He Wrote ‘Kill All Women,’ but a Judge Returned His Guns

Authorities around the country have collided with the limits of laws designed to seize weapons from those who might be a threat to public safety.

By Mike Baker
Nov. 18, 2019
Updated 3:54 p.m. ET

REDMOND, Wash. — The authorities in the Seattle area came across an alarming photo on social media at the beginning of October. It showed a man holding two AK-47-style rifles. The caption above read: “one ticket for joker please.”

With only a couple of days left before the opening of the “Joker” movie, law enforcement agencies scrambled to assess the threat level of the message. As detectives waded through the man’s online history, they encountered additional troubling posts: Charels Donnelly, 23, talked about threatening his mother with a gun and described fantasies about hurting women.

“i will shoot any woman any time for any reason,” he posted on Twitter.

Thanks to the state’s fledgling “red flag” law meant to help prevent gun violence, police in Redmond won a temporary court order to seize Mr. Donnelly’s weapons from his home: three handguns and three rifles, including an AK-47-style rifle and its accompanying magazines. But a couple of weeks later, he returned to court with a lawyer, testified that his online posts were jokes meant only for his friends, and asked for his guns back.

A judge agreed.

Facing a spate of calamitous mass shootings, including three in the last week in California, 17 states have adopted red flag laws as a vital new tool to seize weapons from people they deem imminently dangerous. But as more authorities rush to take pre-emptive action against a rise in gun deaths, they are finding themselves colliding with the Constitution and the limitations of those statutes.

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