Remember Maine

Red flags all around, up and down

The only thing we know is what we read in the papers. (Rogers, Will.) So here is a word of caution about this editorial—a red flag, if you will: We know no more about what happened in Maine than Gentle Reader. But there are plenty of details released already. And more and more keep coming out.

At this writing, at least 18 people are dead, and 13 wounded. We know there were children at the scene, but we don’t know how many are casualties.

We are tech enough to know how to use Google. And we note that Maine does not have red-flag laws. And the suspect in this case has red flags from here to, well, Maine.

What more does a body have to do to tell the world that he is troubled? Here is what the Associated Press reported after the mass shooting in Lewiston:

■ The man ID’d as a suspect was recently committed to a mental health facility.

■ A police intelligence bulletin reviewed by the AP said the man had reported hearing voices.

■ The same document said he had threatened to shoot up a military training base in Saco, Maine.

Yet he was caught on tape with one of those AR-15 types of guns. Police say he shot up a bowling alley and a bar. It was the deadliest mass shooting this year in the United States, and this country gets them regularly.

Would a red-flag law in Maine have prevented this shooting? Who knows? The suspect, a certified firearms instructor and a member of the U.S. Army Reserve, according to multiple law enforcement sources, may have had access to arms. But a red-flag law could have stopped this, or slowed him down, or got him help, or delayed the massacre long enough for him to think things through or get back on his meds, or, or, or . . . .

Or such a law might have stopped nothing. But the thought that it could have will likely torture 18 families for years.

Recent attempts by gun control advocates to tighten the state’s gun laws have failed. Proposals to require background checks for private gun sales and create a 72-hour waiting period for gun purchases failed earlier this year.

What Maine does have, according to multiple reports, is a “yellow-flag law,” which is a red-flag law’s iffy second cousin. According to Maine Public Radio, “Unlike the red flag laws that are in effect in roughly 20 states, Maine’s yellow flag law does not allow family members to directly petition a judge to order someone to temporarily give up their guns and prohibit them from acquiring new firearms. Only police can issue a request. And Maine’s law goes a step further by requiring a medical assessment of the person before the petition goes to a judge.”

Here is how a proponent of that law put it to Maine Public Radio last year: “They have the right to counsel. They use the term ‘clear and convincing evidence.’ And it’s not based on a complaint, it is based on the individual’s actual actions in the eyes of police officers and medical professionals.”

So you have to do something to get in trouble with the police first, then the state can take steps to relieve you of your guns through the courts?

It would seem that once a person gets in trouble with the law (by shooting someone? or many someones?) it would be too late for any color of a flag. And common sense might tell you that the family of the troubled person might know him/her best, and should be able to at least describe the problems to a judge to keep everybody, including the troubled person, safe. Or as safe as can be in a country in which guns out-number the people in it. The suspect’s family knew he was unstable. His sister-in-law told The Wall Street Journal that he was hearing voices, thinking people were talking about him. She said his “short stay” in a mental hospital last summer didn’t quiet the voices.

In place of the family, perhaps a doctor could make a decision before the unsettled (and possibly stressed and problematic) person can look up an attorney.

Which brings us, once again, to the late, great Dr. Charles Krauthammer, who wrote this after a mass shooting in 2012:

“Monsters shall always be with us, but in earlier days they did not roam free. As a psychiatrist in Massachusetts in the 1970s, I committed people—often right out of the emergency room— as a danger to themselves or to others. I never did so lightly, but I labored under none of the crushing bureaucratic and legal constraints that make involuntary commitment infinitely more difficult today. Why do you think we have so many homeless? Destitution? Poverty has declined since the 1950s. The majority of those sleeping on grates are mentally ill. In the name of civil liberties, we let them die with their rights on.”

And sometimes they kill with their rights on, too.

cc: The Arkansas Legislature