The FBI has named the person who (allegedly) killed eight people and wounded others in a shooting at a FedEx facility in Indianapolis before killing himself. But as per our standard practice of not giving murderers free publicity, we will not name him.

I’ll just tell you that he was a 19-year-old male who was known to local and federal authorities. It’s not clear what connection he had to the FedEx, if any. A family member had contacted authorities to warn that he might have a potential to commit violence, but it’s also not known what, if anything, was done about those warnings.

This will undoubtedly give proponents of “red flag laws” more ammunition. It makes sense that if someone close to a person sincerely believes they might be a powder keg waiting to blow up, that authorities should check it out. There have been other previous mass shootings where the police had clear warnings and did little or nothing. So why are red flag laws so controversial?

Because proponents of such laws tend to want to make them overly broad, so that any accusation can rob someone of his Second Amendment rights, even if it’s false. Critics see it as a backdoor way for the left to brand all its political opponents as dangerous insurrectionists so they can disarm them en masse. But they’d never do something like that, right?