Anyone who has threatened self-harm,threatened to harm others, or is mentally unstable should not have access to a gun. At all. You can call it an infringement on rights if you want. I don't care. Just get guns away from such people.
The actions of a sick and twisted few cannot be allowed to strip away the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens. Depriving Americans of their constitutional right to bear arms is the ultimate goal of many on the left who exploit tragedies such as these for political gain. But that doesn't change the fact that we must not allow people who threaten harm to themselves or others to have guns.
As is the case with most laws, the devil can be in the details. Whenever we allow the government to take this kind of action, we must also allow for strong due-process protections.
That's why a judge should determine whether a person meets the red-flag threshold for having a weapon.
We must face the fact that our culture has produced an underclass of predominantly white young men who place no value on human life, who live purposeless lives of anonymity and digital dependency, and who increasingly act on their most evil desires, sometimes with racial hatred.
Progress can be made in the legislative and judicial arenas, but no amount of new laws can completely stop criminals or cure the root causes of violence. The problems go deeper than guns or any inanimate pieces of hardware.
We can't bring back the 31 lives lost recently in the shootings in El Paso and Dayton, or the 17 Parkland victims. But we can commit now to increasing safety measures so that fewer families and fewer communities face these tragedies.
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Rick Scott, a Republican, is a U.S. senator from Florida.
Editorial on 08/13/2019