Will “Red Flag” Laws Stop Suicide?

Suicides are being used as an excuse to impose “red flag” laws so the government may arbitrarily decide who may — or may not — own a gun. The basis for these arbitrary judgments is “mental illness”. According to red flag laws, if the federal or state government deems you “mentally ill”, then you don’t get to protect yourself from people who wish to harm you.

Imagine the spectacle of POLITICIANS deciding who is mentally ill or mentally sane. Have you ever heard of anything so hilarious?

One thing about the Democrats: At least they’re open about gun confiscation. “Yes, we are coming for your guns. They don’t belong to you. They belong to the government. To hell with the Second Amendment. We own you!”

Republicans are sneakier. Many are now arguing that red flag laws will stop suicides. So if you oppose red flag laws — the implication goes — then you’re in favor of suicides.

These guilt-inducing tactics are what Democrats used to pull before they became open, self-admitted totalitarian fascists. Now it falls to Republicans in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere to adopt the guilt-inducing tactic.

The argument doesn’t work on its own terms. It presupposes that if guns are outlawed, it will be harder (if not impossible) for a suicidal person to end his life. Wrong!

To assume that a suicidal person won’t get his hands on a gun (even once they’re all illegal) is just as naive as assuming that a homicidal person won’t get his hands on a gun. It’s preposterous.

The “war on drugs” has resulted in the greatest heroin addiction in human history. Before that, there was crack cocaine. Crime is always higher due to the illegal drug trade. Do we seriously expect that a similar war on guns by the government will result in a reduction in homicides — or suicides?

People who push this idea have no clue about the nature of suicide. Any EMT will tell you that the people who really WANT to end their lives find a way to do so. Even if they can’t get their hands on a gun, they will find a way. Gun violence is not the only way to end your life.

Michael Baldridge comments:
“There are very few guns in Japan, and yet the suicide rate there is higher. They just hang themselves or jump in front of trains instead. If the person is in that bad of shape, 5150 them. Take THEM away from their gun and put THEM in a facility. Taking their gun does nothing to prevent them from suicide if you are really worried about suicide.”

Reducing suicides is just a way to rationalize obliterating the Second Amendment — without even going through the dignity of a Constitutional repeal process, like the government did with Prohibition back in the 1920s and 1930s. By the way, how well did Prohibition work out?

Virtue-signaling Republicans like Marco Rubio, who support “red flag” laws, will complain that America is too violent. They will say that America’s more violent than other countries, such as Europe, Australia and New Zealand. That may or may not be true. But if America IS more violent than other places, and even if America is “too violent” — then how will outlawing guns for everyone (including the peaceful, civil majority) solve anything? The media and the universities will not ask this question. So fools like Marco Rubio will never have to answer it.

Rubio and other leftist Republicans: You should go to the other side. Join your totalitarian brothers and sisters in the Democratic Party who want simply to force everyone to hand over their guns.

These leftists are MORE interested in forcing the peaceful to hand over their guns than they are about controlling criminals. They don’t care about crime. Most politicians are criminals themselves. They just want to be the winners in the criminal game. That’s the government too many of us have created for ourselves … in what started out as a land of liberty and individual rights!

Shame on most of us for letting that happen. But let’s not intensify the evil by pretending that suicides will go down if we only hand over our guns.

 

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