Maine voters passed the state’s first red flag law in November, creating a legal pathway to temporarily prevent someone in crisis from accessing firearms.
Red flag laws, also called gun violence restraining orders or extreme risk protection orders, allow loved ones or law enforcement to petition a court for an order to temporarily remove firearms from someone who is a safety risk to themselves or others.
Maine is the 22nd state to adopt a red flag law (Washington, D.C., also has one). Over 60% of voters supported the law’s passage, according to the Bangor Daily News.
The law likely received widespread support following the October 2023 mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine. Thirty-one people were shot, 18 of them fatally, in a bowling alley and a bar. The gunman was Robert R. Card Jr., a 40-year-old Army Reserve grenade instructor from Bowdoin, Maine.
Before shooting dozens of people, Card had been showing several concerning warning signs for violent behavior, according to several media reports and a lawsuit. His behavior concerned Army colleagues and supervisors for months. He was sent for psychiatric evaluation at a hospital months before the shooting, but the Army did not take away his firearms, according to a lawsuit against the Army and the Defense Department.
“How did this happen when so many people saw it coming?” a psychiatrist, an emergency medicine physician and an epidemiologist wrote in a December editorial advocating for red flag laws.
Those medical professionals conducted a study on the early implementation of red flag laws in California from 2016-2018.
They found that about a quarter of orders were sought in response to threats of public mass shootings.
“When these orders were issued to remove guns from would-be mass shooters, those shootings didn’t happen,” they wrote in their editorial. “And every mass shooting prevented means multiple lives saved.”
What are red flag laws?
Red flag laws are a tool for law enforcement when someone is clearly at risk of causing harm with a firearm but can’t be arrested because a crime hasn’t been committed yet. Anyone who knows someone who poses such a risk to themselves or others can petition a judge to have their firearms temporarily taken away.
Law enforcement officials invoke red flag laws the vast majority of the time. These laws come with a strong burden of proof.
Studies have found that red flag laws are effective, especially for preventing shootings that are often planned out in advance such as mass shootings and suicides.
For example, one study we covered in 2024 found that one potential suicide was likely prevented for every 17 times an order removed guns from people who showed a risk of harming themselves or others.
The study, which analyzed over 4,500 ERPO respondents in four states, also determined that when an order involved someone with a known risk for suicide, an estimated one suicide was prevented for every 13 orders.
But a critical issue is these laws are often underused, advocates and researchers say. In some states with red flag laws, law enforcement hasn’t been trained on how to use them and general public awareness of them tends to be low.
Health care reporters should report on ERPOs and red flag laws as it’s a great opportunity to explore methods to prevent suicides and homicides and to report on whether or not they’re effective.
As the study points out, if the health care field had a better grasp on these laws, maybe they could be used to prevent more deaths.
How to cover these laws
A key story angle for reporters covering these laws is to look at how they’re being implemented.
In 2022, during an AHCJ summit on gun violence, two professors who study red flag laws urged journalists to follow up after these laws are passed.
“At this point, we’re looking at critical implementation questions: Are these [laws] being used? Who’s using them? And in what kinds of circumstances are they being used?” Shannon Frattaroli, Ph.D., MPH, a professor who’s studied firearm violence at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told reporters during the summit.
One way reporters can examine red flag laws is to request public documents and see whether the law is being deployed, according to Frattaroli and the other professor, Veronica Pear, an assistant professor at the University of California-Davis who’s studied red flag laws. Pear is also a co-author on the 2024 study on suicide prevention and red flag laws.
According to Pear, widespread use of the law often hinges on whether people in power are pushing to use the law working with law enforcement and judges on procedures.
As Frattaroli said, “The real work begins once that bill is signed into law.”
