An AP analysis found many U.S. states barely use the red flag laws touted as the most powerful tool to stop gun violence before it happens
So many questions are being raised about Illinois' red flag laws following the deadly Highland Park Fourth of July parade shooting.
"It's too small a pebble to make a ripple," Duke University sociologist Jeffrey Swanson, who has studied red flag gun surrender orders across the nation, said of the AP tally. "It's as if the law doesn't exist." And a national movement among politicians and sheriffs that has declared nearly 2,000 counties as "Second Amendment Sanctuaries," opposing laws that infringe on gun rights, may have affected red flag enforcement in several states. In Colorado, 37 counties that consider themselves "sanctuaries" issued just 45 surrender orders in the two years through last year, a fifth fewer than non-sanctuary counties did per resident.
Some states also allow family members of gun owners, school officials, work colleagues or doctors to ask for gun removal orders, also known as extreme risk protection orders. But data reviewed by the AP show nearly all petitions in several states were initiated by police, possibly because, as several surveys have shown, few people outside law enforcement are even aware the laws exist.
One fierce gun rights defender who still aggressively uses the law is Polk County, Florida, Sheriff Grady Judd, who says he doesn't let his beliefs stand in the way of moving fast when gun owners threaten violence. But Highland Park police never requested a gun surrender order, saying there was no gun belonging to Crimo to take away at the time, even though the law has a provision to block threatening people from making future purchases, too.
In New York, a red flag-type situation that wasn't covered under the state's law nonetheless led to a spike in red flag gun surrender orders. Another complicating factor is that some states have stricter gun ownerships rules and multiple ways to seize firearms. In California, for instance, guns can be taken away through domestic violence restraining orders, civil harassment protection orders and school violence prevention orders in addition to the red flag law.
In New Jersey in 2019, police took seven guns from a man threatening on Facebook to attack a Walmart.
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