If you’re unfortunate enough to read CNN news pieces, you might know that a lone, firebrand-style county Sheriff in Colorado is promising to not enforce the state’s proposed “Red Flag” gun confiscation law if it passes – which it very well could.
According to CNN’s Scott McLean and Sara Weisfeldt:
Weld County Sheriff Steve Reams disagrees so much with a gun bill making its way through the Colorado legislature that he's willing to go to jail rather than enforce it.
Or, one could simply note that Sheriff Steve Reams plans to uphold his oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, that he will not enforce a clearly, flagrantly, unconstitutional law.
The bill is entitled, HB 19-1177, and has been painted with the solid-sounding moniker “Extreme Risk Protection Order” (ERPO), making it seem as if, just by the state applying it to someone, he or she is transformed into an “extreme risk” whom the state is justified to disarm.
And one could wonder about that Orwellian tactic, and wonder why McLean and Weisfeldt single Sheriff Reams out as if he’s an anomaly, when, in fact, more than half of Colorado’s 64 County Sheriffs and/or Commissioners have joined him to stand for non-enforcement, and to create what are called “Second Amendment Sanctuary Counties”.
As Lesley Hollywood writes for RallyForOurRights:
Wondering what a Second Amendment Sanctuary County means? In nearly all of these instances, these efforts are being led by the county sheriff, then joined by the county commissioners, who say no county funds will be used to process ERPO’s or store confiscated weapons, and that the right to keep and bear arms extends to all citizens of the county.
This isn't an abstract or academic discussion.
It’s the immediate, emergent face of tyranny, via a fuzzy psychiatric-judicial alliance that attempts to skirt what is supposed to be respected as untouchable.
Yes, strange as it might sound to the people backing this bill, as a right, the right to keep and bear arms is supposed to be impervious to their political attenuation.
It seems that many of the Sheriffs in Colorado know this, but the Democrat-controlled House and Senate don’t.
And Ream and others also know that the proposal breaches a number of other rights that are supposed to be protected against government encroachment. As he notes in the video interview with CNN:
The bill violates the Fourth, the Fifth, the Sixth, the Eighth, and the Fourteenth Amendments.
What that means is the bill violates the Fourth Amendment requirement that police obtain a warrant from a judge citing the person to be searched and the specific items sought, upon the judge’s determination of probable cause, before they can enter a home, or a business, or do a body search of a person, or search his or her phone or car. It means the Fifth Amendment prohibition against the taking of property without just compensation, and the taking of liberty without due process (a trial). If it passes, it means that the Sixth Amendment assurance that a person is entitled to a speedy trial and to confront the witnesses accusing him or her will be infringed. It means that the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment will be infringed, since the punishment comes without any kind of trial. And it means, as Reams notes, that the state would be abridging the “privileges and immunities” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
And, not only would the law not stop people intent on breaking the laws against murder (it was written in response to a police shooting that occurred on December 31, 2017 in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, a shooting by a mentally unstable man who had been flagged by Wyoming police for local Colorado police to watch) he, like many other thoughtful people also warns that it could cause greater danger to police and civilians.
And to their credit, CNN’s McLean and Weisfeldt make note of his wisdom:
Reams said he also worries about the potential to aggravate an already volatile person by taking their weapons. ‘Going in and taking their guns and leaving the scene, I can't see how that makes them less of a risk. It just takes one tool away,’ said Reams, arguing that a person bent on hurting someone could do it with a knife or a car….
He could do it with something even deadlier.
And McLean and Weisfeldt add:
In 2018, a man near Baltimore was killed after officers showed up to seize his weapons based on a court order and ‘he became irate,’ police said.
Meanwhile, the principles stand preeminent.
In America, if you have not been found guilty of committing a crime, you are not supposed to be punished by the state. If this government protection racket finds through its wonderful jurisprudential system that you have criminally threatened someone, then there is a Common Law basis for interference and apprehension, and, should a suspect be tried and found guilty by a jury of his or her peers, Common Law would lead one to conclude that, under a that paradigm, the person could be jailed.
All so-called “red flag” laws violate this core principle of life under the polis. They place all subjects in the unenviable position of being guilty before proven innocent and irrevocably change the relationship we have with our rights.
Some people, get it.
It appears that the majority of Colorado state politicians don’t.