Just about everyone who has lived with someone else for any length of time knows that sometimes, things can get heated. If you get loud enough, someone calls the police.
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I get it. I’ve done it, myself. You get worried about not acting, so you call and hope that the cops showing up diffuses the situation or, if it’s really bad, take an abuser to prison.
But since you’re not inside the house, you don’t necessarily know what’s going on. It might be heated, but no one is actually in danger.
A New York bill, which failed previously, has just been reintroduced that takes these situations and then infringes on the Second Amendment.
New York lawmakers are preparing to reintroduce a bill requiring police to temporarily confiscate firearms found during domestic incidents. This measure builds on the Safe Homes Act of 2020, which currently allows—but does not mandate—officers to seize visible or consensually discovered weapons.
Proponents like state Sen. Pete Harckham stress the bill’s focus on safety, not gun control, citing a rise in domestic violence fatalities involving firearms. Weapons would be held for at least five days, enabling safety planning.
Harckham can say the bill’s focus is on safety, but it’s most definitely a gun control bill, and it’s a problematic one on a great many levels.
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First, there’s the complete lack of due process involved. If my wife and I were in New York (God forbid) and got into a loud enough argument to qualify as a “domestic incident”–those aren’t necessarily domestic violence, after all–and the cops show up, they could take my guns despite there being no danger to anyone and then sit on them for five days, all because of a loud argument.
No court evaluates whether or not there’s a threat to anyone. No judge considers anything and the impacted parties really don’t have a defense against those guns being taken.
Then there’s the fact that the abused party will also be disarmed.
Look, in your typical household, the man is generally much stronger than the woman. There’s a reason someone commented on my wife’s significant physical strength, yet I’m the one who has to open jars despite not being particularly impressive myself. This is the typical dynamic at play. That means a battered wife may well need a gun to defend herself from an enraged man seeking to hurt or kill her.
Besides, this measure does the same thing that so many other gun control bills do. It focuses on the gun, not the person. It’s premised on the idea that the gun is where the problem is and that if you remove that, suddenly everything will be sunshine and daisies, which isn’t how literally anything works in this world.
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The good news is that this isn’t the first time this was introduced. While supporters think it can withstand legal challenge, it might not even have to. It might simply never be voted on, in part because it’s really hard to push the “I support the Second Amendment but…” line when you’re taking peoples guns without even a judge looking at what’s going on.
This bill makes red flag laws look good by comparison, and that might be too far from some legislators.
Here’s hoping, anyway.
