Michigan Red Flag Law Fails, Candidate Blames ‘Loopholes’

August 18, 2026
5:10 am

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Michigan’s red flag law just took another hit when a court refused to strip a man of his firearms despite the state’s best efforts to paint him as a threat, and the candidate pushing the measure is already blaming “loopholes” instead of admitting the statute itself is constitutionally shaky. The case hinged on the fact that the petitioner could not produce clear and convincing evidence that the respondent posed an imminent danger, a standard the law supposedly requires yet one that courts are increasingly unwilling to rubber-stamp without due process. What the candidate calls loopholes are actually the Bill of Rights doing its job—protecting citizens from being disarmed on the say-so of an ex-spouse, a neighbor with a grudge, or a law-enforcement officer operating on a hunch. For the 2A community the takeaway is straightforward: red flag regimes are only as durable as the weakest procedural safeguard, and Michigan’s experience shows judges are starting to notice when those safeguards are missing. Every time a petition collapses under scrutiny it undercuts the narrative that these laws are narrow, temporary, and carefully tailored; instead they look like end-runs around the Second Amendment dressed up as public-health measures. The political class will keep insisting the fix is simply more process or more money for enforcement, but the deeper problem is that any scheme allowing secret hearings and ex-parte orders to confiscate a fundamental right will eventually collide with the Constitution. That collision is already producing results at the ballot box and in the courtroom. Candidates who treat “close the loopholes” as a slogan are discovering that voters increasingly recognize the phrase as code for “remove the last remaining checks on arbitrary disarmament.” The Michigan outcome is therefore less a policy failure than a constitutional feature reasserting itself, reminding activists that the right to keep and bear arms is not a privilege doled out by risk-assessment algorithms but a protection against precisely this kind of bureaucratic second-guessing.

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For the 2A community the takeaway is straightforward: red flag regimes are only as durable as the weakest procedural safeguard, and Michigan’s experience shows judges are starting to notice when those safeguards are missing. Every time a petition collapses under scrutiny it undercuts the narrative that these laws are narrow, temporary, and carefully tailored; instead they look like end-runs around the Second Amendment dressed up as public-health measures. The political class will keep insisting the fix is simply more process or more money for enforcement, but the deeper problem is that any scheme allowing secret hearings and ex-parte orders to confiscate a fundamental right will eventually collide with the Constitution.

That collision is already producing results at the ballot box and in the courtroom. Candidates who treat “close the loopholes” as a slogan are discovering that voters increasingly recognize the phrase as code for “remove the last remaining checks on arbitrary disarmament.” The Michigan outcome is therefore less a policy failure than a constitutional feature reasserting itself, reminding activists that the right to keep and bear arms is not a privilege doled out by risk-assessment algorithms but a protection against precisely this kind of bureaucratic second-guessing.

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