This week’s troubling and disjointed story of a young man from a wealthy Sarasota family with an apparent compulsion to take the law into his own hands is, on the surface, a compelling reminder that our justice system operates differently for those with money and those without.

As if we needed reminding.

But the arrest and plea deal of Ryan Flanzer, as detailed by the Herald-Tribune’s Carlos R. Munoz, also illustrate an equally profound societal problem. They underscore the contradictions inherent in trying to combat an unprecedented epidemic of random gun violence by using notoriously unreliable predictions of individual human behavior.

Flanzer, 27, was arrested in May 2018 after an attempted break-in and an armed standoff with police at a downtown Sarasota hotel. A search of his home and car turned up “a .50-caliber Desert Eagle handgun, an AK-47 pistol, five handguns, a shotgun and ammunition,” according to Munoz, as well as “tactical gloves and a backpack containing a hatchet and duct tape.”

He had no known history of mental instability. A December plea deal describes his 18 months in a Malibu addiction treatment facility as sufficient “mitigation.” And according to the deal, if Flanzer does not re-offend, he could go shopping for replacement guns five years from now.

The National Rifle Association has deflected attempts to limit the U.S. private arsenal by casting blame on a “broken mental health system.” Over time, the group has honed and driven home a message that guns don’t kill people; mentally ill people do.

But the insincerity of this diversionary tactic has been unmasked by other literal interpreters of the Second Amendment. As a detailed 2019 report from The Heritage Foundation pointed out, “because mental illness is so transient in the lives of so many individuals—and because the vast majority of mentally ill individuals are not and will never become violent,” lawmakers should be wary of restricting their gun rights.

And the NRA itself has expressed reservations about the “danger of overbroad mental health disqualifiers” as applied to military veterans. The concern here is that some individuals would be unduly restrained from owning firearms because of the fluidity and uncertainty that characterize most diagnoses — and available treatments — of mental illness.

Weirdly, one recommendation of the Heritage Foundation paper is that the right to keep and bear arms should be dangled as an inducement for mentally ill people to seek treatment. It calls for laws containing “adequate mechanisms for the restoration of their Second Amendment rights when they no longer pose a heightened risk of danger.” This suggests that the absence of a crippling affliction described earlier in the paper as “transient” could be definitively detected by some ironclad method. A blood test, perhaps?

The Flanzer case illustrates how tortured such logic has always been. In the national debate over gun violence and safety, there are plenty more reasonable questions to ask than how mentally stable an individual must be to own a weapon.

How about this one, for starters: How many guns does one individual need, for the purposes of self-defense or amusement, before being required to qualify for some kind of collector’s or dealer’s license? More than one for each hand?

The Herald-Tribune Editorial Board