There are times when a one in five failure rate is perfectly acceptable. For example, in a difficult STEM subject in school, 20 percent of the students failing is considered normal. It’s a hard class, and the stakes may feel catastrophic to the student, but it’s really not. They can take the class again in college, or if it’s high school, summer school can fix that problem right up. It sucks, but it’s not the end of the world.
But what if there was a similar failure rate for a law that suspended someone’s civil liberties, even if only temporarily? Would that be acceptable? I’d say not.
And what’s even less acceptable is when your response to this is to open the doors for more people to screw it up, yet that’s precisely what Colorado is doing.
Senate Bill 26-004 ‘Expand List of Petitioners for Protection Orders’ passed third reading in the House on March 20 with a 39-24 vote and is awaiting action by Gov. Polis.
The Democrat sponsored bill dramatically expands those eligible to file for an Extreme Risk Protection Order (ERPO) under Colorado’s so-called ‘red flag’ law, to include teachers, health care providers and “institutional petitioners.’
If signed into law, health care facilities, behavioral health treatment facilities, K-12 schools, and higher education institutions will all be eligible to petition courts to seize the guns of those believed to own firearms and who might possible be a danger to themselves and others.
A University of Colorado School of Medicine study found a high rate of rejection for ERPOS filed by non-law enforcement petitioners under the existing law, with a majority of applications filed by family members or romantic partners eventually being rejected after court scrutiny. In total, the data shows about 20% of Colorado petitions result in wrongful confiscation.
When they say “high rate of rejection,” what they mean is that roughly 65 percent of those filed by non-law enforcement were granted, and when you move it out from just the temporary red flag orders, meaning people were in court to defend themselves, the numbers drop even more. About 20 percent of those requests by law enforcement were denied the long-term red flag order, while more than 60 percent of those requests by non-LEOs were denied.
And 88 percent of those granted were cases when someone either didn’t own a gun or no one knew if they had a gun.
This is absolutely insane, especially when you look at just how pathetic these measures are working, and Colorado’s answer here is to just expand the list?
Look, I can see why people would look to health care and behavioral health facilities, since those tend to have some direct dealing with someone’s state of mind, but K-12 schools and colleges aren’t the same thing. We’ve seen too many schools freak out over students who just shoot recreationally for me to be remotely comfortable with that. Plus, especially with K-12 schools, none of the students are old enough to own guns anyway, which means they’ll be coming to ask about the parents’ guns, and if you don’t see the issue there, you’re an idiot.
Not mentioned that the period the study covered, which is 2020 to 2022, includes the Club Q shooting in Colorado Springs by a suspect who had already threatened to blow up a family member’s home, but didn’t get hit with an order somehow.
Yet another way the laws don’t seem to do much.
Something we don’t see here, though, is whether those one in five who had their guns taken from them wrongfully had any threats to their life during the time period they were disarmed. Somehow, that doesn’t factor into things for the researchers.
Honestly, while the above-linked piece gets into a lot of infringements on the Second Amendment in Colorado, the truth is that I think this is really indicative of how gun control advocates treat failure. Rather than acknowledge that a 20 percent failure rate is way too high when dealing with a civil liberty–and I think the actual failure rate is probably higher–they figure they just didn’t infringe on people’s rights hard enough.
Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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