Imagine the scene. It’s Thanksgiving. Or Christmas Eve. Or whatever holiday forces the extended family into the same room with the good china and the bad politics. The house is in a jurisdiction that has decided the Second Amendment is optional if enough people clutch their pearls hard enough. Mixed company: a couple of Second Amendment Radicals who actually understand the Bill of Rights, some normies who just want the stuffing to not be dry, a progressive relative who thinks “gun violence” is a weather system rather than a human behavior problem, and at least one anti-2A true believer whose entire personality is built on the idea that if the government just confiscates enough metal objects from people who never committed a crime, the bad guys will suddenly forget how to do harm.
Conversation drifts. Someone mentions the latest outrage of the day—taxes, immigration, the school board, whatever is currently making the news cycle spin. The gun owner in the room, a regular guy who keeps a few rifles and pistols the way normal people keep tools, makes a point that is neither radical nor threatening. Maybe he notes that people who cannot defend themselves are dependent on the goodwill of strangers and the response time of a bureaucracy. Maybe he just says, in the context of the discussion, that he owns firearms and has trained with them. Or maybe someone else at the table casually references “the guns in the safe” because that’s how normal people talk about normal things in their own homes.
The anti-2A relative’s face tightens. The comment is not a threat. It is not a plan. It is not even particularly aggressive. But it is enough. The relative is offended. Not by violence—by the existence of a capable adult who does not share the soft, saccharine worldview that the State will always be there, that the right people will always be in charge, and that private firearms are an affront to that arrangement. Within hours, the wheels turn. A call is made. A petition is filed. Because in this jurisdiction, almost anyone with a personal connection can start the process, and the standard is not “this person has committed a crime.” The standard is “someone who dislikes this person has said so, under some level of oath or affidavit.”
By the next morning, or perhaps that night, the police arrive. Not one or two officers for a quiet conversation. Enough of them that the neighbors notice. Lights. Orders. The man is not charged with a crime. He has not been convicted of anything. A jury of his peers has not weighed evidence. He is simply told, by armed agents of the State, that his firearms and ammunition will be taken. Refusal is not an option that ends well. Compliance means standing in his own doorway or living room while strangers inventory and remove property that was legal that morning, because a relative or acquaintance decided the conversation at the table was intolerable. The house is searched. The man is left disarmed, with his name now attached to an order that broadcasts to anyone who cares that he no longer has the means to defend himself. The relative goes home feeling virtuous. The rest of the family is left to explain to the kids why the cops were there.
That is not a hypothetical exaggeration in the places where these laws exist in their harshest forms. It is the logical endpoint of a system that treats the Second Amendment as a privilege that can be suspended on the basis of hearsay, interpersonal drama, and political disagreement, without a criminal charge, without a trial, and without the full protections of due process that apply when the State actually accuses someone of a malum in se offense—something evil in itself, like murder, rape, or robbery.
The victim in that scenario was denied the most basic procedural protections the Constitution requires before the government strips a person of an enumerated right. Mere association, a political opinion expressed at a holiday table, or the fact that someone in the social circle is emotionally unstable and anti-gun was enough to trigger a violent State response. The order arrives before the accused has a meaningful chance to confront the evidence, cross-examine the accuser, or force the State to meet anything resembling the standard that applies when liberty is actually on the line. Hearsay becomes sufficient. A judge, often working from one-sided filings, signs off. The guns leave. The man remains free—but now everyone who might wish him harm knows he has been stripped of the tools that deter or stop it.
The History of Red Flag Laws: From Lottery Shootings to the Gunshine State’s Panic
Red flag laws, formally extreme risk protection orders or similar names depending on the state, did not appear fully formed after a single tragedy. Connecticut enacted the first version in 1999 after a disgruntled employee killed four supervisors at the Connecticut Lottery and then himself. Indiana followed in 2005 with “Jake Laird’s Law” after a police officer was killed by a man in a mental health crisis. California, Oregon, and Washington added versions in the mid-2010s. By early 2018, only five states had them.
Then came the Parkland shooting in February 2018. Within weeks, Republican-controlled Florida passed the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act. Governor Rick Scott signed it. The package raised the age to purchase rifles, imposed waiting periods, and created risk protection orders that only law enforcement can petition for—at least on paper. The “Gunshine State,” long a national leader in shall-issue concealed carry and stand-your-ground, suddenly had a mechanism to strip firearms from people who had not been charged with a crime. The political and media environment after Parkland made it possible even in a state that had previously resisted broad new restrictions.
The floodgates opened. In 2018 alone, multiple states enacted versions: Vermont, Maryland, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Delaware, Massachusetts, Illinois, and others. California expanded its earlier law. By September 2026, roughly 22 states plus the District of Columbia had some form of extreme risk protection order statute on the books. A handful of states have moved the other direction, enacting laws that prohibit or sharply limit local red flag schemes—Oklahoma in 2020, later Tennessee, Texas, Montana, and others. Federal proposals have appeared repeatedly. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act of 2022 included funding that states could use for crisis intervention programs including red flag systems. More recently, legislation such as H.R. 7599, the Federal Extreme Risk Protection Order Act of 2026 sponsored by Rep. Lucy McBath, has been introduced to create a federal court process allowing family members or law enforcement to seek orders that would trigger nationwide firearms disabilities, along with grants to expand state systems. Counter-legislation such as H.R. 223, the Preventing Unjust Red Flag Laws Act, has sought to bar federal funding for implementation and enforcement of such orders.
The pattern is consistent. A high-profile killing creates political pressure. Legislators who previously defended the right to keep and bear arms decide that temporary suspension of that right, without a criminal conviction, is an acceptable trade. The anti-2A organizations that treat every private firearm as a public health crisis celebrate. The people who actually live under the resulting regime discover that the temporary order is easy to obtain and difficult to reverse, and that the process treats the respondent more like a defendant in a civil forfeiture proceeding than like a citizen whose enumerated rights are being suspended.
Florida remains the clearest illustration of how quickly this can happen in a state with a strong pro-2A reputation. The statute requires law enforcement to file the petition and, for temporary ex parte orders, to base the claims on personal knowledge of facts showing danger in the near future. Sworn affidavits are supposed to accompany the filings. In practice, usage has been high. Statewide figures show thousands of temporary and final orders granted in the years after passage, with grant rates for final orders reported in the high 80s to near 100 percent in some analyses of early cases. Judges, facing the risk of being blamed if they deny an order and something later happens, often err on the side of granting. The result is a system in which the initial seizure can occur with minimal adversarial testing, and the subsequent hearing still operates under a standard far below what is required to convict someone of a crime and send them to prison.
Real-World Examples of Red Flag Orders Gone Wrong
The theoretical risks become concrete when the orders are served. In November 2018, shortly after Maryland’s extreme risk protective order law took effect, Anne Arundel County police arrived at the home of 61-year-old Gary Willis around 5 a.m. to serve an order and seize his firearms. Willis answered the door holding a revolver. Accounts indicate he initially set it down, then became irate when told why the officers were there, retrieved the gun, and struggled with an officer. The revolver discharged during the struggle without striking anyone. A second officer shot and killed Willis. Police later described the incident as evidence that the new law was needed. A relative had sought the order. Willis was not charged with a crime before the officers arrived. He is dead. [Baltimore Sun coverage] [Reason analysis]
In Florida, early applications of the new risk protection order statute included cases driven by online speech rather than demonstrated conduct. A University of Central Florida student who posted edgy, deliberately offensive comments on Reddit praising mass shooters in a trolling context—while stating he would never commit such acts—became the subject of a temporary order. Police affidavits contained claims that later reviews of the interview transcript did not fully support. The temporary prohibition was eventually lifted, but the process had already treated inflammatory internet comments as sufficient grounds for a firearms disability without a criminal charge. [Reason coverage of the Velasquez case] Other Florida cases have involved family disputes, mental health holds under the Baker Act, and reports that did not result in criminal convictions yet still produced orders stripping the respondent of firearms for up to a year.
These are not isolated outliers. Red flag processes are structured to move quickly on one-sided information. The petitioner—often law enforcement acting on a complaint from a family member, ex-partner, or concerned acquaintance—presents allegations. The respondent frequently has limited notice and limited time to prepare a defense. Judges grant temporary orders at high rates. Even when final orders are later denied or vacated, the initial seizure has already occurred, the respondent has been forced to interact with the system under threat of criminal penalties for non-compliance, and the fact of the order has become part of the record. An emotionally unstable person who dislikes a relative’s politics, an ex who wants leverage in a custody fight, or a progressive activist who views gun ownership itself as evidence of dangerousness can set the process in motion. Bad actors inside law enforcement or the courts can use the low threshold for their own purposes. The anti-2A organizations that lobby for these laws treat every such order as a success story of prevention, while the cases that end with an innocent person dead, disarmed, or bankrupted by legal fees are dismissed as unfortunate edge cases.
The weaponization is straightforward. The laws create a low-cost way for one private party to enlist the State’s monopoly on violence against another private party, without the accountability that attaches to a criminal prosecution. The petitioner does not have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a crime was committed. The respondent does not get a jury. The standard is closer to a civil protective order than to the process required to extinguish a fundamental right. When the petitioner is motivated by personal animus, political disagreement, or simple hysteria rather than credible evidence of imminent criminal violence, the system still functions. That is the point.
Red Flag Laws Violate Due Process and Make Everyone Less Safe
Enumerated rights are not suspended because a neighbor, relative, or activist finds a person’s peaceable conduct or expressed opinions distasteful. They are suppressed, in the American system, when the government charges a person with a malum in se crime—an act evil in itself—proves it beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury of the defendant’s peers, and a court imposes a sentence that includes the loss of the right as part of the punishment. Red flag laws invert that sequence. They begin with the disability and treat the subsequent hearing as an opportunity for the respondent to try to claw the right back, under a standard that does not require proof of a completed crime.
If the concern is that the criminal justice system moves too slowly to address genuine threats, the proper response is not to create a parallel track that bypasses the protections of the criminal process. The proper response is to stop clogging the courts with prosecutions for malum prohibitum offenses—acts that are wrong only because the legislature said so, such as simple possession of marijuana in jurisdictions that still treat it as a serious crime. Free the system to handle actual violence, actual threats that meet the elements of criminal statutes, and actual cases in which evidence can be tested. Campaigning for fewer nonsensical laws is more consistent with a free society than campaigning for a system that lets one person’s complaint strip another person’s Second Amendment rights.
The price of living in a freer society is that the State does not, and cannot, guarantee your safety. Armed government employees exist primarily to enforce the interests of the State. Your personal safety is, at best, incidental to that mission. Two well-known cases make the point clear. In Warren v. District of Columbia (1981), the D.C. Court of Appeals held that police owe a general duty to the public at large, not a specific duty to any particular individual, absent a special relationship. Three women who called 911 during a break-in and subsequent hours-long assault were told help was coming; it was not. They were raped, robbed, and beaten. The court found no actionable duty. In Castle Rock v. Gonzales (2005), the Supreme Court held that a woman whose estranged husband violated a restraining order, abducted their three daughters, and murdered them had no constitutionally protected property interest in the enforcement of that order. Police discretion means the government does not owe you a personal bodyguard.
That reality is why the armed citizen remains the default. As detailed in the piece on being an armed citizen, the tools and the training are a duty of capable adults precisely because the State’s response is not guaranteed, is not instantaneous, and is not primarily for your benefit. Red flag laws do not change that calculus. They make it worse. An evil person who is red-flagged and disarmed will obtain another weapon. In a country with hundreds of millions of firearms in private circulation, that is not difficult. Or the person will use a vehicle, a knife, an improvised explosive, or some other method. The law does not remove the intent; it removes one tool from one person and advertises the fact. An innocent person who is red-flagged and disarmed is placed in greater danger. The order itself is a public signal that the individual has been stripped of the means of defense. Anyone who previously weighed the risk of attacking that person now knows the risk has dropped. The State has done the attacker’s reconnaissance.
Pro-2A Citizens and Organizations Fighting Back
The response has not been limited to commentary. Organizations and individual citizens have challenged these laws at the ballot box and in court. In Florida, Florida Carry has filed more than 70 complaints and multiple lawsuits against law enforcement agencies across the state, alleging that departments are circumventing the procedural requirements the legislature actually wrote into the risk protection order statute. The claims include failure to use the state-mandated petition forms, submission of petitions without sworn statements from individuals with personal knowledge of the alleged dangerous acts, and reliance on officers’ own summaries in place of the required affidavits. Some agencies have already indicated they will correct procedures rather than litigate. These suits do not erase existing orders, but they create a record of non-compliance that can be used to argue for repeal or substantial reform. When the agencies tasked with enforcing the law cannot or will not follow the limited guardrails that were included, the case for treating the entire regime as unworkable becomes stronger.
Nationally, groups such as the Firearms Policy Coalition and the Second Amendment Foundation have pursued litigation against various firearms restrictions, building a body of case law under the framework set by District of Columbia v. Heller and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. While direct challenges to red flag statutes face the difficulty that many are structured as temporary civil processes, the organizations continue to press the due process and Second Amendment arguments in related contexts and to support state-level efforts to block or repeal such laws. Gun Owners of America and state-level groups have opposed expansion at both the state and federal levels. Ballot measures and legislative fights in states that have considered or enacted these laws have produced mixed results, but the existence of anti-ERPO statutes in several states demonstrates that the political momentum is not unidirectional.
The practical path is local and state-level. Anti-2A organizations concentrate their efforts where they can secure narrow majorities or exploit high-profile incidents. The response is the same: elect people who treat the Second Amendment as a constraint on government power rather than a suggestion, support the litigation groups that force courts to apply the text and history, and refuse to treat temporary suspension of an enumerated right as a reasonable compromise. Membership and financial support for the organizations doing the work is not optional if the goal is to reverse the expansions that occurred after 2018.
Snitch Lines Have To Go - Red Flag Laws Are For Losers At Life
Red flag laws are immoral because they invert the burden. They treat the exercise of a constitutional right as presumptively dangerous and place the onus on the citizen to prove otherwise after the State has already acted - kind of like background checks, but we'll get to that in another article ;). They empower snitches, ex-partners with grudges, political opponents, and emotional wrecks who have been taught that disagreement is violence and that privately-owned firearms are the root of every social problem. They do so while the people who lobby for them live in environments where armed security is prioritized, police response times are shorter, and the consequences of disarmament fall on someone else. The soft-handed progressive who has never had to consider what happens when the State does not arrive in time, or when the State arrives for the wrong person, gets to feel effective. Red flag laws weaponize HOA losers. The rest of us inherit the risk.
The data on actual defensive gun uses, the historical reality that police have no individual duty to protect, and the documented cases in which red flag processes have ended in death or in the disarmament of people who committed no crime all point the same direction. These laws do not solve the problem of criminal violence. They create a new vector for State violence against people who have not been convicted of anything. An evil actor will find another way. An innocent person is left more vulnerable, with a public record that he has been stripped of the tools that deter predators.
The urgency is real, and the midterm elections matter. State legislatures and local officials set the conditions under which these laws are passed, expanded, or enforced. Anti-2A groups plan their attacks at that level precisely because federal courts have not yet delivered a clean nationwide repudiation, and because a single high-profile incident can still move a statehouse that previously resisted. Voting for candidates who will not trade enumerated rights for temporary political calm is the minimum. Supporting the organizations that litigate and lobby is the next step.
Join or support the groups that are actually in the fight:
Firearms Policy Coalition — strategic litigation to restore the right to keep and bear arms.
Second Amendment Foundation — long-running legal challenges to restrictions on the right.
Gun Owners of America — no-compromise advocacy at the federal and state levels.
Florida Carry — state-level litigation, including the ongoing challenges to red flag procedures.
The ballot box still works, especially where the attacks are planned. Use it. And in the meantime, remain armed. The State’s interest is not your safety. Yours is.
note: I wrote this with the aid of Grok. Let me know what you think. With Grok I can output faster, but it may not seem like "me" as much. Without Grok, you get "me" but slower.
Get Yourself A Gun And Learn It
This is a firearms blog, so we're going to recommend guns. Of course don't forget other things like medical, comms, doing your Area Study, and so on. There's better sources than RGG on those topics, but for firepower, we have you covered.
Ideally you'll at least want either a basic rifle, i.e. an AR-15, or a pistol, i.e. a GLOCK 19, to start. Both are exceedingly common firearms with plenty of accessories, spare parts, training, and support. However, in some restricted areas, both an AR and a GLOCK are hard to get easily, and you may have to settle for a shotgun for quickly arming yourself. It beats a sharp stick. Note, the in-house counsel wants to remind you that we're talking the legal acquisition of guns here. We're still working on abolishing gun control, and we don't want you in jail. Unfortunately you'll have to play ball in this regard. But anyways, here are some basic suggestions for getting armed.
| Firearm | Cost | Buy Now |
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| Radical Firearms RF00028 AR-15 | $469 | Buy Now! |
| GLOCK 19 Gen6 9mm Pistol | $620 | Buy Now! |
| Mossberg 590 Shotgun | $621 | Buy Now! |
Learn how to make guns, as well.
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| Ender Creality 3 V3 SE | $186 | Buy Now! |
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