If Democrats were serious about using red flag laws to keep guns out if the hands of people who might use them to senselessly murder others and therefore are danger to society, and not just as a gun-control tool to disarm law-abiding citizens, then why did they kill an attempt to use compiled lists of known gang members, which many police departments and law enforcement agencies possess? Why did they kill a measure to red flag gang members? And if Beto O’Rourke is going to come and take our guns, particularly our AR-15s, is he going to start on the south side of Chicago? As the Washington Examiner noted on September 14:

House Democrats this week advanced a new measure to encourage states to pass “red flag” laws, known as extreme risk protection orders, that authorize removing guns and ammunition from dangerous individuals. Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee amended the measure during a Wednesday mark-up to authorize the federal government to issue extreme risk protection orders in some instances, but they rejected an amendment that would have red-flagged anyone who law enforcement lists as a gang member. “The majority of violent crime, including gun violence, in the United States is linked to gangs,” Rep. Ken Buck, a Colorado Republican who sponsored the amendment, said Wednesday. “My amendment is quite simple. It would allow the issuance of a red flag order against anyone whose name appears in a gang database if there was probable cause to include that individual in the database.”

Dems like House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler warned that people could be wrongly identified as gang members, just as people have been mistakenly put on no-fly lists. But identifying NRA members and law-abiding citizens exercising their constitutional right to keep and bear arms as killers-in-waiting are okay to Nadler, Swalwell, and O’Rourke. Yet, as Buck points out, urban police departments have a pretty good idea of who the gang members in their community are and are held to a high standard before officially listing them as member:

Buck pointed out his amendment requires law enforcement to limit red-flagging to only those with probable cause to be included on the list, which is a stricter criteria… “Maybe you are just doodling because it is the 13th of June,” Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler of New York said. Buck said police have to meet a much higher threshold to list someone as a gang member. “This is a situation where the police officers are trained, and there are very identifiable signs, and it isn't just one sign,” Buck told Nadler.

Chicago has the equivalent of a mass shooting every weekend, and just to put faces on those whom the Democrats want to exempt from red flag laws, consider that on last Tuesday two separate trials began in Chicago for known Chicago gang members Dwight Doty and Corey Morgan for the murder of nine-year-old Tyshawn Lee. As Fox News reported:

Two reputed Chicago gang members allegedly executed a 9-year-old boy in broad daylight because they sought revenge on the child’s father’s rival gang, which they blamed for gunning down family members, prosecutors said Tuesday. Tyshawn Lee, 9, was in his school uniform when three men approached him in the South Side of Chicago in November 2015, prosecutors said during opening statements. Prosecutors said Corey Morgan and Kevin Edwards kept watch while Dwight Doty lured the fourth grader into an alleyway. They said he promised him a juice box. Doty then took out a .40-caliber handgun and shot Lee, Cook County Assistant State’s Attorney Margaret Hillmann said. Two separate trials began for Morgan and Doty on Tuesday. The two alleged members of the Bang Gang/Terror Dome faction of the Black P Stones gang seek to pin the blame on each other for the child’s slaying, reports said.

No red flags for these guys. Gang members with .40 caliber handguns? No problem or you might be mistaken about the two being gang members, says Nadler. Go grab the AR-15 from the home of a law-abiding citizen fearful that someday this gang trash will gun down his child or other family member. Scratching your nose in public could be the wrong gang sign, a crime punishable by death in Chicago. And Democrats say it’s Republicans who don’t care about the lives of children?

No doubt Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who recently had a verbal shoot-out over guns with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, will blame the shooting of nine-year-old Tyshawn Lee on guns from outside the state but would it matter if where the gun came from if the two accused gang-bangers were red-flagged and not allowed to have it under the GOP amendment?

Much of Chicago’s gun violence stems from gang bangers, particularly those imported from south of the border, and from the steady supply of illegal drugs that are a consequence of open borders. It is called “gun violence” when it is in fact gang violence fueled by drug trafficking. As Katie Pavlich writes at TownHall:

As the violence in Chicago's gang plagued neighborhoods rages on, the underlying cause of the Windy City's murder rampages can be found thousands of miles away along a porous border. According to a report from Breitbart's Jeremy Segal, Mexican drug cartels are "allowed" to run Chicago's streets and young African-American men are killing each other as a result. Harold “Noonie” Ward, a former high-ranking member of the Gangster Disciples, one of America’s largest street gangs, claims the deadly violence that is plaguing Rahm Emanuel’s “world class city” of Chicago is because Mexican drug cartels are being allowed by “the powers that be” to operate freely and “run” Chicago’s streets. In an interview with Breitbart News outside of his childhood home, a now-condemned apartment in Altgeld Gardens, one of Chicago’s most well known housing projects, Ward explained that there are a number of issues leading to the bloodshed in the city. The greatest reason, Ward says, is drugs and how they are being brought into the city.“Where the drugs are coming from is Mexican cartels,” Ward said. “From Mexico to Chicago, they make $3.5 billion dollars a year. And the majority of violence in Chicago, comes from the Mexican cartels.”

The police know who these gang-bangers are. Will Democrats want to apply red flag laws to them?

Daniel John Sobieski is a former editorial writer for Investor’s Business Daily and freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicatgo Sun-Times among other publications.