Think this through. They were trying to take his firearms, because there was no process by which they could take him and put him in a psych hospital for evaluation and, if found necessary, treatment and/or long-term commitment. The problem with what we currently call "red flag laws" is that they focus on taking guns, and leaving the purportedly dangerous crazy person free.

Obviously when the person really is dangerously crazy, it's the person that needs to be separated from free society, not a particular category of inanimate object, which is just one of many categories that a violently inclined crazy person can use to kill or maim. If they'd had a process to take him they could have put him under surveillance and caught him off-guard to take him into custody. Then he'd still be alive, and if (as I have noted) the infernal privacy laws were gutted, he would only be kept in a secure psych facility if that was actually warranted.