NRA Buckles Again, Backs Gun-Violence Restraining Orders

David French, writing for the National Review, lauds the NRA’s recent move to support Gun-Violence Restraining Orders. Clearly, David French does not understand the mentality of the Gun Grabber Cattle Car Guide Club. Or, perhaps, he does understand, and is working in collusion with them.

Apparently, the NRA fits into that category as well. They either don’t understand the Gun Grabber Cattle Car Guide Club or they are working in collusion with them.

The NRA is getting behind the Gun-Violence Restraining Order as a way, presumably, or, rather, ostensibly (because I am seriously doubting the sincerity of their actions), to placate the Gun Grabber Cattle Car Guide Club or to preemptively cut them off from making more draconian anti-gun moves. Here is how David French opened up his article celebrating the NRA’s capitulation, along with a video of the NRA’s announcement that it supports the GVRO.

From National Review

The NRA Makes a Wise, Principled Decision to Support Gun-Violence Restraining Orders

By David French

On Wednesday, the executive director of the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action — the NRA’s lobbying arm — took to NRATV with a critical announcement. The NRA-ILA called on Congress to provide funding for states to adopt so-called “risk protection orders,” another term for the gun-violence restraining order that I discussed in this piece shortly after the Parkland school massacre. You can see the announcement below:

A gun-violence restraining order (GVRO) is a remarkably simple and precisely targeted remedy for two forms of gun violence — mass shootings and suicides. As Chris Cox explains, it allows a defined group of people (usually family members, school principals, employers) to petition a local court for an order temporarily removing guns from a person who’s made statements or exhibited behavior indicating they’re a threat to themselves or others.

To be constitutional, a GVRO should require that the petitioners (those seeking the order) come forward with admissible evidence, it should grant the gun owner a prompt hearing, and it should provide a right of appeal. The best GVRO statutes will be drafted with the help and cooperation of the NRA, which will ensure that the statutes aren’t overbroad and will minimize the chances of abuse.

The NRA is shifting its position on GVROs, and I’m seeing some grumbling on gun-rights websites and message boards. These complaints are misplaced. The NRA has made a wise, principled decision that will save lives while protecting individual liberty.

To understand why the shift was necessary, it’s important to remember three critical realities. First, while overall gun violence is down, mass shootings are on the rise. Second, time and again state and federal law-enforcement bureaucracies have failed to protect the public. And third, mass shooters (and suicidal individuals) typically exhibit troubling and dangerous behavior before they fire a single fatal shot.

Read More

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In addition to putting tremendous trust in the Gun Grabber Cattle Car Guide Club, the NRA is also helping to advance the fear porn of the anti-gunners, that we live in a dangerous land with an epidemic of gun violence in the form of mass shootings (which is patently untrue). Your chances of being involved in a mass shooting are less likely than being struck by lightning.

The NRA would have you believe that you can write legislation that would limit the state from broadly interpreting what constitutes ‘dangerous’ thoughts. The NRA would have you believe that you can write legislation that would limit the state in how it forms hearings that meet the standards of “due process” as articulated in the fourth amendment of the Bill of Rights. The NRA would have you believe that one step backwards in the fight to preserve individuals’ abilities to acquire and possess tools of self-defense (in this case, guns) will prevent the Gun Grabber Cattle Car Guide Club from pushing for more aggressive anti-gun legislation.

Color me skeptical, from head to toe, that such legislation will significantly limit what constitutes “dangerous thoughts,” and what constitutes “dangerous people.”

I cannot, with 100 percent certainty, say whether or not David French and the faux-gun-rights group, the NRA, actually believes the swill they’re pouring for the masses. But I can say with 100 percent certainty that, while keeping guns out of the hands of dangerous people and people at risk of suicide is a good idea in principle, empowering the state to determine who the dangerous people are, who is seriously at risk of committing suicide, what due process means in one of these hearings, well, is more dangerous than the risk we take letting dangerous people have guns.

At the end of the day, the most effective check against dangerous people having guns is a community around them that can directly hold them accountable, not an empowered state that has a vested interest in reducing the amount of the potential cost of coercion, should it decide that coercion is needed to get the results it desires.

I have a saying – one that my cohost on iSDaily Tuesday, Bodhi Agora, put into t-shirt form – I would rather face the danger of a madman with a gun than empower the state to define what a madman is. Apparently, the NRA disagrees with me, and so does David French.