Using the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida (site of the ghastly atrocity committed there by a deranged former student in 2018) as her backdrop, Vice President Kamala Harris announced on Saturday another infringement of Second Amendment rights by the federal government: the National Extreme Risk Protection Order (ERPO) Resource Center.
Funded with taxpayer dollars through the now-weaponized Department of Justice, the center will attempt to bribe states already abusing its citizens with ERPO laws to participate in a national effort to make them more intrusive and more widely utilized — and to bribe those states without them to implement them in order to qualify for the “free” federal money.
According to the “Fact Sheet” published by the White House, the center is a “first ever” infringement that will “assist” anyone seeking to remove firearms from a citizen owning them by “optimizing the usage of red flag laws.” The DOJ is working in tandem with the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, which itself is being funded by the anti-gun, anti-Second Amendment Bloomberg Health Initiative.
Leftist Attorney General Merrick Garland applauded the new intrusion:
The launch of the National Extreme Risk Protection Order Resource Center will provide our partners across the country with valuable resources to keep firearms out of the hands of individuals who pose a threat to themselves or others.
The establishment of the Center is the latest example of the Justice Department’s work to use every tool provided by the landmark Bipartisan Safer Communities Act to protect communities from gun violence.
“Every tool” includes the five — five — gun registries already maintained by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), along with data that compliant states are providing in exchange for the federal funding of the center.
The center will have “direct access to critical information that will enhance [its] ability to reduce firearm homicides and suicides,” according to the press release.
Those being targeted to use ERPOs more effectively to remove firearms from those determined to be at risk “to themselves or to others” include prosecutors, attorneys, judges, clinicians, victim service providers, social service providers, and household members. ERPOs are sold to unsuspecting and still-trusting citizens as a way to preclude gun violence by removing firearms from those deemed unstable and dangerous. It avoids the necessity to inform the unsuspecting target of his rights under due process, guaranteed by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, automatically depriving him of his Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) was among the first to expose the agenda behind the center:
Merrick Garland just announced a massive Red Flag Operation that the DOJ will be running by using EVERY spy tool the US government has in order to violate [America’s] Second Amendment!!
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) wrote: “A Federal Red Flag center? We did not authorize this.”
Back in 2022, the National Rifle Association foresaw the certainty that red flag laws would be abused:
So-called “Red Flag” orders, or Emergency Risk Protection Orders, are designed to empower the government to confiscate Americans’ firearms without due process of law.
Aside from allowing run-of-the-mill malicious actors to indulge personal grudges against law-abiding gun owners, in the current politically charged environment these laws enable the government to target [and disarm] those with First Amendment-protected political views the government disfavors.
It is clear that this is another tool to be used against law-abiding gun owners. The definition of who exactly is a “danger to himself or to others” need only be expanded to include anyone who owns a firearm. With that expanded definition, the final stages of total gun confiscation would begin.
The bad news is that there are 21 states already inflicting red flag laws on their citizenry. The good news is that, at least according to the White House announcement, “only six are accessing the [taxpayer] funding to implement their red flag laws.” Those “29 states without red flag laws,” says the Biden administration’s Department of Justice, “should enact those laws and ensure effective implementation, supported by this … funding.”
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