The good news just just keeps coming:
The New York law that enables the confiscation of guns from people who haven’t committed a crime is unconstitutional, a state Supreme Court judge has ruled.
This red flag law, or the Extreme Risk Protection Order law, lets individuals—including police officers—petition a court to allow the seizure of firearms from a person they believe poses a threat to themselves or others.
If a judge agrees, the judge can direct law enforcement to take guns from the person in question.
The law, which took effect in 2019, has led to the issuance of more than 1,900 removal orders.
However, the law is in violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Second and 14th amendments because it doesn’t “sufficiently protect a citizen’s rights,” state Supreme Court Judge Thomas Moran said in a ruling in late December 2022.
The answer I want to know is when are the prosecutions of the criminals who created these laws going to start happening?
Nothing will happen to the people who wrote ‘red flag laws’. And nothing is going to happen to the criminals in power who WILL continue to use ‘red flag laws’ to disarm people in violation of their rights. The courts have NO METHOD to enforce their ruling. The people they would depend upon to enforce their rulings are the people who are willfully violating those rulings in order to violate our rights. There is no meaningful method to stop criminals in power from acting criminally…at least no legal method.
The ERPO law is unconstitutional ***as presently enacted***, because it lacks due process.
The ruling hammers on the lack of due process protections.
The NY Legislature could fix this with some straightforward copying from the mental hygiene law, and it would then be Constitutional.
However: if a person is a threat to self or others, what needs the State with a law just to take firearms from that person? Just involuntarily commit, as the mental hygiene law already provides, with apparently ample due process protections, so the person doesn’t fulminate, disarmed at home, and assemble a bomb, concoct a poison, or find knives in the kitchen?
The Soviets engaged in much similar behavior after someone in power at a drunken bash spouted, “you would have to be crazy to violate a law in Russia!”
Mental bulbs a-blazing.
Only why remove the guns, when you can just send off the offender to a mental hospital in Siberia?
But I digress, since when was it ever a problem for government over punishing someone that had no benefit of defending oneself? In court or otherwise?
Up to and including summary execution for that once again most popular term in Soviet Russia, “resisting”.
I can hear half the judges now, Constitution, what’s that?
Bad news: The New York “Supreme Court” isn’t supreme. It’s not an appellate court, but only the second tier in the NY judicial system, the trial court for more important cases.
Judge Moran will be overruled in a few weeks. The Constitution-defying appellate judges that overrule him may be overruled in turn by the federal courts – in a few years. And there’s no hope that the US Supreme court will do anything to punish them or the politicians that passed this law and worse.