Some steps have been proven to prevent mass shootings but nationwide "red flag" laws may not be part of the solution, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who is running for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, said Sunday.
The Arkansas Republican told CBS News's "Face the Nation" that he had worked with the National School Shield program, and that there was bipartisan legislation, the Safer Communities Act.
"These are steps that have been proven to be successful in saving lives and I think we continue to look at what can be done," said Hutchinson.
The Safer Communities Act allocated over $1 billion for mental health resources, including money to incentivize red flag laws, but in states like Kentucky and Tennessee, the latest mass shooting site sites, those laws are not in effect, show host Margaret Brennan pointed out.
"In Arkansas, we made sure that our school counselors can devote time to counseling with students and not doing administrative work, and so putting more money into the school resources and the mental health services across the board are important," said Hutchinson.
However, states must pick up responsibility as well, he said.
"You shift into enhancing those mental health services, but also making sure that we have the capacity to identify and respond if someone poses a risk," he said. "We have to look at actually utilizing the law that's on the books, and it's been there since the '70s, but it was used in a different way, and that is if somebody is a danger to themselves or a risk to others, then they can be committed. It has to go before a judge and there has to be a hearing on it."
He acknowledged though that that solution does not solve every problem.
"You've got to be able to enforce the law and you've got to send the signal that there's going to be serious consequences and the death penalty when somebody through a pure act of evil carries out that kind of shooting."
But still, he said, "we have failed in our society" to act on identifying whether people pose a risk to others, but when asked if he wants a national "red flag" law, Hutchinson called that a separate issue."
"There is the adjudication through a court of law for someone who poses a risk to themselves or to others, and that's on the books," he said. "It's in virtually every state and that's dependent upon an action that a family member might take when they identify another family member, that is a risk. It might be the police that could identify that of somebody that's on the streets, or it could be a whole host of ways, but it would get it into court."
But that is a matter of practice, not a federal law that needs to be passed.
But on red flag laws, there is resistance because the rulings aren't coming from a court, said Hutchinson.
"We want to make sure it's due process," he said. "You're not unnecessarily taking firearms away from somebody just because they say they're having a bad day."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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