Red flag laws have got to be one of the stupidest ideas to come out of the left since banning firearms based on what they look like—unless the left isn’t sincere about who these laws are meant to target. Red flag laws don’t make sense. Not if you take them at face value.

Even given the assumption that lawmakers on the left are being sincere, these laws are another example of the left blaming the weapon rather than the criminal. Here they have a person they think is going to kill lots of people, and they’re so afraid this person is going to kill lots of people that they want to take that person’s firearms immediately.¹

And then, specifically and deliberately, their law leaves the person free to kill lots of people with other firearms, or other weapons entirely such as gasoline, bombs, poison, and vehicles.

The more cynical take is that the left is more interested in ways to take away our guns than in stopping actual mass murder.

Because there are ways to keep criminals from committing murder. Most of the red flags that we learn about after a mass murder is committed are actual criminal acts that should have resulted in putting or keeping the criminal in jail.

Paying attention to those red flags would have kept the murderer from committing the murders that the left uses to justify red flag laws.

Other red flags are symptoms of serious mental problems for which there are already laws in place for committing the person to restricted care.

That also would keep them from actually committing the murders.

But the red flags that the left enshrines into law aren’t flags at all. They’re just one person complaining about another person, sometimes even anonymously. It’s Facebook social dysfunction brought into the real world.

Red flag laws are yet another example of criminals committing crimes, and the left wanting to take self-defense weapons away from everyone else.

They are yet another example of the left looking at laws not being enforced—criminals allowed to go free—and wanting more laws against the law-abiding rather than enforcing the laws that would have stopped the criminals.

They are yet another example of if the left believed what they’re claiming they believe, they’d act far differently. If the left believed that the people targeted by red flag laws were going to kill, they would work to lock up the criminal, not the weapons. Locking up a criminal’s weapons doesn’t stop the criminal from starting a fire, or renting a large moving van, or buying poison, or any of the many other trivially easy ways that killers can and do kill. If the left truly believed their red flags were targeting murders, they’d take the red flags a lot more seriously than that. They wouldn’t take away the guns. They’d quarantine the murderer.

They don’t. Because they don’t believe that the people targeted by their laws are murderers. They don’t believe their red flags because this is also yet another example of the left taking terms that everyone understands and using them in a way that means nearly their opposite, hoping nobody notices the shuffle. Before these laws, red flags meant red flags, serious offenses that should have brought the criminal to the attention of law enforcement. Those red flags should have resulted in prison time or confinement. As embodied in the left’s laws, red flags mean little more than vague feelings of unease, or minor neighborly or familial disputes. Things that happen to everyone and everywhere, and are thus not red flags at all.

They could apply to anyone, in other words, which is itself a red flag. When the left says they want to stop crime, but pass laws that disarm non-criminals, when they say they want to protect victims, but instead treat the criminals as victims and disarm victims, when they say they want new laws but ignore the laws that aren’t being enforced, that is a red flag. It means their real goals are not their stated goals.

The left’s gun control policies create more victims in vulnerable populations, and make existing victims more vulnerable, specifically by reducing the ability of victims to defend themselves against criminals. Their laws empower criminals. The left claims they want to control criminals, but they really want to control everyone other than criminals.

Targeting criminals isn’t where power lies. Targeting everyone else is.