If asking the police to plug the hole raises too many worries about rights, perhaps individuals are the answer. Commenting on the failure of red-flag laws in this case, National Review’s Rich Lowry writes in defense of the laws, arguing that what’s necessary is a shift in public behavior. “Everyone needs to adopt more of a ‘If you see something, say something’ attitude toward young men flashing signs of potential danger.”
Lowry inadvertently reveals the weakness of his own idea. The link to the War on Terror is a good warning about the dangers posed by his suggestion, because it points to a case in which generally good intentions led to serious infringements on civil liberties, for relatively little gain. Following the 9/11 attacks, the government went on high alert and instituted a series of changes that produced large-scale infringements on rights such as due process, including warrantless wiretaps, spying on mosques, and Kafkaesque no-fly lists. Some of these measures may have prevented some terrorist attacks, though calculating how many would be hard to say. Others, however, were not just largely useless, as Jeffrey Goldberg demonstrated about the TSA in 2008, but also in many cases plainly violated Americans’ civil rights.
Similar dangers loom in trying to apply the same attitude to mass shootings. Maybe people should be more willing to alert police to worrying behaviors by people around them—but given what we know about abuses in the criminal-justice system, many people might hesitate to take such a risk. And those who don’t hesitate may indirectly contribute to a system that is rife with abuse.
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