You won’t hear it from me often. Gov. Janet Mills has managed to get something right by opposing Question 2, Maine’s proposed red flag law.

Proponents claim it would make the state safer without affecting gun rights, but there’s no hard evidence of the former and the latter simply isn’t true.

Our current process, the yellow flag law signed in to law in 2019, was intended to allow for a process wherein police can seize a person’s firearms after a full evaluation, respecting their constitutional right to due process.

While it wasn’t widely used initially — and it didn’t prevent the Lewiston shooting — that does not mean it’s ineffective. Rather, it wasn’t used more widely because police and the public weren’t aware of the procedure. 

There were a series of systemic failures that led to the shooting in Lewiston, but the state’s yellow flag law wasn’t one of them. Instead, it was the incompetence of various authorities, including the U.S. Army and the Sagadahoc County Sheriff’s Department, that led to the shooting. They simply didn’t report Card or properly use the yellow flag process.

If they’d done their job, current laws would have been more than sufficient to prevent the Lewiston shooting. That tragedy was more thanks to their negligence than current laws being insufficient.

The point here isn’t to apply culpability to certain authority figures in that particular case. Instead, it’s to point out that if nobody is ever reported, then no law will ever be able to prevent tragedy. If we’d had a red flag law in place before the Lewiston shooting, but nobody had ever reported Card, it wouldn’t have been applied either.

All of these laws depend on somebody, somewhere, seeing something and reporting it to someone at some point. We can quibble all day long about statutes, but at the end of the day all laws depend on individuals stepping up and doing the right thing.

The problem lies in the flip side of every new law: potential for abuse, just like the potential for tragedy. That’s why when we consider new laws we have to consider how they could be abused, and this one has far too much potential for abuse without sufficient guardrails protecting civil liberties.

If we’re going to force an individual to give up their firearms, even temporarily, the process ought to have very high standards. The red flag proposal simply does not meet those standards. It allows anyone to lodge a petition with the court to have a person’s firearms seized; the court must then make a ruling within 14 days.

This opens the door to disgruntled neighbors, family members, ex-partners or others filing frivolous complaints that either bog down our court system or lead to hasty rulings that curtail people’s rights. We don’t have a similar process that allows the state to seize any other property with the potential for abuse with such a rushed process — there’s no reason we should implement it with firearms.

The red flag proposal is significantly weaker than the current law in another way: it completely eliminates the mental health evaluation that’s now required. We have a two-layer process now, an evaluation by mental health professionals and a court hearing, all initiated by law enforcement. The proposed red flag law wouldn’t require a mental health evaluation.

This would lead to more people’s rights being curtailed, without knowing whether any tragedies are being prevented. That’s always the issue with new gun control laws: we can never really tell if they’re effective.

In the case of the current yellow flag law, it is being used more widely since the Lewiston shooting. We ought to leave it in place rather than implement another, confusing, parallel system, especially one with such potential for misuse.

Moreover, it’s not true that members of the public can’t initiate the process now: they simply have to do so through law enforcement rather than directly with the courts.

Every time gun control advocates step in with a new proposal, they claim it will solve our gun violence problem, yet regardless of whether it passes or not, they’re always back at it. They tried it with universal background checks, and now they’re trying with the red flag proposal.

They never rest, either; this referendum shows that. If the red flag referendum passes, they’ll give background checks another try, or return with some other proposal to curtail our Second Amendment rights.

So, rather than passing another ill-thought out new law, let’s try enforcing the laws we already have — and increasing funding for mental health treatment generally.