30 thoughts on ““Red Flag” Laws”

  1. My impression is the Senate framework proposal is talking about funding red flag laws for states that pass them themselves, but doesn’t require or even encourage them?
    Also, I’m pretty sure that the inclusion of provisions for access to juvenile records is something that wacko Dems won’t ever agree to, so I think it will all fall apart way before it passes.

  3. Alexia is absolutely one of my favorite commenters/bloggers/whatever. Signing up to receive her legal jewels was one of the best decisions that I ever made. Just seeing one pop up on my in-box screen makes my heart go pitty-pat.
    Not to disparage any of the other writers/bloggers that I regularly go to read, but if some situation forced me to limit myself to three individuals, then the three would be Sgt. Mom, Sarah Hoyt, and Alexia.

  5. I have six flags with red: the New Mexico flag; the Arizona flag; the Missouri flag; the California Bear flag; and the North Dakota flag, which has the least red on it…and of course, the U.S. Flag!! The state flags are from my five Air Force assignments.

  6. Of course the “Red Flag” laws will be abused. You only have to look at how the “Protective Order” laws are being abused everyday. Look at the Depp-Heard thing, lawyers should be embarrassed to call it a trial, she went public first with her allegations, so believe the woman takes hold and Depp is demonized until she is forced to prove it and it turns out to be bogus. Now that doesn’t make Depp any closer to being sane but self defense is still valid even for crazy drug addled drunks.

    Look at how often charges of child sexual abuse appear miraculously just when some woman’s divorce settlement starts to go south. Any time, one side of a dispute is privileged above the other, it will be abused. It’s called winning which has nothing to do with justice.

    Look at the history of civil commitment and all the times it was used to get an obstreperous wife out of the way of a rich husband’s desire to move on to someone more pleasing.

    The obvious solution is to give the person coming forward with this allegation some skin in the game. Maybe they should have to post a $100,000 bond that’s forfeited to the victim if they can’t prove them. Probably it’s just as simple as enforcing the laws already on the books for making false statements. Judges most places have to stand for some sort of election, maybe we should start keeping track of just how gullible they are kick the credulous fools off the bench.

  9. It’s hard to feel sorry for Assange. The man is a sociopathic asshole; he was told that publishing the Manning information would get people killed, and he did it anyway. The ISI used the documents he didn’t bother to redact identities from to kill anyone they could identify as working for the Coalition in Afghanistan, which ran into the hundreds or thousands of people–Including some who’d just been named in our records that he so blithely accepted from a mentally-ill trannie.

    So, if Assange is suffering? So what? Is he being burned to death with his family, the way at least one of our sources died in Afghanistan?

    You ask me, whatever they’re doing to his sorry ass is too kind. I frankly hope he spends the rest of his life suffering. And, yes, Bradley Manning ought to be in the cell next to him, listening to recordings of the deaths of all the people the two of them got killed for their little ego-boo.

  10. I have honestly no idea how, if Assange can be prosecuted, that every major MSM “national security reporter” can’t be also. I thought the law and legal precedent was that you can get in serious trouble for violating your security clearance, but if that’s not the case, i.e., if someone gives you material, that you’re perfectly permitted to print it or do whatever you like, they’re the ones who broke the law, not you. My vague impression is that he’s charged with inducing someone to leak, which I guess is still covered, but again, seems like it would apply to almost anyone who works at the NYT, WaPo, etc. I felt much more negatively about him pre-Russiagate, that’s for sure. He’s infinitely less dangerous than anyone who’s worked at the top of the FBI, CIA, etc., for recent decades. He better hope the system doesn’t want him dead. “Assange didn’t kill himself”–make sure you have that all cued up.

  11. The Dems and their “activists” have basically already explicitly rejected any ability to look at juvenile criminal records. I think the talks have already served their purpose, they showed the GOP was “serious”, but the fact is no one cares about “gun control” right now. Inflation and gas prices and overall economic catastrophe is all that is going to matter.

  12. manning was pardoned, and he actually did the work, apparently the whole cable library is as secure as a your local barnes and noble, wilkileaks revealed the dirty laundry of officials from chechnya to south america, snowden revealed the capabiliities of the surveillance net, a whole host of publications got a raft of pulitzers by just publishing the material, of course everything changed when hillary’s dirty laundry was aired,

  13. The irony about all that BS regarding criminality is that the really, truly criminal crap that was going on never got into the databases in the first place. All that was in there was stuff that anyone with half a damn brain could work out from open-source information and rumor.

    The problem I have with the Manning documents being released is the fact that they didn’t redact identities of the people who were in there. For any reason… Acquaintance of mine did multiple tours over there, as a Human Intelligence type, and the thing she found on the one after the idiots released all that crap was that everyone she’d had contact with in one village and then made the mistake of documenting? Wound up dead. Murdered, one way or another. The Taliban got lists, sent from the ISI who had analysts working on the databases Manning gave Assange. Anyone she’d even talked to, had tea with, whatever…? Dead. Along with their families.

    So, yeah… F*ck Manning, and Assange, both. I completely get and understand the need to release the stuff they thought criminal, but the identities of all those poor bastards that made the mistake of just talking to us, in Afghanistan? Unforgivable.

    Frankly, the really criminal crap wasn’t in those databases. I spent years working on the high side of SIPRNET, and I can’t recall ever having seen a damn thing in there that was really all that actionable or objectionable. The truly egregious crap ain’t documented, but you can see the outlines of it on the open-source side. It’s mostly the things that aren’t there, the telling omissions. Like, for example… Why did we never do anything about Pakistani support for the Taliban? Why were we paying them billions, just to have our support convoys robbed blind going through Pakistan to Afghanistan, and essentially never go after the ISI for supporting the Taliban? We allowed the ISI to effectively use Pakistan as a safe harbor and refuge for the Taliban, while they steadily recruited, paid, and supported their activities in Afghanistan. Nothing was ever done, and none of our fine flag officers ever went before the American people or Congress to tell us what was going on. The reality? We were paying the Pakis to pay the Taliban to go into Afghanistan and kill American soldiers and Afghanis. That’s something that ain’t in the databases, but you can damn sure tell it was going on. Why was it going on? Well, again… Who the f*ck was getting the money? Why was Debby Wasserman-Schultz hiring Pakistani nationals as IT specialists, and giving them free rein over the Democratic Party’s Congressional delegation computers? Why did that investigation get squashed by the Capitol Police?

    Manning and Assange didn’t commit journalism; they committed self-gratification theater, nothing more. And, in so doing, killed thousands of people just so they could get their little Pentagon Papers jollies.

    Didn’t accomplish sh*t, either. Anyone who really cared about real issues and real crimes would have been going after far different targets than the ones they did.

  14. Manning was a messed up tranny who still somehow got shipped over to Iraq and the Army realized they didn’t trust him with a gun so they put him in a seat with access to anything and essentially zero security protections, because they thought that was so much safer. Typical Army, in other words. And of course everyone covered up for his tranny-ness until after he was convicted, even though everyone in internet chatrooms knew.
    Still doesn’t change the fact that Assange isn’t even American, let alone is covered by any sort of security agreement, so it seems to me he’s an a-hole who the judicial system shouldn’t be able to touch. If you asked me whether he or Adam Schiff should be locked away in Leavenworth as a national security threat, the answer isn’t even close–lock up Schifty and throw away the key.
    Rumor used to be that Wikileaks was a Russian front, my guess for a while has been it was more likely a Western IC cutout that served its purpose and then the frontman thought he was a big shot and stepped out of line and has been made to pay the price ever since.

  15. Manning was even worse than most people know. I knew his security manager, and had an opportunity to talk to him after the fact.

    Manning was a known security risk. He committed egregious violations while he was still in training at Fort Huachuca, but because he was “protected class”, they were unable to touch him. He turtled up and claimed that he was being persecuted because “he was different”. The schoolhouse just pushed him on, trusting that his duty unit would deal with him. It was easier to get rid of him that way.

    He got to his first duty assignment, and they were ramping up to go to Iraq. Security manager took one look at him and wanted to pull his clearances; he’d had word through the grapevine. The chain of command nixed that, because they didn’t have enough people to man the desks during the deployment coming up, and Manning had been granted a Top Secret clearance by OPM, something that never would have happened back in the bad old days when we regarded the sexually confused as security risks due to the tendency for other mental issues to accompany that one. In today’s enlightened times, of course, we don’t practice that.

    The security manager that tried stopping Manning’s clearance got effectively fired, and the guy who replaced him read the handwriting on the wall: Keep the numbers up, no matter what. So, Manning retained his clearance and wound up working unsupervised due to the shortage of personnel available to work in that SCIF (Secure Compartmented Information Facility). In the end, who got blamed for Manning? Not the f*cking commanders, that’s for sure. They’d been told he was a risk, they made the choice to pressure keeping Manning on the roster with a TS clearance, and they took zero responsibility for it. If I remember correctly, they hammered the security manager and Manning’s supervisor, but got no blame for having been responsible for setting the stage through their actions and decisions.

    Manning was a “known risk”, and never should have been deployed, let alone with a clearance. The guy who’d wanted to pull his clearance and gotten fired for it? He had examples galore of things that Manning had done prior to deployment and while still at the schoolhouse. He also had a “Memorandum for Record” that he’d filed protesting the decision not to pull his clearance, and when they went after him for Manning (which, believe it or not, they tried to do…) he casually dropped the copy of said Memorandum he’d kept, and showed them where they could go looking for it in the files. Which sort of took the wind out of the sails for all involved…

    Manning only happened because of the idiocy surrounding having this protected class of people who’re now untouchable for behavioral problems. If a heterosexual male did the things that many homosexual males routinely do, we’d pull his clearance in a f*cking heartbeat, because there is a high correlation between people going off the rails sexually and then doing things. Unfortunately, you can’t do that with “teh gay”, ‘cos that would be discriminatory.

    Don’t even get me started with the OPM breaches. I suspect that there was something really hinky going on with them for years, before anyone even wants to talk about it having begun, because there were some really, really weird decisions made about clearances that I still don’t quite understand. My boss nearly lost his clearance for an extramarital affair he had; the amount of paperwork we had to do and the hoops we had to jump through to get them to let him keep it were astonishing and onerous. The investigators climbed up his ass with microscopes, along with the woman he had the affair with. Yet… I know of several other cases where there were things that should have resulted in similar actions which were essentially just glossed over and ignored by OPM. I’m not going to say that there was a racial component to it, but… My boss was a hetero white male, and the two cases I’m thinking of, one was black and the other was asian. Multiple DUIs, gambling debts, all sorts of red flags. No investigations initiated, no threats over the loss of clearances. Everything was A-OK, apparently. Their security managers and I were more than a little puzzled by this, but when OPM turned out to be breached…? Shall we say that a little light went on?

  17. I thought after christopher boyce and pelton and hanson and ames, they would have made things more secure, encrypt cables with confidential information then again there are a million people, last time I checked with security clearances, maybe that number has been pruned,

  18. Manning and Assange didn’t commit journalism; they committed self-gratification theater, nothing more. And, in so doing, killed thousands of people just so they could get their little Pentagon Papers jollies.

    Nixon, unlike Trump, actually did things for which he should have been removed from office. However, the Jan 6 hearings and related media coverage emit the same stink of parochial, morally obtuse sanctimony that accompanied the Watergate hearings. The USA’s wholesale abdication of its overseas commitments in the ’70s, once the Democrats gained control, was strikingly similar to what we’re living through today. The country was adrift for years while our enemies made headway and millions of our foreign allies paid the price. Many of the leading Democrats and media people never acknowledged any of this, much less were willing to reflect publicly on whether bringing down the hated Nixon had been worth the international consequences. Dan Rather still basks in fading glory as a smug simpleton who asked the devil president gotcha questions at press conferences.

    Now the Democrats are again in charge and we have bolted from Afghanistan, Putin has taken the hint to invade Ukraine, China and Iran are on the move, incompetents and commissars run our military. But we got rid of Trump by any means necessary and that’s what counts.

  19. nixon could be faulted for many things, appeasing communist china, wage and price controls thats just a few, now the shenanigans of political surveillance, carried out through private parties like intertel, but it was on the downlow, mark felt supervised it every day of his life probably for the last decade, dubious financing from suspicious sources, secret unsanctioned military expeditions, more than one can count

  20. The Dems and their “activists” have basically already explicitly rejected any ability to look at juvenile criminal records.

    Of course they have, because their goal is to disarm their political enemies and most certainly NOT stop mass killings.

    Hence, they will not go along with any policy or any change in policy that will actually accomplish anything to make mass murders less likely.

    Bluntly, they need them to continue. Otherwise, their relentless attempts to disarm the public have no chance at all.

    Pardon me if I am merely stating the obvious.

  21. Assange is a dead man walking. He pissed off too many stupid and corrupt governments to be allowed a trial. Manning, a serving soldierette, should be trussed up and beaten like a pinata, but Assange owed nothing either to the USG or the corruptocrats of Aholistan.

    Anyone with any familiarity with the history and culture of Allah’s favorite hillbillies would have known that a neocon neocrusade with the battle cry, “We’re infidel perverts, and we’re here to help you!” would have limited appeal. T.s. for those who made the wrong call, but Allah wills it.

  22. After the betrayal with sykes picot there are right to be wary then they promised the jews and the arabs you cant cut the same cake three different ways now suez had it succeeded would have brought the brotherhood to power nearly 50 years earlier so thank heavem for small favors the brits enpowered the hashemites and the sauds the latter used those weapons to fighr against their rivals (sound familair)

    But the charge against assange is espionage?? How he gave the info to all parties free of charge.

  23. Every govt felt vulnerable because they left their cables unencrypted like a candy store apparently unsupervised.

  24. Nixon was a poor president in many ways. Wage and price controls were an unmitigated disaster. He created the EPA. He abused power. China, maybe. He appeased the Soviets – they cheated on SALT, and the ABM treaty was an own-goal. But he was a grownup and got some very big things right. He got us out of Vietnam (Congressional Democrats turned our disengagement into a catastrophe by pulling support from the South Vietnamese). He saved Israel in 1973 by resupplying weapons against the advice of Kissinger and the foreign-policy bureaucracy. He put our nuclear forces on high alert when the Soviets threatened to intervene on the side of the Arabs; the Soviets backed down. (Our domestic naval-gazing media, parochial as ever, treated the nuclear alert as a cynical ruse and distraction from Watergate. In their partisanship and ignorance they couldn’t or wouldn’t see the possibility that the Soviets might be trying to exploit our domestic political disarray.)

    Some of us might say that Suez, had it been allowed to succeed, might have discouraged the resurgence of Arab fascism a la Nasser and Saddam Hussein

  25. Yes those points but he had certain skepticism about soft on crime the rising hostility to church and nation which vietnam was masking the easy reflex of promiscuity and drug abuse his ill thought out minimum basic income was a replacement for welfare but vietnam and the great society had started to weaken the fiscal foundation of the country

  26. MCS’s comment gets to the heart of red flag abuse; does anyone know the proportion of murders by kin, boy/girl friend, etc.? Before gang killings became so common, spousal ones were fairly high, I don’t know if that remains true.

    The one whose gun is taken becomes the vulnerable one in a crazed relationship battle. But, on the other hand, surely murders are more common in these fraught relationships. And those deaths can lead to collateral damage – the crazies go full blown. Take the guy who ran over his girlfriend with a car then a couple of days later mowed down young and old in the Christmas parade with the same van; wasn’t one of those riots begun when police shot a guy who was kidnapping his kids and had threatened his girlfriend (who called 911) with the knife he was reaching for? The very situations where the red flag might do the most good bear some resemblance to those in which it would be counterproductive.

    On the other hand, in Florida, in Uvalde and in many other cases the deranged murderers were also self-destructive, throwing out more cries for help than are imaginable without some action. No one was there to care, no one was there to help, no one was held responsible. These are not the signs of healthy homes, healthy communities, healthy schools. Some (maybe all) seem broken beyond repair – but we do need adults who see the brokenness, who see the need for isolation from society, see the need for attention to those broken monsters in our midst.

    Some of the same goes for expunging records. We mature slowly. But we don’t become different people as we mature. Knowing George Floyd’s ability to hold a pistol to the belly of a pregnant woman while his crew searched her apartment for drugs might have lead to less optimism about his redemptive progress.

    If any laws are agreed upon, their consequences are likely to be so complicated it will be hard to distingjuish the ratio of good to bad.

  27. The devil in the details:

    Yes, false accusations must be severely punished. But also yes, anonymous accusations must be handled (somehow) as well. How much effort must be put into investigating and prosecuting a malicious or possibly mistaken accuser who wasted police resources and violated a citizen’s rights?

    The cops don’t “adjudicate”, right. But showing up to confront a guy with “an arsenal”? Are we talking about Sheriff Andy meeting up with the accused at the local cafe, or Deputy Fife with an ATF/SWAT team busting down doors just before dawn?

    Does a surrender order imply a search warrant? If the list of registered firearms includes a weapon that the owner says was recently lost in a tragic boating accident… how aggressively is that discussion conducted? Of search warrants generally … if the house is tossed, is the homeowner financially responsible hire the crew to put everything back and make necessary repairs?

  28. working backwards

    They didn’t kick-in my door, they actually called me out front of my apartment complex and had a team our there waiting who cuffed me. For those wondering why I went down in the first place…. They don’t exactly tell you that you’re going to be red-flagged, I didn’t even know it was firearms related and thought they just wanted to talk. Once I found out why they were they I told them they would need a warrant. The officer on scene told me they could do that but then SWAT would kick in my front door, he then suggestively asked if I had a dog, so I told him I had a German Shepherd. He said if I let them in and cooperated he’d make sure that she wasn’t harmed, basically I caved-in to save my dog.

  29. Luke K
    I was red flagged in Maryland, a judge ordered my guns returned within 48 hours. It was an awful experience, cost me 10k in attorney fees, the cops set cps on my wife and I, and i didn’t get my guns back for months even though the judge ordered them returned. If you want more information I’d be happy to share with proof. EDIT: I’m going to provide additional details below since people seem interested.

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