The danger of red flag laws

[calfoxwc]

A simple idea becomes a chance at tyranny. IF you can do it to one person, fraudulently, then why not a law that does it to

an entire classification of people? Like veterans? Retirees? Teachers?

The idea, as most of the time, is "good intentioned"...but the effect is eventual abuse by individuals with a gripe, or a gov with a gripe.

https://www.ammoland.com/2019/05/we-need-to-fight-red-flag-laws-head-on-not-hide/?utm_source=Ammoland+Subscribers&utm_campaign=0e594d7b2c-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_6f6fac3eaa-0e594d7b2c-20770865#axzz5o2Rvb8mc

[OldBrownsFan]

Thought this was a little related:

Trump Administration Refuses To Sign The Fascistic Christchurch Call And We Should Thank Them

When Asia Bibi was sentenced to death for blasphemy in Pakistan and when a few hundred “Easter worshipers” in Sri Lanka were killed, most of the West was pretty silent. There were no vigils and protests and irate editorials about hate. But, let a singular event take place in one of the many self-hating Western nations involving a favored minority, and, well, you have something entirely different.

This is the case in New Zealand in the aftermath of the March 15 shooting at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, that killed 51 and wounded 49 “Friday worshipers.” The first step of the reaction was to disarm law abiding New Zealanders. And now that country’s Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, is trying to turn that strategy into a worldwide jihad against speech that has not been approved by right-thinking government appartchiks. The vehicle is the “Christchurch Call.” You can read it at the bottom of this post.

Along with New Zealand, France’s Emmanuel Macron is leading the charge and signatories, thus far, include British Prime Minister Theresa May, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Jordan’s King Abdullah II, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter. It is just a matter of time until Russia and China sign on.

The major hold out it the United States:

The United States broke with 18 governments and five top American tech firms Wednesday by declining to endorse a New Zealand-led effort to curb extremism online, a response to the live-streamed shootings at two Christchurch mosques that killed 51.

White House officials said free-speech concerns prevented them from formally signing onto the largest campaign to date targeting extremism online. But it was another example of the United States standing at odds to some its closest allies.
…
But the White House opted against endorsing the effort, and President Trump did not join the other leaders in Paris. The White House felt the document could present constitutional concerns, officials there said, potentially conflicting with the First Amendment, even though Trump previously has threatened to regulate social media out of concern that it’s biased against conservatives.
…
The White House’s decision against supporting the Christchurch Call drew criticism from some experts who’ve called for stronger regulation across the Web. Alistair Knott, a computer-science professor at the University of Otago in New Zealand, said the absence of a U.S. endorsement potentially would undercut the global argument for controlling how hate and violence spread online.

“It seems insufficient to say that free speech prevents the U.S. from doing something about violent extremist attacks,” said Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond law school. “Congress should consider carefully crafted legislation that both protects core First Amendment interests and public safety.”

This is one of those situations where the Trump administration has proven an adherence to constitutional protections and to individual freedom that no one would have anticipated in 2016.

There is no legal reason for this document as “incitement” and “conspiracy” are already crimes. While one may not agree with bizarre political manifestos, whether by Unabomber Ted Kaczynbski or by Christchurch shooter Brenton Tarrant, the idea that they should be forbidden from posting their thoughts because they are dangerous should scare the living hell out of anyone with a pair of firing synapses. The world is full of “dangerous” books. Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” was one of them. Machiavelli’s The Prince and Milton’s Paradise Lost have been declared subversive and banned an one time or another.

More to the point, you don’t defeat bad or stupid ideology by banning it and giving it a cachet of being counter-cultural. You defeat it by forcing it into the open, by debate and by convincing people that the ideas are wrong. But no one in this group cares about what the Christchurch shooter posted on line. Their objective is to be able to refuse to debate issues they’d rather avoid…like the impact of unfettered immigration…by declaring the very question to be hate speech produced by some phobia recently discovered by a leftwing sociology professor.

The agenda here is clear. This declaration seeks to give governments interested in limiting political debate and large multinational corporations with no loyalty but their bottom line and rent-seeking the ability to control and to criminalize what you say if your words don’t fall within a narrowly circumscribed range of behavior. That’s it. It is social control pure and simple.

The Trump administration is right to refuse to sign onto this nonsense and to enable America to continue to serve as a beacon of liberty and free speech in a world that seems to view both those as something hostile to the political status quo.

https://www.redstate.com/streiff/2019/05/16/trump-administration-refuses-sign-fascistic-christchurch-call-thank/