the fact that, as a law enforcement officer I was occasionally tasked with doing something similar.under two California bodies of law when I was in Patrol:

• • §5150 of the Welfare and Institutions Code, and
  • §273.5 of the criminal Penal Code

5150 W&I states:
(a) When a person, as a result of a mental health disorder, is a danger to others, or to himself or herself, or gravely disabled, a peace officer, professional person in charge of a facility designated by the county for evaluation and treatment, member of the attending staff, as defined by regulation, of a facility designated by the county for evaluation and treatment, designated members of a mobile crisis team, or professional person designated by the county may, upon probable cause, take, or cause to be taken, the person into custody for a period of up to 72 hours for assessment, evaluation, and crisis intervention, or placement for evaluation and treatment in a facility designated by the county for evaluation and treatment and approved by the State Department of Health Care Services. At a minimum, assessment, as defined in Section 5150.4, and evaluation, as defined in subdivision (a) of Section 5008, shall be conducted and provided on an ongoing basis. Crisis intervention, as defined in subdivision (e) of Section 5008, may be provided concurrently with assessment, evaluation, or any other service.

(b) When determining if a person should be taken into custody pursuant to subdivision (a), the individual making that determination shall apply the provisions of Section 5150.05, and shall not be limited to consideration of the danger of imminent harm.

And here’s the kicker in California:

Pursuant to Welfare and Institutions Code 8103 individuals with mental illness are restricted from access to guns. Section 8103 reads: “No person who has been (A) taken into custody as provided in Section 5150 because that person is a danger to himself, herself, or to others, (B) assessed within the meaning of Section 5151, and (C) admitted to a designated facility within the meaning of Sections 5151 and 5152 because that person is a danger to himself, herself, or others, shall not own, possess, control, receive, or purchase, or attempt to own, possess, control, receive, or purchase any firearm for a period of five years after the person is released from the facility. Any facility that places a 5150 hold on someone is required to report them to the Department of Justice which, in turn, is required to list them on the National Instant Criminal Background Check System. Gun dealers must access the NICS prior to making a firearm sale.

On its face, this appear immediately reasonable, right? Perhaps this is the time to insert two words: due process. Hold that thought.

The other section in California involves domestic violence, 273.5 PC. California and federal law both prohibit people with domestic violence convictions from possessing guns. And courts have repeatedly ruled that such restrictions do not violate your Second Amendment right to bear arms. The applicable federal law is 18 USC 922(g).

Please note an important difference in the above sections: you must have been convicted of the crime(s) as opposed to merely having been arrested or detained. Meaning: you were afforded due process. It just didn’t go your way. Next case.

If Red Flag laws stayed right there, with a few necessary adjustments, I wouldn’t have a massive amount of heartache if there were guaranteed aspects of due process mandated. This is not necessarily the case and, of course, laws vary by state. Hold that thought as well.

I can hear a number of you now bemoaning and wailing: “BZ, you hypocrite, you applied the earliest version of what have now become known as Red Flag laws and now you’re against them. You despicable heathen!”

I suppose I could say “yes, but that was then and this is now.” Would that suffice? I don’t quite care. Because that was then and this is now. Please allow me to explain.

In the 80s and 90s when various laws were initially instituted — and I can only speak for Kalifornia (it was actually just California back then) — the politics and ramifications of every action taken by law enforcement wasn’t parsed down to every footstep, every syllable. We were actually treated, mostly, like adults by our administrations and we were allowed, mostly, to do our jobs primarily unimpeded by stupidity.

One quick example: in my sheriff’s department we did not have to ask Mom or Dad if we could make an arrest. They just trusted us to make a generally good decision — unlike the Sacramento Police Department, whose officers had to consult with a supervisor prior to taking someone to Booking. True story then, true story now. SPD didn’t trust its officers then and doesn’t trust them now. When you treat people like kids, expect them to act like kids. When you treat people like adults, expect them to act as adults. Human Behavior 101. The likes of which I still insist Leftists have no grasp. Of human behavior.

Some of us, like me, railed against the initial inequality of 13700 PC/273.5 PC. That is to say, I believed then as now that “no one is equal until everyone is equal.” 273.5 PC, by the way, is a felony in Kalifornia.

I set a precedent and it was my precedent that resulted in the Sacramento DA’s office issuing a proscription against my actions. The story is this:

I was sent to a domestic violence call at a Marconi Avenue apartment complex around 1986. A male and a female had been engaged in a heated domestic dispute. At the time the mandate was for officers to make a 273.5 PC arrest if there was an injury “no matter how slight.” The problem was, I failed to view myself solely as the Women’s Gestapo. I instead viewed myself as an equal applicator of the law as written, male or female.

Because the truth is, more than 40% of domestic violence victims are male. Women are also likelier to utilize emotional abuse which can be just as scarring psychologically. But, of course, much more difficult to document because, after all, where’s the broken bone?

At the scene,the female accused the male of hitting her. There was a faint bruise. The male accused the female of hitting him. There were scrape/scratch marks on his face. The words “no matter how slight” danced in my brain. Therefore I arrested them both. They both objected. Loudly. Somehow things didn’t go as either expected.

The female said “I didn’t mean for you to take him to jail. I just want him gone.” The male said “you shouldn’t arrest her.” I explained 273.5 and the 13700 PC mandate, “no matter how slight.” They both then recanted their stories and said they would both not testify. I properly responded with “it doesn’t matter. That is the law.” There was fresh evidence to indicate they both struck each other. Why would I arrest only one, the male, and not the other when evidence indicated both were involved in physical violence?

I arrested them both under the felony 273.5 PC.

I subsequently learned — and then a memo was issued from the DAs office — that the point of the law was to arrest males and not females. No more “double arrests” were to occur. That is when I decided that I was still not going to be a member of the Women’s Gestapo when reality indicated that, frequently, it took two to tango.

That’s a roundabout way of saying that I know how things work in law enforcement and with various laws. In Kalifornia, EPOs — Emergency Protection Orders — can also be executed in order to remove firearms. That entails an on-call judge being contacted who authorizes an emergency order that can take many forms, including confiscation of firearms.

And that was the beginning of the injection of politics into law enforcement. It is infinitely worse now. Much worse.

My guess is that so-called “Red Flag laws” mean something entirely different from their initial installation back in my time. And that would be absolutely correct.

What might be some of the triggering mechanisms desired for various RFLs?

The first would be instances of clear mental instability. That in and of itself is a massive clusterfuck. Hold onto that thought as well, we’ll return.

The second would be instances of domestic violence in which violence was utilized with, specifically, a firearm.

But you have to consider and allow for what I term the “Logical Extension.”

Would those instances of potential firearms confiscation include, these days, the following — at minimum — subject areas?

• Social media;
• Voting history;
• Employment;
• Geographic area;
• Dialect;
• Melanin count;
• Sex;
• Religion;

And many other considerations?

Because the devil is, of course, in the details. The details count most massively.

“BZ please, stop being stupid” you say. Oh really? You don’t think the possibility exists for certain personnel to rat you out on social media? Because they simply don’t like you?

What would you say if I told you social media was already a consideration? From Newsweek.com:

GUN CONTROL: NEW YORK WANTS TO MAKE YOU SUBMIT SOCIAL MEDIA HISTORY BEFORE PURCHASING GUNS

by Aristos Georgiou

proposed bill in the New York State Senate could mean that anyone wanting to buy a pistol or renew their permit will be subject to a review of their internet history and social media accounts going back up to three years.

The bill, referred to as S9191, was drafted by State Senator Kevin Parker from New York’s 21st Congressional District with the intention of keeping firearms out of the hands of potentially violent people, ABC-affiliate WHAM reports.

S9191 “requires a person applying for a license to carry or possess a pistol or revolver or a renewal of such license to consent to having his or her social media accounts and search engine history reviewed and investigated for certain posts and/or searches over a period of 1-3 years prior to the approval of such application or renewal,” the draft bill states.

If the bill passes, investigators would be able to look for posts or searches that contain threats to the health or safety of others; intentions to carry out an act of terrorism; or commonly known profane slurs or biased language describing the race, color, national origin, ancestry, gender, religion, age, disability or sexual orientation of a person.

In order for investigators to access personal accounts, applicants would have to give over their login details to social media platforms such as Facebook Snapchat, Twitter and Instagram.

And there goes your privacy. And your rights. Because, if I’m not mistaken, the Second Amendment is still active and a part of the Bill of Rights. For a time, at least. The submission of all your passwords wouldn’t be a “hint” or a “guideline” or a “request.” It would be a demand.

In order to defend yourself. Or now, even to hunt. Which, by the way, isn’t even considered under the Second Amendment. It Second exists because you have a right to protect yourself in general. And protect yourself from overbearing and tyrannical government, more specifically. If you think it can’t happen here, you clearly are failing to pay attention to what’s occurring all around you.

But let’s step back for a moment in order to consider what many are saying is one of the most mandatory inclusions in any set of RFLs: mental instability.

We should also remember that for every individual whose circle of friends and relatives said something similar to “we knew it was only a matter of time before he did ______,” there are even many more who said “we never saw this coming, not even for a second.”

After the spate of recent shootings — to include the shootings of law enforcement officers — EBPs, or Emotions-Based Policies do little to solve the problem. In fact, a very recent study came out from Johns-Hopkins which related:

California’s Background Check Law Had No Impact on Gun Deaths, Johns Hopkins Study Finds

by John Miltimore

The findings—which run counter to the conventional wisdom that gun control saves lives—have received almost no media attention.

A new academic study has found that, once again, gun laws are not having their desired effect.

A joint study conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the University of California at Davis Violence Prevention Research Program found that California’s much-touted mandated background checks had no impact on gun deaths, and researchers are puzzled as to why.

California Gun Laws Are a Failure

In 1991, California simultaneously imposed comprehensive background checks for firearm sales and prohibited gun sales (and gun possession) to people convicted of misdemeanor violent crimes. The legislation mandated that all gun sales, including private transactions, would have to go through a California-licensed Federal Firearms License (FFL) dealer. Shotguns and rifles, like handguns, became subject to a 15-day waiting period to make certain all gun purchasers had undergone a thorough background check.

More than a quarter of a century later, researchers at Johns Hopkins and UC Davis dug into the results of the sweeping legislation. Researchers compared yearly gun suicide and homicide rates over the 10 years following implementation of California’s law with 32 control states that did not have such laws.

They found “no change in the rates of either cause of death from firearms through 2000.”

The findings, which run counter to experiences in Missouri and Connecticut that did show a link between background checks and gun deaths, appear to have startled the researchers.

Let me clarify: it startled Leftists. Or perhaps more appropriately, disappointed Leftists.

We Should Judge by Outcomes, Not Intentions

Alas, the experts are behaving exactly as expected.

More than a decade ago, the writer Louis Menand, in a New Yorker article, explained the rationalizations experts make when their theories fail to hold up in our real-world laboratory:

When they’re wrong, [experts are] rarely held accountable, and they rarely admit it, either. They insist that they were just off on timing, or blindsided by an improbable event, or almost right, or wrong for the right reasons. They have the same repertoire of self-justifications that everyone has, and are no more inclined than anyone else to revise their beliefs about the way the world works, or ought to work, just because they made a mistake.

California’s failed gun control law appears to be yet another example of experts, to quote the great Milton Friedman, judging “policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”

Despite the dismal record of gun control, expect the media and “experts” to use a repertoire of self-justifications rather than modify their beliefs—regardless of what the evidence shows.

Let’s talk about the actual impact of Red Flag Laws or RFLs. The bottom line is that RFLs allow the government to violate Fourteenth Amendment due process rights along with Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights in order to confiscate property (firearms) — and make no mistake, it is a confiscation — on some kind of an unsubstantiated report or complaint by a family member, a peer, a co-worker, a friend or potentially a completely uninvolved third party whose information may be wildly hearsay.

And again make no mistake: about something a person might do. (I have to be honest: the first mental image that came to mind? East Germany’s Stasi.)

That’s a lower standard than the “reasonable suspicion” standard I used when I was in law enforcement. And it opens up another huge venue for political and personal retribution, outright punishment and perhaps even deaths.

In Maryland, that’s already occurred.

Police serving order to remove guns shoot, kill armed man

FERNDALE, Md. (AP) — Police in Maryland say an officer shot and killed a man while serving an order to remove guns from his home.

Anne Arundel County police said in a statement that the shooting happened Monday as officers served the “red flag” protective order, which can be used to temporarily restrict firearms access. Police spokesman Marc Limansky says officers responded to a family dispute Sunday and an officer suggested a protective order.

When officer arrived to serve an order Monday, police say 60-year-old Gary Willis answered the door with a gun. He put it down, but later became irate and grabbed the gun. When an officer tried to take it, Willis fired. A second officer shot Willis, who died on the scene.

No officers were injured and police haven’t released their names.

Yes. Personal and, more specifically, political retribution? Have we even factored for that? I submit that no one has.

Because, trust me, you and I both know that Leftists will utilize every potential opportunity to make the lives of Conservatives, those with religious views (except Islam, because Islam will kill you, no questions asked), Trump supporters and Republicans as much of a living hell as possible. We know that because they’ve demonstrated their intent and told us so outright.

Sometimes you simply have to take people at their words.

Further: has anyone heard of “Swatting”? And if so, depending on the potential loose limits of who can instigate the RFL system (

You think Leftists, Demorats, Antifa, anarchists won’t do this? Think again, particularly under expanded RFLs. Think: your family, if you have oppo family members. Think: your co-workers, if you’ve let your political allegiance leak at work. Think: social media, if RFLs were to include those on social media who can complain. And also think, doing the logical extension: psychiatrists and psychologists who may be tasked with determining if you are “fit” not just to own firearms, but to meld into a life with your sons, your daughters, your ex-wives, your ex-husbands. Again, please hold that thought.

And yes, in today’s political environment, I do believe that RFLs will lead to abuse. 30 years ago? Not so much. Today? It’s all about the politics.

You have to understand your enemy, those persons who are calling for everything from RFLs to “gun bans” to outright confiscation. Listen to what they’re saying. A few years ago Leftists, Demorats and the American Media Maggots would use hedging or couched words; now, it’s outright advocation of confiscation. Know thy enemy.

But let’s be clear. Technically there is no such thing as an “assault weapon.” What the LDAMM refer to as an “assault weapon” is nothing more than a rifle. There are rifles and there are carbines. There are automatic rifles and semi-automatic rifles. There are bolt-action rifles, lever-action rifles and those with clips or detachable enclosed magazines.

Any rifle can “assault” someone. Any pistol can “assault” someone. Any revolver can “assault” someone. Persons can “assault” others. What does the word “assault” mean anyway?

Assault:
noun
-a sudden, violent attack; onslaught:
-an assault on tradition.
-Law. an unlawful physical attack upon another; an attempt or offer to do violence to another, with or without battery, as by holding a stone or club in a threatening manner.
Military. the stage of close combat in an attack.
-rape1.

Sheriff David Clarke wrote on August 12th:

The Second Amendment is personal to me. These liberty-stripping laws will not stop the next mass shooting. It’s a Trojan Horse toward gun confiscation. So are the so-called universal background checks. First of all, there is nothing universal about background checks. Ask any person prohibited from possessing a gun. If they want a gun, they will find a way to get one. I confess that I don’t know what will stop mass killings because we are dealing with flaws in the human condition, but I am not going to cede back to the government, rights that my slave ancestors shed blood and tears over so that the U.S. Constitution would apply to them. One of the hallmarks of slavery was that blacks could not be armed to defend against kidnapping, lynching, and mob attacks. Black Codes enacted after the civil war continued the prohibition of newly freed slaves from being able to exercise their Second Amendment freedoms. It’s been referred to as the Black Tradition of Arms.

Shame on anybody who thinks that Red Flag Laws are a good idea. It was Benjamin Franklin who said, “Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” 

And oh yeah. Sheriff Clarke is black. To learn more about Sheriff David Clarke, go to www.americassheriff.com

We already know that accusations of many sorts have been weaponized against Conservatives. We have to go no further than those leveled against Brett Kavanaugh.

Kavanaugh accuser admits to making up rape accusation as ‘tactic’

by Stephan Dinan, the Associated Press

One of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s accusers admitted this week that she made up her lurid tale of a backseat car rape, saying it “was a tactic” to try to derail the judge’s confirmation to the Supreme Court.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Judiciary Committee revealed the fraud in a letter to the FBI and Justice Department Friday, asking them to prosecute Judy Munro-Leighton for lying to and obstructing Congress.

Mr. Grassley said Ms. Munro-Leighton is a left-wing activist who hijacked another “Jane Doe” anonymous report about a backseat rape and claimed it as her own story, calling it a “vicious assault.”

Now repeat this however many times Leftists perceive they know about certain Conservatives possessing firearms. You know. Any of us on social media at all.

But wait:

What good does it do to disarm someone and leave them free to access whatever weapons or materials they can get their hands on? The greatest mass murders in this country were reportedly initiated with utility knives (9/11), fuels oil and fertilizer (Oklahoma City) and a dollar’s worth of gasoline and a match (Happyland dance club fire). Guns didn’t even enter into the equation — and it is for this reason the contention that anyone who can’t be trusted with a gun can’t be trusted without a custodian holds true.

Dammit Jim, stop with the Logic Bombs.

Because: isn’t this, truly, the ultimate consideration? It would be for me.

As the story goes, the dead gun owner’s sister had filed for a protective order. Was she right in doing so? Is the piece of paper really a deterrent for someone violent enough to warrant one? And how many times do we need to learn the lesson that you’d better not summon the state into your home unless it’s truly your last resort, because they’ll bring with them an up-to-lethal force continuum they’re trained to escalate when not immediately obeyed.

The corollary is then in reverse true: when you step into another person’s neighborhood or community, you really don’t know them. And perhaps they have truly anticipated you. Worse yet: you’re about to intrude into an intimate household realm the likes of which you are not prepared. Call it CQB.

Then this:

So the cops were primed. And what better way to defuse a volatile situation than to pound on a door in the wee hours when it’s still dark and scare the hell out of someone you have reason to believe is armed?

Let’s go back to Waco. We know Koresh left the Branch Davidian complex to go into town. But “certain personnel” wanted to make a statement and attacked Koresh on his home turf. Big mistake. Take your time. Don’t make tactical mistakes.

An interesting point:

Just don’t look to the politically-motivated Anne Arundel County police chief to do anything but call for more infringements:

Chief Timothy Altomare said the fatal shooting in Ferndale was a sign that the law, which went into effect Oct. 1, is needed.

What do you think the odds are that Chief Tim wouldn’t get the courtesy of an apologetic heads-up if a disgruntled relative decided to bad-mouth him?

Under today’s newly-proposed RFLs? Oh yeah he would. But us “Militant Normals” as defined under Kurt Schlichter? We can go straight to hell.

Ben Shapiro — who is, sadly, an advocate of RFLs, says this:

The editor-in-chief of The Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro, said partisan anger and political abuse of proposed red-flag gun laws could lead to a power grab by the government if statutes and regulations aren’t instituted properly.

Well, thanks for allowing the nature of humanity to intervene. Particularly Leftists.

Shapiro added, “I’ve been supportive of red-flag laws but the counter-argument … is that you cannot trust people to be able to take away other peoples’ gun rights, because there are too many people who are going to use that in bad faith, and there are too many judges who are willing to impose such orders in bad faith.”

Fucking duh. Facts in federal court evidence. Hello? Then this:

“There are a lot of people on the right who are worried about this and I think that that worry is not an unreasonable one, given the way that the left is treating the right, right now — given the way that Democrats are treating anyone who says they will vote for Trump — given the way they are lumping in everybody who is on the right with white supremacists,” he said.

Because Cory Booker has said: “Red Flag Laws are not enough.”

And clearly, for Leftists, they are not.

But let’s get back to the “mental health” aspect involved these days. And with that I ask you and everyone else:

Prove to me that you are not insane or, at the very least, mentally unbalanced.

What do we know about this? Oh yeah. “Mentally unbalanced” exists in the mind of the beholder. Or more specifically, the examiner.

In today’s environment, prove to me that you are completely sane.

• Because, if you’re against abortion, you are insane;
• If you are not a supporter of a fluid or liquid Constitution, you are insane.
• If you believe anyone — save those celebrities or politicians important to the Left — should be armed, you are insane.
• If you believe free speech requires preservation, you are insane.
• If you think the Constitution and the Bill of Rights simply get in the way of “good government,” you are insane.
• If you believe in any kind of a religion — except Islam, because they’ll kill you — you are insane.
• If you believe wages, shelter, transportation, clothing, medical care shouldn’t be free, you are insane.

The DSM-5 is the current version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders extant. But there will be future versions to include the DSM 6, 7 and 8.

Who determines sanity? Correct. Those persons assembling the current and future DSMs.

And who are those people predominantly? Leftists, of course. People seek certain jobs because they satisfy certain worldviews. Not very many Leftists consider law enforcement as a profession as they are not much interested, for example, in the sacrifice, discipline and judgment required for such officers.

I tend to distill it down to two camps:

1. Those who must say yes all the time because it’s easy, and
2. Those who have the sack to actually say NO. Because it’s difficult.

Then let’s move on to a recent Johns-Hopkins study:

California’s Background Check Law Had No Impact on Gun Deaths, Johns Hopkins Study Finds

by Jon Miltimore

The findings—which run counter to the conventional wisdom that gun control saves lives—have received almost no media attention.

A new academic study has found that, once again, gun laws are not having their desired effect.

A joint study conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the University of California at Davis Violence Prevention Research Program found that California’s much-touted mandated background checks had no impact on gun deaths, and researchers are puzzled as to why.

California Gun Laws Are a Failure

In 1991, California simultaneously imposed comprehensive background checks for firearm sales and prohibited gun sales (and gun possession) to people convicted of misdemeanor violent crimes. The legislation mandated that all gun sales, including private transactions, would have to go through a California-licensed Federal Firearms License (FFL) dealer. Shotguns and rifles, like handguns, became subject to a 15-day waiting period to make certain all gun purchasers had undergone a thorough background check.

Again I say, Leftists completely fail to read humans and understand humans. They fail to recognize that humans are very clever, that humans can be simply evil with few if any redeeming features, and that proscribing one tool from an evil person will never stop their being evil, or their ability to acquire whatever tools they deem necessary to accomplish said evil.

More than a quarter of a century later, researchers at Johns Hopkins and UC Davis dug into the results of the sweeping legislation. Researchers compared yearly gun suicide and homicide rates over the 10 years following implementation of California’s law with 32 control states that did not have such laws.

They found “no change in the rates of either cause of death from firearms through 2000.”

And this is very revealing:

More than a decade ago, the writer Louis Menand, in a New Yorker article, explained the rationalizations experts make when their theories fail to hold up in our real-world laboratory:

When they’re wrong, [experts are] rarely held accountable, and they rarely admit it, either. They insist that they were just off on timing, or blindsided by an improbable event, or almost right, or wrong for the right reasons. They have the same repertoire of self-justifications that everyone has, and are no more inclined than anyone else to revise their beliefs about the way the world works, or ought to work, just because they made a mistake.

California’s failed gun control law appears to be yet another example of experts, to quote the great Milton Friedman, judging “policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”

Despite the dismal record of gun control, expect the media and “experts” to use a repertoire of self-justifications rather than modify their beliefs—regardless of what the evidence shows.

Then there is this — another article hardly mentioned by any one of the Leftists, Demorats or American Media Maggots — because, after all, this is one of the primary underpinnings of RFLs themselves:

Studies Find No Evidence That Assault Weapon Bans Reduce Homicide Rates

The studies, data, and examination of the available evidence by scholars suggest that assault weapon bans or buybacks will have little if any effect on rates of violent crime and gun violence.

Saturday, August 17, 2019

Mass shootings are unconscionable acts of violence and are the most acutely disturbing form of gun violence. In the wake of such tragedies, many gun control advocates lambast gun rights supporters for allowing “weapons of war” onto the streets of America and not supporting “responsible gun reform.”

The measures put forth are usually either a ban and/or mandatory buyback of “assault weapons,” most of which are more accurately known as semi-automatic rifles. (“Assault weapon” is a vague term that varies state to state and can include common pistols and shotguns depending out other attachable accessories.)    

While these initiatives are “common sense” to advocates, if one takes the time to examine the data and evidence, it becomes abundantly clear that gun control in this form will do little do reduce gun violence.

Oddly enough, what you and I, proper thinking human beings, naturally intuit from the involved statistics.

Mother Jones’s database of mass shootings, defined as shootings involving three or more fatalities, shows that between 2007 and 2017, there were 495 people murdered in such events. When breaking down those shootings by the weapons involved, it is revealed that around half of those victims (253) were murdered by a perpetrator with an assault weapon (AW), such as an AR-15.

Over the same timeframe, FBI annual crime reports show that there were 150,352 homicides in total, of which 103,901 involved firearms. This means that mass shootings involving AWs constitute 0.17 percent and 0.24 percent of all homicides and firearm homicides, respectively.

Uh-oh. Then there’s this.

To further illuminate the relative infrequency of mass shootings with “assault weapons,” consider the fact that in 2017, some 1,590 people were murdered using knives or sharp instruments.

Over the last five years, 261 people were murdered with AWs in mass shootings (an average rate of 52 murders annually.) At such a rate, it would take over 30 years of mass shootings with AWs to produce the same number of deaths as one year’s worth of knife murders. (It would take 135 years’ worth of mass shootings with AWs to produce the 7,032 deaths that handgun homicides did in 2017.)

Consequently, even a completely effective ban/buyback of AWs would have an incredibly small impact on rates of homicide and gun violence, and then there is always the probability that people intent on committing mass violence will substitute AWs with other available firearms or methods of destruction (such as homemade explosives.)

Gosh. Like we’re seeing the resulting explosion of knife crime in Europe and now here in the United States.

There are theoretical reasons to doubt the effectiveness of a ban or buyback of assault weapons, but it also doesn’t help that real-world evidence suggests these measures fail to produce reductions in gun violence.

Between 1994 and 2004, the federal government banned the manufacture, sale, or transfer of assault weapons and large-capacity magazines.  A subsequent Department of Justice studyfound no evidence that the ban had had any effect on gun violence and stated that “should it be renewed, the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.”

A recent study published this year in the Journal of General Internal Medicine examined state gun control policies and found no statistically significant relationship between assault weapon or large-capacity magazine bans and homicide rates. A Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) study came to the same conclusion.

And the Australian model, demanded by Leftists here — which resulted in the confiscation of firearms in 1996 — well, that doesn’t work either.

Listen to JACK ALEXANDER, a resident of Australia, talk about firearms confiscation in Australia, its results and ridiculous proscriptions — no air-driven spearguns, no bb guns, no pellet guns, no wrist rockets, no crossbows, no bows.  .  .

Start at 39:00 to understand what happened to Australia under firearms confiscations.

In 1996, Australia experienced a horrific mass shooting. In response, the government implemented a mandatory buyback scheme that banned and confiscated certain types of firearms, including assault weapons.

A 2016 JAMA study on the matter found no statistically significant change in the trend of the country’s firearm homicide rate following the law’s passage. The authors also noted that the decline in firearm suicides post-ban could not clearly be attributed to gun control since non-firearm suicides fell by an even greater magnitude.

The article concludes:

The studies, data, and examination of the available evidence by scholars suggest that assault weapons bans or buybacks will have little if any effect on rates of violent crime and gun violence. There seems to be no relationship between these gun control measures and reductions in firearm homicide or suicide, and there doesn’t appear to be any clear evidence they reduce mass shootings.

But wait. Isn’t that the reason for the new demand in Red Flag Laws? “Assault weapons” are everywhere and people must be stopped in advance? Is this an earlier version of the movie “Minority Report”?

The Kopel Testimony says this is what’s wanted:

• Petitions initiated by law enforcement, not by spurned dating partners or
relationships from long ago.
• Ex parte hearings only when there is proof of necessity.
• Proof by clear and convincing evidence, which has been corroborated.
• Guarantees of all due process rights, including cross-examination and right to
counsel.
• Court-appointed counsel if the respondent so wishes.
• A civil remedy for victims of false and malicious petitions.
• Safe and orderly procedures for relinquishment of firearms.
• Strict controls on no-knock raids.
• Storage of relinquished firearms by responsible third parties.
• Prompt restoration of concealed carry permits for the falsely accused.
• Prompt return of firearms upon the termination of an order.
• Renewal of orders based on presentation of clear and convincing proof.
• Not allowing time-limited orders to be bootstrapped into lifetime federal
prohibition.

But trust me when I tell you that is isn’t what Leftists want, They want it greatly, greatly expanded.

If we are predicating RFLs but upon specious information and statistics that do not point to the wondrous efficacy of RFLs, then why are we considering the sacrifice of even more personal liberties and freedoms — demanding that Leftist become even more intrusive into our lives and minds?

It just doesn’t make sense to me.

So I say no to Red Flag Laws, knowing full well how Leftists and Demorats, supported ably by the American Media Maggots, intend to expand them into categories heretofore unconsidered.

BZ