The House of Representatives plans to vote on a bill that would authorize federal courts to issue "red flag" orders prohibiting people from possessing firearms when they are deemed a threat to themselves or others. Meanwhile, legislation encouraging states to pass and enforce their own red flag laws has emerged as a possible point of compromise between Senate Democrats who favor new gun restrictions and Senate Republicans who are skeptical of that approach.
It is not hard to understand the bipartisan appeal of this policy, which promises to target dangerous individuals rather than impose broad limits that affect millions of law-abiding Americans. But there are two basic problems with red flag laws that cannot be wished away by consensus-building rhetoric: Predicting violence is much harder than advocates of this approach are usually willing to admit, and trying to overcome that challenge by erring on the side of issuing red flag orders inevitably means that many innocent people will lose their Second Amendment rights, typically for a year and sometimes longer, even though they never would have used a gun to harm anyone. In short, minimizing false negatives means maximizing false positives.
