David French: . . . I think one of the issues with red flag laws is education: Do people even know they exist? . . . You can’t even use a law that you don’t know exists.
Another one is: Under what circumstance is it granted? And I think it’s a mistake to say: It is granted under the circumstance where we’re predicting a mass shooting. It is better to say: It is granted under the circumstance where someone has indicated that they might be a threat to themselves or others. So, it’s not that you are trying to predict—a pre-crime sort of analysis. It is instead rooted in certain kinds of conduct and behavior—that maybe a hundred people do this, and only one of them would go on to attempt a mass shooting. . . .
But of that hundred, . . . [all of them] have indicated by their behavior that this is not the kind of person who needs to be possessing a weapon. So, I think that the real key is not to say: Okay, the red flag law is predicting who’s going to be a mass shooter. Instead, the red flag law is identifying who is indicating that they’re a threat to themselves and others. And so, it has a lot of spillover effect—for domestic violence, for example; it has a spillover effect for suicide; it has a spillover effect even for common street crime, in some ways.
We can’t think of it as: This is the legal mechanism that predicts a mass shooter and takes a gun away from him. What you say is: This is a legal measure that identifies people exhibiting behavior that disqualifies them from gun ownership.
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