Red flags redux
[NOTE: Since red flag laws are under serious consideration in the wake of various new shootings, I thought I’d recycle a two-year-old post on the subject, slightly edited. The post was originally written about Pulse nightclub shooter Omar Mateen, but it could apply to any number of shooters who have been known to be trouble a long time before they go on their murderous rampages, and yet nothing effective is done to prevent the violence from happening.]
Omar Mateen was adorned with red flags, absolutely festooned with them.
We already know that law enforcement was warned about Mateen, investigated him, and decided there was nothing they could do because he had not acted on his beliefs.
But were you aware of this?:
According to Omar Mateen’s fifth-grade classmates, the 10-year-old future terrorist was once suspended for two weeks after he threatened to bring a gun to school and kill all of his classmates.
Leslie Hall – one of Mateen’s classmates at Marisopa Elementary School – told TMZ that Mateen was a bully and frequently harassed both students and teachers.
Mateen reportedly told a group of students that he planned on bringing a gun to school to kill everyone there, a threat which “was not received as a joke.” Multiple former classmates confirmed the incident to TMZ.
Or his high school behavior?:
Pulse nightclub shooter Omar Mateen’s troubled school days included an incident where he was charged with battery and another where a school official said he was suspended for cheering the Sept. 11 attacks two days after they took place.
On Thursday, the Martin County School District released records showing Mateen was suspended 15 times when he attended junior high and high school from 1999 until 2003. At least two of those suspensions were the result of violent incidents.
Mateen’s final suspension was on Sept. 13, 2001, and was issued by a school administrator named Evelyn Stettin. In a conversation with Yahoo News on Thursday, Stettin said Mateen was suspended for celebrating the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which [had] occurred two days earlier.
He was very pleased to see it happen,” Stettin said of the attacks. “We took him out of class, and we were trying to, you know, talk with him, and we had a school psych present, but basically he didn’t show any remorse. Nothing. I mean he was pretty happy it happened.”
Stettin said school officials discussed Mateen’s reaction to the terrorist attacks with his parents. She suggested Mateen’s parents were unconcerned by the incident.
“We spoke to the parents and they didn’t really do very much about it, let’s put it that way,” Stettin recounted.
And this guy Mateen was later accepted to become a prison guard, and then a security guard:
When he applied for the Department of Corrections job, Mateen had to explain a 2001 criminal charge for battery and disturbing a school function.
In a one-page handwritten letter to prison officials, Mateen said he was charged following a May 2001 fight with another student in his math class at Martin High School. The letter, dated Sept. 26, 2006, says the disruption charge was later dismissed and that he received probation for the battery charge.
Mateen was later let go for other reasons. And I suppose that, in the absence of other evidence, that note of his could have been convincing. It does happen, after all; people do reform, they do see the light. But put it all together—which no one did—especially the 9/11 cheering, and you get a very bad picture of an explosive human ready to go off, and already in sympathy with Islamic terrorists.
And he later fulfilled that early potential through action, with terrible consequences.
The problem is that, even knowing all this, it’s unclear what could have been done to have prevented it. We don’t do preventive detention for thoughtcrime or speech in the absence of criminal acts. Mateen was born here as a citizen and could not be deported. You might say that his parents should not have been let into this country back in the 80s (that’s the ideological test for immigration that I’ve suggested before), but once it had already happened it couldn’t be remedied without violating his rights as a citizen.
Whether it’s a terrorist or a “regular” mass murderer, when you look back there are almost always these sorts of signs, often beginning in childhood. For example, how often do we hear of a mass murderer that he had long been perceived as a dangerous person, and yet until he (it’s most often a “he,” so I’m not being sexist here) acts out some violence there is little to be done that wouldn’t compromise liberty, because any proactive remedy is likely to be overused and/or misused against others.
Remember how the Soviets misused their mental health system to incarcerate dissidents.
How do we separate the truly dangerous from those who are verbally threatening but won’t do much? How can we do it without compromising our basic liberties? We must figure out how to protect ourselves, but protection and liberty are often at odds, and it can be very difficult to know where and how to draw the line when a threat of this magnitude presents itself. But the threat is to liberty itself, in the end.
Quite a conundrum.
[NOTE II: The following is a slightly-edited portion of another post I wrote a while back, explaining how “red flag” laws work.]
“Red flag” laws are statutes that allow for preventive and temporary removal of firearms from persons deemed dangerous who have not yet committed any crimes, with a court hearing coming later. These laws work like this [emphasis mine]:
The laws allow weapons to be seized for a brief time – typically two or three weeks – after which a petitioner, usually a police agency, must go back to court to let a judge decide whether the gun owner’s behavior amounts to a threat to himself or others and whether the weapons should be held longer.
Such laws would have to be carefully crafted and administered to avoid abuse, because the potential for abuse is clear. Is it possible to do this? Is the will there to do this? I have to say I don’t trust the government to use these laws only wisely and well.
As I said earlier, it’s a conundrum.
Here’s a prime example of how Red Flag type laws can be abused–
See https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/08/new-red-flag-legislation-will-allow-feds-to-take-guns-away-from-us-veterans-like-obama-tried-to-do/
“persons deemed dangerous who have not yet committed any crimes,”
So tell me, neo, why you would hand over your rights to be adjudicated without your knowledge to the psychiatric professionals who are declaring President Trump unfit to be President?
Red flag laws presume a degree of trust in our medical and legal system that no longer exists in this country.
So, you go to the VA for some reason, and a Doctor there, or perhaps just an ol’ VA benefits employee of some sort, decides that you can no longer handle your VA check/benefits, and declares you “incompetent.”
Next, you get a letter informing you that the VA has declared you incompetent, and that, from now on, someone the VA has appointed a, no doubt well compensated, fiduciary, will handle your benefits from now on.
And, oh, by the way, this VA declaration of your incompetency has triggered a provision of the Brady Act, which now makes it a crime for you to purchase, possess, transport, or receive a firearm or ammunition, with fines and/or jail time if you do so.
According to the gatewaypundit.com article linked above, 129,000 veterans have already been declared “incompetent.”
SDN:
That’s my point. These laws are a double-edged sword, and as I said, I don’t really trust the authorities to make fair and good decisions on it.
Neo:
I would not trust the people who determine the content of the DSM. I’m sure they would define the desire to own a gun as a mental condition which precludes them from having a gun.
Hello, “Catch-22”?
Mateen’s father was a big supporter of the Taliban and was public about it. I recall that our legal immigration, leading to citizenship, process used to have various “probationary” stipulations. Wouldn’t have been smart to have an deportation mechanism for people who support terrorism, before Omar was born? Did that exist but wasn’t used?
I think I read that Omar had trained in the police academy but was rejected in some of the final qualifications.
While Mateen had something of a record, Nicholas Cruz didn’t have any type of convictions despite a raft of moderately violent behavior. The PC superintendent and sheriff’s dept. were trying to “disrupt the school to prison pipeline.” Seems to me that the Cruz situation is an insurmountable obstacle to red-flag solutions.
___
As Neo said, women are almost never perpetrators of these things. The two that come to mind are the teen Brenda Spencer in San Diego who shot up a school yard with a scoped .22 rifle. Also, the house wife in the northwest who offed her husband with some poisoned Excedrin, and then planted some tainted bottles in a store in order to throw off the investigation.
Both of those had two fatalities each and don’t qualify for a mass killing. And neither really connect with the mindset of the killers that are the topic here. While she had a moderately rotten childhood, Spencer didn’t really have a motive other than boredom.
I noticed Neo’s last quoted section did not mention a right of the gun owner to defend him or herself. That’s an important element that I suspect only gets treated seriously in red or purple states.
The odd woman in: Tashfeen Malik
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_San_Bernardino_attack
We have prevented Islamic terror attacks by being pro-active. We listen to phone calls, surveil mosques, have spies in mosques, listen to tips from anyone who brings suspicious activity to official attention and other activities. Few complain about these methods because they have worked and will continue to work. Many more attacks have been thwarted than we know about.
We have a choice. We can continue to be reactive to mass murder or we can become proactive. The most common denominator of mass murderers is that they are mentally disturbed. And most are known wolves to law enforcement, but because we are reactive, they do nothing. We had two mass shootings in Skagit County, WA in the last ten years. Both perps were known to be dangerous and their families had pleaded with law enforcement to do something about them. But nothing could be done. The result: 20 innocent people killed or wounded.
I believe we need to be proactive, but the laws have to be written carefully, so that just any Tom, Dick, or Harry can’t make a malicious accusation. And there should be a way for a person found not dangerous to get his guns back after due process. There also has to be a way to monitor the results so that the law isn’t abused. Or if it is, to modify it or get rid of it.
The country needs to get more proactive about mental illness in general. We are allowing too many people who are mentally ill to live in homeless camps where they eventually die gruesome deaths. IMO, it’s better to institutionalize people who cannot care for themselves and hold a job than to let them live like animals on the streets. And it’s better to identify those who are dangerous to society before they act.
I share a distrust of government, but we have to hold them accountable, especially at the state, county, and city level. We elect them to provide law enforcement and an honest justice system. If they don’t do it, we need to elect some people who will. We get the government we deserve. We just had a primary here in WA. They estimate that 20% of registered voters will have voted. That’s how we get crappy candidates. Too much attention on national races and too little on local candidates.
Due process must be preserved with real, verifiable terms. If not, DJT will be a one term President and the Dems/Progs will win. It could be the end of our Republic as we know it. I hope I’m not correct.
Diplomad has some cautionary thoughts about “red flags”.
https://www.thediplomad.com/2019/08/toxic-culture-and-red-flags.html
The Diplomad is a blog site by W. Lewis Amselem, a long time foreign service officer who has served the State Department for many years and seen how such laws have been abused.
“I noticed Neo’s last quoted section did not mention a right of the gun owner to defend him or herself. That’s an important element that I suspect only gets treated seriously in red or purple states.”
After the Zimmerman-era debates – in a much more scary forum than this – I learned that the far left seems to hold various positions on self-defense:
1) If someone attacks you, you obviously deserve it.
2) If someone attacks you and you can’t defend yourself “like a man” (eg, preferably unarmed, but definitely without a gun), you deserve to get beat to death.
3) No one is going to attack you. You’re just a racist, paranoid rightwinger to believe that you will need to defend yourself.
Alan Dershowitz has an op-ed in the Wall St. Journal today, expressing serious reservations about “Red Flag” laws on civil liberties grounds.
Why should we let someone who might be dangerous if he had a gun to be out in public anyhow? It would be better, it seems to me, to take steps, including due process, to confine people who are dangerous — that is, people with really serious mental illnesses which constitute a danger to themselves or others.
I wonder when we’re going to hear whether any of these shooters (CA, TX, OH) were taking illegal or legal drugs, including medication for depression or marijuana. In some people, these substances can trigger serious violent episodes.
And, for the marijuana user who posts here, please note I said “some people.” The problem appears to be particularly among adolescents and young adults, although of course most users do not become violent.
Red Flag laws sound good in theory and I understand completely why lots of people want them however, due process must be a requirement or else the abuse could lead to terrible situations. It won’t be easy to find the crazy nut-job killers before they want to make a publicity splash shooting innocent people and at the same time shift out the grudge and revenge complaints.
sift, not shift – above
Hi,
I believe in two of the shootings the shooters sister was murdered by them. Any follow up on that?
“I believe in two of the shootings the shooters sister was murdered by them.”
Hmmm . . . , you a bot, John? Cause as incoherent English goes, that’s a winner.
Nevertheless, the Dayton mass murderer did (as reported) kill his own sister as well as her boyfriend. Of any others who killed a sister in the course of mass murder? I know not.
It is fundamentally wrong to abridge the rights of people that have not done anything wrong. The opportunity for abuse is enormous, and the ability to police this abuse low. Why should we trust the government to administer this program fairly when they have failed, utterly, to enforce the laws already in place?
Thinking a bit further about ‘Red Flags’, I am a bit fearful that a lot of the Republican politicians will jump on board all sorts of restrictive gun laws if they think it will help them win their election, not in my part of Texas, but some places they will sell us reasonable gun people out. My hope is that Trump will not jump on that anti-gun band wagon because it might cause him to lose the election or if he wins we will be screwed without being kissed.
The right to bear arms is written in the Constitution as a right, though to me it has always seemed more like a privilege and implies responsibility. (“A well regulated militia” to me connotes discipline and solidity. Not qualities usually found amongst your typical mass-murdering shooter.)
So why should everyone be allowed to own guns? Felons are not allowed to own guns, for example, in a similar manner to registered sexual offenders who are not allowed to live near schools. If a violent individual is prevented from gun ownership because of a “red flag” situation, is that really too much of a penalty for that individual to pay in contrast to the greater public good?
Sdfer
No I am not a bott.
Now that you have proven your vast intellectual superiority:
(Or perhaps 😉 did two of the shooters, shoot siblings.
Sincerely
John
Well Michael, felons have no barriers to obtaining a gun once released from prison. It happens thousands of times every year. Illinois requires one passes a rigorous background check to receive a firearm owner idenity card. Without ii one can not legally purchase a firearm in IL which also requires a federal background check.
So why does Chicago have so many gun related homicides and injuries, when Chicago has the most restrictive gun laws in Illinois? Bottom line, firearms are a desirable and lucrative commodity just like drugs, sex slaves, etc. No law, no regulation, and no wishful thinking will prevent twisted, evil people from commiting murder. Period. All those laws, regulations, and wishful thoughts do one thing, and one thing only, impinge the rights of responsible people.
No matter how any red flag law is written, it will be abused and abused often. The possibilities for this will be infinite. Liberty can easily be destroyed by wishful thinking. I usually do not write such a long post, but attacking, however wishful and good intentioned the attack, is to begin the chipping away the 2nd, the cornerstone of the Republic (if you can keep it).
So the Left wants to remove all guns from all the people because some of the people might kill people by using a gun to shoot them. That won’t get passed by Congress, at the present time. So their Plan B is to prevent some people from legally acquiring a gun, based on a determination made by the government that they are “crazy.” After the government determines that some person is crazy because they want to kill people, would it not make sense to remove that person from our society, rather than simply prohibiting them from using a more efficient means?
“We find the accused is batshit crazy because he wants to murder masses of people, so we hereby order that he’s free to go, except he cannot purchase a gun. Sleep well tonight, fellow citizens.”
Here are some of the major studies on guns, violence and criminality that you should read to become knowledgeable on the subject.
Drs. James Wright and Peter Rossi, “Under the Gun, Crime and Violence in America” (1983) National Institute of Justice
Professor Gary Kleck, “Point Blank, Guns and Violence in America” (1991).
Dr. Charles Wellford; et al, “Firearms and Violence: a Critical review” (2004) National Academy of Sciences.
None of these studies found any evidence that demonstrates the availability of guns has any measurable effect on rates of homicide, suicide, robbery, assault, rape or burglary.
The problem with gun laws is that they try to disarm the criminals, crazies and careless and these are the people that just don’t pay too much attention to the law.
We already have a real world exemplar of how “red flag” laws will be abused. I am speaking of orders of protection routinely applied for and granted in justice of the peace and similar courts of limited jurisdiction. Most frequently these proceedings arise within the context of divorce or custody proceedings then pending or about to be filed in higher courts of general jurisdiction. Orders of protection are issued pursuant to an emergency proceeding in which the lower court is implored by a spouse or parent to grant immediately orders protecting them or their children from the other spouse or parent. These orders are issued ex parte and generally take the form of no contact orders prohibiting the accused spouse or parent from any contact with the accusing spouse or the parties’ children. The accused can request a hearing and present a defense but only at a later date.
The allegations most commonly brought to obtain the orders are spousal abuse and–ever increasingly–sexual abuse of the children. Given that these are civil proceedings, the standard of proof required to obtain the ex parte orders is simply preponderance of the evidence. Further, the judges almost always err on the side of caution. The result is that emergency orders are routinely granted. Unfortunately, many of the allegations used to obtain the orders in the first instance prove to be bogus.
Whether justified or not, for a number of reasons–most importantly, the accused must struggle to undo what has already been done–the mere existence of these orders are potent weapons in the larger divorce or custody litigation. That’s why orders of protection are so popular.
But that is not all. Many states also provide for the issue of emergency orders against harassment. These are simply orders of protection writ large– that is, any member of the public can obtain one upon allegations of miscreant behavior. My experience has been that these are less commonly applied for. But if so,that is only because divorce and custody disputes tend to bring out the worst in people and the stakes are so much higher.
All of the red flag proposals I have seen follow the same type of procedure and provide even more potential for abuse. First, in blue jurisdictions many judges are simply ideologically predisposed to view 2nd amendment rights with a jaundiced eye. Further, the ordinary citizen who has had their firearms seized will almost never have $10.000 to $20,000 necessary to obtain the services of legal counsel and expert witness testimony to effectively fight the seizure. Call that a “deplorable tax.”
One can readily see why elite respectable culure, received opinion, and “woke” politicos are pushing for red flag laws.
Incidentally, if in the midst of a heated domestic argument, one spouse splashes water on the other, that constitutes a domestic violence assault and under federal law the splasher, if convicted, loses the right to buy or possess a firearm for the rest of their life. So there you have it, an after the fact red flag law.