Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Those who favor gun control almost have to love mass shootings on some level. On one hand, they’re terrible and I’d hate to imagine anyone looking at the aftermath with glee, but on the other, they routinely jump at the opportunity to throw gun control ideas at the wall in hopes that some will stick.
It seems with the Philadelphia shooting, it’s now time to try red flag laws.
Last week, five Philadelphians lost their lives and two children were injured by a mass shooter in the Kingsessing section of the city. Community members in Southwest Philadelphia woke up on the Fourth of July — a day that is supposed to be filled with celebration — in disbelief that more innocent lives were lost in a city plagued by gun violence.
In Philadelphia alone, more than 900 people have been shot since January.
The Kingsessing tragedy might have been avoided if the Pennsylvania Senate had passed red flag legislation, also referred to as extreme risk protection orders, which already passed the Pennsylvania House in May. The red flag law would allow law enforcement to temporarily seize firearms from someone deemed by a judge to be an immediate threat to themselves or others. And as news reports have since made clear, in the days leading up to the shooting, there were clear warning signs that the 40-year-old suspect could be a danger to himself or others.
Except, there really weren’t.
Sure, the individual in question was probably not as mentally sound as we’d all prefer, the problem is that being weird and a little nuts, in and of itself, isn’t illegal. The shooter had strange opinions and thoughts, but should being odd be sufficient grounds to take away someone’s guns?
Further, what the author is doing here is using hindsight to determine just how things would have gone down if Pennsylvania had a red flag law.
If this individual was so clearly a threat to themselves or others, why wasn’t he remanded somewhere for a 72-hour hold? That’s on the books in all 50 states for just such individuals. There, he could have not just been taken away from things like guns and other weapons but could also have gotten the treatment he needed to possibly avoid any kind of bloodshed down the road.
So why wasn’t such a hold used? Because no one really believed it was needed.
As such, it’s hard to believe that a red flag law would have been used, either.
Of course, that doesn’t get discussed. People pretend there was literally nothing that could have been done to prevent this simply because a state doesn’t have all these gun control laws, but they ignore the very measures already in place meant to stop such things from happening.
They want you to forget such things exist as well. If the public remembers them, they won’t continue to buy into the idea that there are options out there other than gun control, and we all know that we can’t have that, now can we?
https://bearingarms.com/tomknighton/2023/07/12/philly-red-flag-laws-n72485