The Red Flag Next Door

The Supreme Court ruled that a guy in Texas could still own a gun along with a couple ounces of marijuana. It was an old law, 1968, that was the 'red flag' of the time. It was attributed as a reaction to the assassinations of 1968, but were Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King shot by Rastafarians? Like present day red flag laws, the public is broadly supportive when something sounds like common sense on the face of it.

Should a mentally unstable person, who might be prone to homicidal and suicidal actions because of an illness, keep their guns? Well, no. You can't even get Trump to say anything against that, and he says outrageous things for sport. Of course, definition of terms, it's not that simple. Likewise, in 1968, it was easy to sell people who believed Reefer Madness was real on the idea that stoners must be kept from having guns.

From a public health standpoint, I'm not sure if it matters that much. There was a period of ten years when you couldn't have found marijuana in my house. I was a family man with a job that under some circumstances drug tested. Weed made young me paranoid anyway, so it was easy for me to say the juice wasn't worth the squeeze and just abstain. So I'd be the perfect gun owner.

A perfect gun owner who put away six to ten craft beers per night. Who kept the gin in the freezer so he wouldn't dilute his martinis with ice. Who made ten gallon batches of beer in his driveway on weekends. I was your typical functional alcoholic.

And the thing is, I don't think my alcohol use was that unusual. The people I worked with lived very similar lifestyles, and in fact when comparing weekends I often marveled at how much more alcohol they claimed to use than I did. A casual reference to drinking 18 beers, Festivus poles made of beer cans taller than the drinker, etc. Or the mentioning that they were 'hammered' on the golf course. I didn't tend to drink during other activities (beer judging and homebrewing allowed some cover for the fact that drinking was my main activity.

Now, as to whether I should have been red-flagged for being addicted to alcohol and forbidden from owning guns? I do have anger issues, and booze is no help with that. I've never had a run-in with the law, not even a DUI. I used to say I put the fun in functional alcoholism because I managed, for a lot of years, to avoid the worst potential consequences of my consumption. I was adept at going to work hungover but on time.

I'd say it's probably a good thing that the guy who drinks to blackout every night doesn't have a loaded gun by his bed. I have a friend who was a cop, he almost shot his wife by accident one time. He was sleeping in the day because he was working nights, she dropped some cans in the kitchen and he drew down on her before waking up enough to size up the situation. I had a daughter with autism who got up at one in the morning for the day (an even bigger reason for me not to keep guns in the house).

I still say if you're going to red flag me in my 30s, and you probably should if I didn't beat you to it by having more sense than that. But if you're going to take my theoretical guns, you'll have to take the real ones from practically everyone I know because they all have some sort of booze in the house. Maybe they don't drink as much as I did, maybe they drink even more, doesn't matter to the argument.

I guess this is to say, what if SCOTUS went the other way on this case? Would we be red-flagging all the drinkers who own guns, right along with the potheads like me. That's right, I haven't had a drink in almost a year, what you call California sober. People aren't static. The best argument for gun control is that everyone, sometimes, is eligible for a red flag. The answer to that isn't necessarily more gun laws, this is something that needs to change in the culture. It needs to be socially unacceptable to hoard unnecessary firearms. Not a criminal offense, treat it like smoking in the car with your kids. Everyone knows good parents don't do that, and that makes it pretty rare.

So if you hunt, keep those hunting rifles by all means. In a safe or with a trigger lock until it's hunting season. But buying hardware just because, or hoarding it for some imagined 'second American Revolution' civil war makes you the kind of idiot they ought to take guns away from. I really think it's a matter of social pressure. That allows for the fact that the calculus is fundamentally different in Wyoming versus New York. Even now, the social acceptability of guns is very different between urban and rural people.

Which is to say I'm glad the Supreme Court didn't uphold this bizarre double standard that weed is somehow a different breed of intoxicant. Stoners have the same right to keep and bear arms the drunks have. It's unnecessary for most of them to own guns at all though.