Rand Paul: “Jon Miltimore, who writes for the Foundation for Economics and Education writes: Red flag laws don't involve precogs…”

“Jon Miltimore, who writes for the Foundation for Economics and Education writes: Red flag laws don't involve precogs seeing into the future. Yet, like precrime, they are designed to prevent a crime before it happens, even if it means violating civil rights in the process. Miltimore asks several important questions: Can people who are flagged as threats be involuntarily committed? Are they appointed legal counsel? Will a Federal database be established to track flagged citizens? These are questions that civil libertarians should be asking, especially since many people who are red-flagged will have committed no crime. There will simply be, like Philip Dick's ``Anderton,'' people who might commit or might be a danger to someone. Miltimore reminds us that the idea of precrime didn't originate with ``The Minority Report.'' In ``1984,'' Orwell writes that Big Brother's ``endless purges, arrests, tortures, imprisonments, and vaporizations'' are not the result of people breaking laws, for there are no laws in Oceania. These punishments, readers learn, are merely the wiping out of persons who perhaps might commit a crime at some time in the future. Red flag laws are well-intentioned. Everyone is searching for a way to prevent the senseless massacres of school mass shootings. I think accessing the violent criminal records of juveniles is a reasonable way to try to prevent these killings.…”