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They allow the government to eliminate peoples' rights without any due process. Say your neighbor calls the police and says you're a bad guy who's about to commit a crime? Or maybe your ex complains about you after an argument? Now the cops can show up and remove your firearms.

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Imagine this approach with any other set of rights. Imagine a neighbor complaining about someone, and then having that person thrown in jail. Or say a guy's ex-wife (think Amber Herd) claims he was abusive, and so we take away his right to free speech.

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Maybe the neighbor has a point. Maybe the ex-wife is right. But we have a simple principle in this country: innocent until proven guilty. If you want to strip someone's rights, you've got to go through a court of law--that's true even with those rights progressives don't like.

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There's another angle to this: we're ignoring that it's already against the law to provide or sell a weapon to a crazy person. Why do so many people, from the shooters in Uvalde and Parkland to many others, get guns when there were many signs that they were a problem?

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The answer (in part) goes to how we treat mental health and institutionalization. Walk around any big city in America these days and you have a very good chance of meeting an obviously insane person who is a threat to themselves and others. As a society, we ignore them.

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But whether they're an isolated teen in Texas or a screaming insane person outside of the New York subway, we need to ignore less and institutionalize more. Is that a strong response? Sure is, which is why we have due process before we commit anyone to a mental institution.

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Yet we need to be willing to institutionalize people more, both to clean up our streets and also to help some obviously very sick people. That would be far more effective than any "red flag" law. And we'd respect important rights in the process.

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There's so much more to do. American schools are clearly seen as soft targets by evil people. Is this sad? Yes. Do I wish it weren't so? Of course. But it's reality. So, we need to bolster school security and make it harder to get into schools in the first place.

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I've not even addressed the deeper problems here. We have some very troubled young men who carry out these mass shootings. We have horrible inner-city gun violence that kills far more people than any of the one-off shootings that gather headlines.

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We have a deranged media that covers the mass murders that fit their narrative while ignoring those that don't (do a search for "Tulsa" and "Waukesha" to see what I mean). And one of our deepest problems is politicians who use slogans that poll well instead of being honest.

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