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This pending US Senate bill is prompting ever more state legislators to enact “Red Flag” no due process firearm confiscation laws.
Per GOA:

https://cqrcengage.com/gunowners/?0

Protect the Second Amendment
“Red Flag Laws” are really Gun Confiscation Orders
Sources inside the U.S. Senate are now telling us that we may not have seen the last gun control measure to be considered this year.

At a time when Chuck Schumer and his anti-gun minions are blocking reciprocity, hearing protection, and veterans’ rights legislation, the gun-hating zealots are trying to force consideration of a particularly nasty piece of legislation.

That bill, S. 2607, would try to force every state to adopt gun confiscation measures.

Gun Confiscation Orders are sometimes sugar-coated as “red-flag laws” or “extreme risk protection orders.”

But make no mistake about it: They are nothing more nor less than efforts to strip Americans of their gun rights through secret star-chamber proceedings — in which the gun owner is barred from participation.

Under this Rubio-Nelson abomination, the police or an angry “ex” could convene an Orwellian “secret hearing” to strip you of your constitutional rights without giving you a chance to be heard — in what is otherwise known as an ex parte hearing. [proposed section 3042(b)(3)]

The secret hearing would find you “guilty” — not by a standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt” ... or not because there was probable cause to believe you had committed a crime ... or not even because there was probable cause to believe you would commit a crime.

Rather, you would be stripped of your rights based on a subjective determination that you presented a “significant danger” to someone, including yourself. [proposed section 3042(b)(2)(A)(iii)]

And, incidentally, the bill strips state courts of all discretion about whether they can decline to take away your rights.

We have some experience with these “star-chamber” proceedings in which only the accuser is in the room. In those cases, the judge almost always issues the order.

In a study of Gun Confiscation Orders in Seattle, the court granted 28 of 29 applications.

A Massachusetts legislator stated, with respect to much-more-limited domestic violence ex parte orders (where only the accuser is represented) that the courts “don’t ask many questions.”

The first time a gun owner learns about the proceedings is when a police SWAT Team, that normally serves high risk arrest warrants for violent criminals, arrives at his door to immediately seize his previously lawfully-owned firearms.

After a fixed number of days, S. 2607 generously allowed you to spend $10,000 and up for attorneys and expert witnesses — in an effort to convince a court that it made a mistake.

Few gun owners have the resources to mount such a challenge, and few courts are willing to reverse themselves on these types of issues.

If you look at the specifics of S. 2607, paragraph-by-paragraph, it is very similar to bills being hawked in the state capitals as the most extreme anti-gun element of the anti-gun agenda.

So there is every indication that the language of this bill ultimately originated in the backroom of Michael Bloomberg’s offices.

We saw with the anti-gun Fix NICS language that when it was stalled in Congress, the Republican leadership attached it to the must-pass omnibus spending bill (which passed in March).

So gun owners have our work set out for us. The next must-pass spending bill will be voted on before October 1.

Gun owners need to let their senators know how toxic this bill is, or there is a chance that we will receive yet another anti-gun “knife in the back” in September.

So please contact your Senators to oppose S. 2607 in all forms, whether as a standalone bill or as an amendment to a larger bill.
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There is now a serious possibility that the Maine legislature will enact one of Michael Bloomberg’s nastiest gun control ideas: the Gun Confiscation Order.

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Gun Confiscation Coming to Pennsylvania?
In a dramatic attack on the Second Amendment, the Pennsylvania legislature is moving to authorize Gun Confiscation Orders in the Keystone State.

The bill numbers are Senate Bill 1141 in the Senate and House Bill 2227 in the House.

At their core, Gun Confiscation Orders — cynically disguised as “red flag laws” or “extreme risk protection orders” — would authorize the police or an angry “ex” to convene a secret star-chamber “ex parte” hearing on whether to suspend your Second, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights.

The first thing gun owners learn is when police knock on the door — ready to ransack their house and, if you resist, to arrest or even shoot you and your family.

The standard is not whether there is probable cause to believe that the gun owner has committed a crime, as the Constitution would seem to require. Rather, the standard is some subjective determination about whether the gun owner represents some “danger.”

As in the film Minority Report, Americans are stripped of their fundamental constitutional rights based on the subjective possibility of a “future crime.”

And we know from our limited experience that many accusers lie or make mistakes — even more reach delusional conclusions — and the target is frequently an abused victim who is most in need of the wherewithal to protect against an abuser.

When the accuser is the only one in court, the judge will normally sign the order. Thus, in Seattle, 28 of 29 Gun Confiscation Order applications were approved.

In Massachusetts, in connection with analogous but less far-reaching “restraining orders,” one of sponsors admitted that “judges don’t ask very many questions” before rubber stamping ex parte orders.

After a fixed period of time, the gun owner can ask for a court hearing to restore his or her constitutional rights.

But guess what? Few gun owners have the sophistication or the thousands of dollars it would take to hire a lawyer and expert witnesses.

And few courts are willing to second-guess themselves and reverse the Gun Confiscation Order which has been issued.

In fact, hundreds of thousands of veterans have lost their gun rights without due process pursuant to a comparable procedure.

And recent revelations from the VA suggest that fewer than 50 have successfully invoked this “process” to get their rights back.

Although they preexisted in a couple of states, Gun Confiscation Orders really picked up steam when the Bloomberg/Giffords gun control organizations decided to push them as the most extreme aspect of California’s anti-gun laws.

Since then, the bills have been mass-produced based on a template in the backroom of Bloomberg’s New York offices and exported for quickie adoption in states like Pennsylvania, with only minor tweaks.

Amazingly, the tweaks made by Bloomberg’s Pennsylvania agents make this state’s gun confiscation bills much more insidious than most other states:

• There is absolute civil and criminal immunity, which means that an angry “ex” can bring a vengeful, bad faith ex parte petition without consequences, so long as the person couches their lies in subjective accusations. It also means that police can break down your door and shoot you and your family without consequences.

• The definitions are poorly crafted and could expand the universe of complainants to distant relatives and high school sweethearts.

• Even if a gun owner is absent or unrepresented, the burden of proof is a scintilla of evidence past 50% in order to strip a person of his constitutional rights.

But there’s a larger issue: If the Constitution can be suspended in a secret hearing, where does this lead?

What if this newspaper could be shut down for 21 days without due process — based on a secret complaint? Or an individual could be arrested or imprisoned for 21 days? Or tortured?

Far from being a “consensus proposal,” the suspension of the Constitution in a secret hearing is a constitutional Rubicon from which there is no return.

So please contact your state legislators today in opposition to SB 1141 and HB 2227.
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