Last week, several gun control senators introduced Red Flag legislation in the Michigan State Senate using an argument that it could have prevented the Oxford school shootings. MCRGO strongly opposes these bills. They have been referred to the Senate Government Operations Committee.
The Senate Majority Leader has indicated the legislation will receive a hearing. Please contact your state senator with an email asking that they oppose Senate Bills 856, 857, & 858 that provide for firearms seizure without due process. You can find your state senator HERE.
Below is a message from Cooley Law Professor & MCRGO Second Vice Chair Steve Dulan explaining his opposition to these bills in more detail.
I am adamantly opposed to so-called "Red Flag" laws, which are sometimes referred to as "Extreme Risk Protection Order" laws, and various other names. I have many reasons for my opposition, legal and practical.
Put aside for a moment the very serious due process concerns surrounding a law that allows for search and seizure with no warrant that is based on evidence of crime. Put aside the fact that the list of individuals who are authorized to file Red Flag complaints is usually also the same list of individuals who are likely to have reasons other than concern for public safety underlying their reports (spouses, ex-spouses, siblings, etc.)
Put aside the fact that legal procedures already exist for dealing with people who are a danger to themselves or others.
Put aside the fact that the "plain view" doctrine, which states that once law enforcement officers have a "lawful vantage point," they can pursue criminal charges for whatever they happen to observe. Put aside the real cases of gun owners who have been charged with felonies for possessing items that they believed to be acceptable (one family had inherited a "Tommy gun" that was legally purchased by an ancestor in 1927, and which had never left the family farm. They ended up facing prison after allowing a permissive search of their gun room. Another defendant was prosecuted for felony possession of a "Street Sweeper" shotgun that he had lawfully purchased in the 1980's. He literally "never got the memo" that it had been retroactively outlawed.
Put aside that Red Flag laws stigmatize guns and gun owners by ignoring all of the other weapons and means of causing physical harm.
Put aside my personal experience with a friend whose family did take away his guns because he was behaving irrationally. He hung himself to death shortly thereafter.
In my Firearms Law class, I prefer to focus on a thought problem: Assume that the person calling in the alarm had genuine, well-founded concerns. Assume that a person's family member is well-meaning and sincere, and honestly believes that the subject is a danger to himself or others but doesn't have enough evidence to get a PPO (Personal Protection Order) or to have the subject detained for observation in a mental health facility. So, the Red Flag law is invoked. Assume the person making the initial call doesn't have some other axe to grind and the call wasn't made for some nefarious purpose such as petty revenge for some insult.
The local law enforcement agency is tasked with disarming the subject, who is now known to be armed and presumed to be irrational. So, they take officer's safety into account and stage a standard pre-dawn SWAT raid. I've seen the aftermath of such searches. The home is usually essentially destroyed.
Assume the best-case scenario: that neither the subject, nor any police officer, is shot or otherwise harmed. No arrest is made. The police leave with whatever guns they are able to find at the home. The subject is not taken into custody. (Remember, there is no probable cause or there would have been an arrest or a mental health detainment.) The subject, who is presumed to be unbalanced and aggressive, is now left at large: agitated, afraid, and angry, with a destroyed home, in a world full of potential weapons, and probably some theories about who made the initial call.
Even in the best-case scenario, when the law works as planned, a very dangerous situation results. Even putting aside all of the legal and practical concerns, the very concept of "Red Flag" laws fails at the level of basic logic.
-Steve Dulan, MCRGO Second Vice-Chair
