Of all the infringements of our basic right to self-protection, affirmed by the second amendment of the United States Constitution, HR-127, the bill proposed by Sheila Jackson Lee earlier this year, is the most egregious, the most dangerous, and the most blatantly unconstitutional.
For starters, it would make millions of people across the nation felons overnight. Countless gun owners over the age of 18 yet under the age of 21 will be forced to turn in their legally obtained and owned firearms or otherwise become felons. Millions of other gun owners will be forced to turn in legally obtained firearms and firearm accessories or else become felons. Those few firearms left will be subject to a burdensome tax and worse will be made a matter of public record, so that no burglar will ever need to worry about which houses to violate.
Any national gun registry will make the home addresses of all peaceful, law-abiding gun owners a matter of public record. Those who wish to rob and murder in safety, those who wish to initiate violence against those who consider gun owners their political opponents, and in the event of a total war with a country able to match the military might of our own will have a list of all men and women in the country in possession of a firearm.
This is all if the bill is passed peacefully, which it won’t. People will not allow their rights to be violated especially as people from both sides of the aisle have spent a year normalizing political violence. All law enforcement officers will all be forced to resign else they be considered oath breakers and stand for eternity with the likes of Marcus Junius Brutus, Benedict Arnold, and Damien Jones the man who the sponsor of this bill, Sheila Jackson Lee, protected from accusations of sexual assault by firing the aide who reported his abuse.
If you pass this bill you will be inviting a war, a war you cannot win. You will all be putting yourselves on record as those who ordered the violation of the rights of hundreds of millions of civilians. Rights that were given to them by nature of being human, and rights affirmed by the constitution, drafted by those who made innumerable sacrifices to protect their rights from tyrants, and whose memory you taint by proposing this blatant violation of the constitution, and the rights of every man woman and child in this great nation.
Another bit of Gun Control stupidity that has been around for a while but is still no less of a problem is the proposed national “red flag” laws, also known as “take the guns first worry about due process later.” They are a system of laws that throws out both the second, fourth, and to a certain extent, the first amendment in the name of national safety. The safety of the nation has always been the excuse for government overreach and unjust laws from the Alien-Sedition acts to the PATRIOT act, and red flag laws are no different. The same myths will build the false case for red flag laws as having been used for all other gun control measures in recent memory, and they’ll be abused by governments, trolls, and bitter exes alike and the second amendment will continue to erode.
Red flag laws are presented with the purpose in mind of allowing the government to take weapons out of the hands of those who are of serious danger to themselves and others. Proponents of red flag laws point to multiple mass shooters, the Parkland shooter in particular, who exhibited many warning signs before carrying out the shooting yet law enforcement was all but powerless to prevent this tragedy. A valid point to make but sets a bad precedent that anyone the government deems dangerous should have their firearms and by extension their rights and means of self-defense.
Red flag laws are often presented with the idea that gun violence in America is an epidemic. While the increased number of mass shootings in recent memory might seem to affirm this belief the statistics simply aren’t there to back up this claim. The United States has a total of over three hundred million people and has confirmed more guns than people with even more guns that we don’t know about. Yet considering this extreme number of firearms to population only a grand total of one hundred people die per day as the result of a gun. Sixty percent of said deaths are suicides which is a separate issue. Around ten percent are accidental killings, police killings, etc. Only around thirty percent are homicides which, in American crime statistics, includes justifiable acts of self-defense. Violent crime has actually gone down while civilian gun ownership has skyrocketed. Of course, correlation doesn’t necessarily equal causation if more guns mean more violence violent crime should be skyrocketing as well even though it’s not. When you exclude the five cities with the strictest gun laws the overall violent crime rate per capita drops even more. Considering this and the fact that ninety-seven percent of mass shootings occur in places where firearms are not permitted we should reach the conclusion that adding restrictions on firearms are the cause of increased numbers of mass shootings not the answer to an increased number of mass shootings.
Red flag laws are a proposed set of laws that allows individuals, particularly family and law enforcement, to petition the courts to get someone’s firearms confiscated. Red flag laws have been passed in Colorado, immediately sparking backlash as multiple sheriffs declare their counties “second amendment sanctuaries.” Sheriff Steve Reams of Weld County states that he would rather go to jail than enforce the new laws stating in an interview with CNN, “Once you fail to stand up for people’s constitutional rights, then what’s next?” The best example of the spirit behind these unconstitutional laws comes from president Donald Trump “Take the guns first, go through due process second.” The spirit behind these laws not only comes from an absolute disregard for the second amendment as well as the fourth amendment.
Red flag laws serve the purpose of further dividing the American people. By telling the people that their neighbor wants to take their guns, they absolve the government, at least in the eyes of those having their rights taken away, of any wrongdoing. They will convince the American people that it wasn’t the government who took their rights away; it was other people. This newfound division amongst the people will open up Americans to the same divide and conquer strategy that nearly all authoritarian powers use against their own people before they carry out another round of democide.
One reason these new laws should be universally terrifying is the power of the internet and the power of internet trolling. In a 4chan thread showcased in Mel Magazine’s article “The Rise of Weaponized Autism,” a user posted a photo of themselves onto the messageboard. Another user got bored and decided to find out the location that the picture was taken and was able to pinpoint the exact spot the photo was taken by narrowing down clues inadvertently left in the picture. This exact thing is far from an isolated incident. When Shia LeBeouf decided to raise a flag stating, “he will not divide us” as part of an anti-Trump campaign. The users of 4chan managed to track down the flag using social media posts and weather patterns, and the flag was replaced with a Make America Great Again hat within twenty-four hours.
Mass flagging is already an issue in the online world that abuses the report system on social media to get accounts banned and de-platformed. One somewhat recent story is Larry Correia’s example of why Facebook is “super dumb” when writer Larry Correia received a temporary ban from Facebook for insulting the imaginary people of an imaginary country. Correia jumped to the aid of the noble, and fake, people of Krasnovia and referred to the disgusting, and also fake, people of Pinelandia as “goat rapists” which got him a three-day ban on Facebook. Everyone agreed it was very silly until Mike Glyer decided that they were all having “wrongfun” by making memes of the ridiculous situation. So Glyer decided to trash Correia on his influenza virus of a website File 770, and the few readers on his website that weren’t Chinese bots decided to instigate another mass flagging campaign. They even bragged about it, saying, “My imaginary friends were insulted by Larry C, so I complained on their behalf.” Correia was banned from Facebook again within a few days in a demonstration of precisely what would happen with red flag laws only with a SWAT team shooting his dog.
A pre-existing problem in the online world is the act of SWATting, where users will call the police on a streamer and get them harassed on stream solely for perceived humor. As prevalent as this is already, it is not far-fetched to believe that red flag laws will be abused in this way as well.
Another proposition that goes along with these laws is a red flag tool for social media companies. Considering how willing social media companies are to screw over people they don’t like the minute they do something that can be construed as wrongthink and how ready angry mobs are to purposely get people they don’t like banned from social media, not to mention how easy it is to do so, it should be immediately seen how bad of an idea this is. One might not have to worry about finding a person to red flag them; they could press a button and send a SWAT team to their house to violate their second amendment rights.
Red flag laws will do nothing but serve to erode our second and fourth amendment rights further. They will, not to mention, further give power to malicious trolls allowing them to strip someone’s rights away by a phone call or if social media companies are given the power to red flag, the push of a button. Red flag laws are universally supported by politicians, both Democrat and Republican, but have seen massive backlash by the American people. Ordinary people seem to dislike these laws, even those who are for gun control and pedal the same false gun violence epidemic talking point agree that red flag laws are extremely likely to be abused and are against these unpopular unconstitutional authoritarian, and un-American laws.