Red flags all around

Another ‘completely preventable horror’

The more details that come out, the more outraged we should all be. Over the weekend, a woman walked into Joel Osteen’s megachurch in Houston with two rifles and a piece of yellow rope that looked like a detonation cord. She took the AR-15 from under her trench coat and started shooting up the place.

A pair of off-duty officers working security at the church confronted the woman and shot her dead. Her 7-yearold son, whom she’d dragged along with her, was seriously hurt. As this was being written, the boy was fighting for his life in a Texas hospital. (The press reports are unclear who shot the boy.)

And the woman had more red flags than you can shake a stick at.

Her mother-in-law said after the incident that her daughter-in-law had a notable mental illness, but was still somehow allowed to have guns: “My daughter-in-law, when she was taking medication for schizophrenia, was a very sweet and loving woman,” the lady wrote in a Facebook post Monday. “But mental illness is real illness, and when family members seek emergency protections, they’re not doing so for their own sake, but for the sake of the person who is ill.”

She called the shooting a completely preventable horror. Which is why states have red-flag laws. Or some states do. Texas does not. Neither does Arkansas.

Genesse Ivonne Moreno was 36 when she died in that church. In 2016, CNN reports, she had been put “under an order for emotional detention.” And she had “a mental health history documented by Houston police.” The shooter’s family had petitioned—unsuccessfully—to allow her mother-in-law to be conservator of the boy.

An attorney who once represented Genesse Moreno told the press that when she had a divorce proceeding transferred in 2022, she was arrested for a weapons charge. It was a misdemeanor, and she cleared it up by spending two days in jail.

A local Fox affiliate in Houston quoted a neighbor of the shooter, whom the station identified only as “Jill,” who said the suspect had made false police reports about people stalking her:

“Four years I’ve been through hell. I have reported this, reported this, reported this, and it’s gone on deaf ears,” Jill told the outlet. “I’ve had psychological officers up here. Since they won’t answer their door, they won’t do anything. ‘Until she hurts you, there’s nothing we can do.’ So everybody keeps saying on all these big news stations, ‘if you see something, say something.’ That’s bulls—-. Because I’ve been through it. I’ve talked to everybody. I’ve probably called every one of your news stations trying to get someone to take this on.

“No one would do anything. Nobody would call me back. And yet everyone’s still on these stations saying see something, say something. Nobody should have died. Nobody should have been hurt. This should have been handled years ago. And here we are again.”

It’s not hard to find multiple booking mug shots of Genesse Moreno online. In every one of them, she appears scared, bruised, disheveled, wild-eyed.

Yet she bought an AR-15 in December, according to police. She also had on her a .22-caliber gun in a bag.

She could be the poster child for why states have red-flag laws.

Texas does not. Neither does Arkansas.

Red-flag laws would seem to be one of the common-sense approaches to mass shootings. As long as these laws have due process protections—and they do—then such laws would only be used in dire circumstances when the public, or the gun owner, is at risk.

Families, police and judges would be able to take away somebody’s weapons when that somebody is having mental problems. And if clear and convincing evidence isn’t provided at a (fast) hearing, the person can get his guns back again. The states that have such laws have put in protections so your brother-in-law can’t have your deer rifles taken from you because of an argument over a lawn mower.

In place of the family, perhaps a doctor could make a decision before the unsettled (and possibly stressed, under-medicated and problematic) person could walk into a church/theater/ school with a loaded weapon or two.

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.”

Sometimes they kill with their rights on, too.

Red-flag laws might stop many of the mass shootings this country experiences every year. Not all, but many. Texas is lucky that of the dozens of rounds shot this past weekend at the Houston megachurch, more people weren’t killed.

Because Texas doesn’t have red-flag laws.

Neither does Arkansas.