Discussions of possible federal ‘red flag’ laws are being raised again.
The basic idea is that if someone is accused of posing a danger to himself, or others, you take away his guns until you can judge whether the danger is real and if it’s not, he can try to get his guns back.
Constitutional issues aside, the two main practical problems with red flag laws are (1) once the guns are taken, it can be difficult and expensive to get them back (and sometimes impossible to get them back undamaged), and (2) there’s no accountability for the people who ‘warn’ the authorities about problems that don’t actually exist.
It seems like a good time for a reminder that there’s a way to achieve the goals of a red flag law without either of these problems: A purple flag law.
Such a law addresses the first concern by confiscating the person instead of confiscating his guns. (Persons, unlike guns, have a right to habeus corpus.) And it addresses the second concern by adding substantial and mandatory consequences for false accusations.
Note that even in cases where an accusation is well-founded, and it turns out that a person is too dangerous to let him continue to move around freely, a purple flag law has the crucial advantage of focusing attention where it belongs — on the person, and not on the guns. So, although they require violating all kinds of other constitutional provisions, Purple Flag Laws do not raise Second Amendment issues.
Of course, in a free country we wouldn’t even be having this discussion. But to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you don’t make laws for the country you want. You make laws for the country you have. Purple flag laws may be the best we can do for the country we have now.
