Over the last week or so, our stories on Red Flag orders have proven…controversial. The first, “What To Do If Police Show Up At Your Door With A Red Flag Confiscation Order” stirred up a lot of emotions. But the “How to Prepare For A Red Flag Confiscation Order At Your House” seriously elevated a lot of people’s blood pressure.
Plenty of readers in comment section said they would refuse to comply with officers serving a red flag order against them. Plenty more suggested that they would fight to the death to resist.
Like this one:
While I attribute a lot of this #resistance talk to keyboard warrior chest-thumping, let’s keep things in perspective. It’s not like Big Government has passed a decree banning all guns and UN storm troopers are going house-to-house confiscating everyone’s firearms and shooting their dogs (not necessarily in that order).
These “extreme risk protection orders” or “gun violence restraining orders” — whatever they may be called in your state — while grossly unconstitutional, are temporary. Every state where this is law has a specified hearing date, usually about ten to fourteen days after confiscation. At that hearing, the gun owner who’s been temporarily stripped of his or her gun rights has an opportunity to contest the initial complaint in front of a judge. If the judge adjudicates the complaint as unfounded, your rights are restored and you’ll soon get your guns back.
The article on “how to prepare” suggests storing some of your guns in other locations only you know about so you can access them immediately once you are again legal to possess them. In other words, so you can defend yourself and your family (at least the ones who didn’t file a vexatious complaint against you in the first place) in that window of time between when the judge throws out the complaint and when the local constabulary releases your property.
If police show up at your door, are you really going to fight to the death to resist instead of submitting to a(n admittedly wrong) short-term inconvenience? That doesn’t make sense. Especially if you’re a normally well-balanced individual who, when you appear in court, will show up reasonably well-dressed, well-groomed, calm, cool and collected. Seeing that, the judge will probably throw out the original order.
After all, if a judge sees you don’t have a tail, horns or fangs and you appear mentally and emotionally sound, the claims against you will look unfounded at best, and maliciously defamatory at worst.
Yes, it will cost you a thousand bucks or more to hire a decent attorney to fight the bogus accusations. Is your life worth a thousand bucks? Mine sure is. Yours is too.
Not only that, as I noted in the “how to prepare” story, signing up with a company like US Law Shield that will represent you in a red flag hearing gives you the peace of mind knowing you won’t have to spend money you probably don’t have hiring a good attorney to represent you in the formal hearing.
What’s more, after the first red flag gets beaten back, I suspect any judge worth their salt will look at subsequent filings against the same person with a heaping helping of skepticism.
Yes, if Diane Feinstein gets her way, the Democrats vote to ban all guns and the UN “peacekeeping troops” land on American shores to forcibly disarm us during the day and rape our wives and daughters at night (stories 1 2 3 4 5…), plenty of Americans like me will be delighted to poke holes in the men under those blue helmets, both up close and from a quarter-mile away.
But shooting a cop on your doorstep carrying out a red flag order? Nope. I’m not a fool. I’ll fight that one out in court in a week or two.
As they say, living well is the best revenge.
Not only that, but don’t make all gun owners look bad by going down in a blaze of glory over something that can be fixed in court in the near future. Trust me, you won’t look like a patriot hero to Joe and Jane Sixpack across America. Instead you’ll legitimize the fiction of why we have these unconstitutional laws in the first place. They’ll assume gun owners really are simply just one bad day away from going off the deep end and killing someone.
Or this one:
Or one of my favorites: