So, I know I’m going to stir up a schit storm here. I’ll preface it by saying I wished we lived in a sane society where every vehicle WAS NOT merely an excuse to strip rights from people. And I say that because I can see situations where red flag laws could be useful. I actually experienced something this summer with a client whereby through no fault of his own, he suddenly found himself living next to a batshit crazy person. But there was very little he could do. Protective orders are limited to family or dating relationships. Restraining orders do very little. The cops weren’t interested. His wife who knew the neighbor was batschit knuckled under and went to bat for him when they did a 72 hour mental hold. My client was afraid that he was going to have to kill the guy. A red flag would have been nice.
Of course, usefulness isn’t the standard. Crime was pretty low in Stalin’s Russia too...so every action has to be balanced against rights and their infringement. And of course, now you can see the long game as well. For 75 years all the ways we would have used to handle crazy persons like state hospitals and all that have been dismantled in the name of civil liberty. In the State of Texas there are something like 2,000 mental health beds for 30 million people. That means there are hundreds of thousands of seriously insane people out there and very little can be done about it.
So break the system, then propose dramatic and potentially draconian means of fixing the system that you broke in the first place. Red Flag laws could work in a sane society where everyone respected the rule of law. In the clown world we’ve become, it’s just another step too far.
Last edited by JoeBob; 02/09/21.
