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During his gab-fest with lawmakers and gun rights stakeholders last week, President Donald Trump suggested a good gun policy would be taking guns from people and letting courts decide later whether the confiscation was lawful.
His exact quote, referencing the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school shooter, was:
The Police saw that he was a problem, they didn’t take any guns away. Now, that could’ve been policing. They should’ve taken them away anyway, whether they had the right or not… I like taking the guns early, like in this crazy man’s case that just took place in Florida … to go to court would have taken a long time. Take the guns first, go through due process second.
As Bob Livingston reminded us regarding Trump’s comments, such a thing is a blatant violation of Americans’ rights guaranteed under the 2nd, 4th, 5th, 6th and 8th Amendments. Trump received no backlash from the attendees at the meeting, and he’s gotten little backlash from the mainstream media – which demonstrates they agree wholeheartedly.
Apparently, so does the Seattle Police Department, which recently used a new state law to forcibly confiscate a weapon from a man who had broken no law.
According to media reports, the incident occurred in the Belltown community after neighbors complained the man “had been intimidating people for the past year.” That intimidation involved wearing a .25 caliber automatic on his side while walking down the hall of his apartment complex and staring at customers through a plate glass window while wearing his firearm.
Open carry is legal in Washington, and no one accused the man – who police have not identified – of brandishing the weapon or threatening anyone. Yet based on complaints, police used the “extreme risk protection order” law (ERPO) to force the man to surrender his firearm.
ERPOs have been used by Washington police departments “a few dozen” times to convince people to voluntarily give up their weapons, according to reports. But Seattle is the first department to serve an ERPO warrant and forcibly confiscate a gun, according to media reports.
During a meeting with governors, Washington Governor Jay Inslee told Trump that Washington’s ERPO law should be a model for the rest of the nation.
Millions of people who once lived in communist Russia and China and Nazi Germany were unavailable for comment.
