“Setups” are not right. In Maine and the Nation, law-abiding gun owners – Republicans, Independents, and Democrats – are under attack, being legislatively “set up” for a 2nd Amendment takedown. How? In disguise, confiscation authority is being green-lighted as “red flag laws.”
Take Maine as a leading example of how the anti-gun ownership lobby works, how they twist the discussion, ignore facts, and push the idea that what is patently bad, fundamentally unconstitutional, inexcusable, and dangerous, is somehow good.
In Maine, the latest sleight-of-hand is LD 2283, a bill which cleverly – some might say, cynically – takes the 2023 tragedy in Lewiston, Maine, involving a guardsman with mental health issues, to whom “yellow flag laws” applied, and makes him into an excuse to strip Mainers of core gun rights.
The basic method used, which Democrats in Maine’s legislature know but seldom talk about, is to take a tragedy, fan the public fear that attended it, and turn that fear against law-abiding gun owners, thus chilling their defense of historic gun rights, and opening the door to confiscation.
This is, without a doubt, happening in Maine – and across the nation. LD 2283 aims to disenfranchise gun owners by allowing anyone to complain about them to the police, converting a strong disagreement, exchange of words, social post, or physical encounter into a “threat.”
With no more than an attestation that someone feels “threatened,” the official state harassment, police engagement, and confiscation can begin. This so-called “red flag law” is a foil, as in New Mexico where opposition was high, for gradually disarming those who differ with gun owners.
The difference in Maine is – or should be – that gun ownership is not correlated with political party, at least outside of left-leaning enclaves in the southeast part of the state, where fear of guns and former New York state citizenship both run high.
Throughout most of the state, whether someone grew up Democrat, Independent, Republican, or none-of-the-above, people tend to respect gun rights, gun ownership, gun utility, and know how to use a gun, just as they use cars, trucks, plows, chainsaws, hammers, axes, knives, and shovels.
Notably, everything on that list could be used by a mentally unstable person to do harm, a lot of harm, but Mainers would never think of depriving a fellow citizen – call them “old Americans” as opposed to “new Americans” – from use of an implement our Founders gave them rights to.
This LD 2283 is, frankly, written to be vague, understood to be likely unconstitutional, and is being pushed – with instate and out-of-state money – to turn Maine into a place where people are put in fear, made to fear, resent, complain about, and disrespect each other’s rights.
Is that who we are? Is that who the more thoughtful Democrats in the legislature really are? Independents? Republicans? Are we ready to be chided, cajoled, coerced, and chilled into being other than who we have been? We should not be.
Maine already has “yellow flag laws,” effective without more intrusion, lost rights, top-down direction about who can own guns, what gun owners say in public – or lose their guns. Existing laws cover the rare cases, cover the mentally unfit. We do not need more. We do not need progressive confiscation in Maine, snuck into law end of the session, just not right. EVERYONE should oppose LD 2283, a “setup.”
Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman for AMAC.
