According to Firearm Chronicles
Some time back, I took a look at the results of Florida’s “red flag” law. It was passed in the rush to DO SOMETHING, less than one month after the February, 2018 shooting at Parkland High School.
The law allows no-due-process confiscations of firearms because a person might be a danger to self or others sometime, maybe, in the future, we think. I first looked at the law in 2019, and there was little data, but what there was seemed to indicate that homicides and suicides had actually increased post-passage. That was despite the confiscation law being used an average of five times a day.
Two years after the law’s passage, it has been used more than 3,500 times. That’s a lot of would-be homicides and suicides prevented, right?
Generally, when I see the victim disarmament advocacy industry or the mainstream media — but I repeat myself — touting the alleged success of red flag laws, their “metric” is always…Look how many guns we took away!
I think a better measure is how many bad things — murders or suicides — were prevented from occurring. After all, that is how they justified rationalized passing these laws in the first place.
Well, we now have another year of data, so let’s take another look at Florida.
In the two years prior to passage of the red flag law, homicides were declining and the suicide rate was steady. After passage, both rates went up, and remain above pre-law rates. To be fair, you can’t say the rates went up because of the passage of the law, but way to go, Florida. Floridians are now at the mercy of vindictive exes and other with grudges and the law’s proponents can’t even claim it improved anything.
It sure would be nice if courts would start applying strict scrutiny to laws like this, where a key test of whether a rights violation should be allowed is…Does it even even work? But with “President-Elect Harris” about to take the throne, I think we can surrender the dream constitutional niceties.