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| Photo Credit: AP. |
(AP) - Chicago is one of the nation’s gun violence hotspots and a seemingly ideal place to employ Illinois’ “red flag” law that allows police to step in and take firearms away from people who threaten to kill. But amid more than 8,500 shootings resulting in 1,800 deaths since 2020, the law was used there just four times.
It’s a
pattern that’s played out in New Mexico, with nearly 600 gun homicides during
that period and a mere eight uses of its red flag law. And in Massachusetts,
with nearly 300 shooting homicides and just 12 uses of its law.
An
Associated Press 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, a
trend blamed on a lack of awareness of the laws and resistance by some
authorities to enforce them even as shootings and gun deaths soar.
AP found
such laws in 19 states and the District of Columbia were used to remove
firearms from people 15,049 times since 2020, fewer than 10 per 100,000 adult
residents. Experts called that woefully low and not nearly enough to make a
dent in gun violence, considering the millions of firearms in circulation and
countless potential warning signs law enforcement officers encounter from gun
owners every day.
“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.”
“The number
of people we are catching with red flags is likely infinitesimal,” added
Indiana University law professor Jody Madeira, who like other experts who
reviewed AP’s findings wouldn’t speculate how many red flag removal orders
would be necessary to make a difference.
The search
for solutions comes amid a string of mass shootings in Buffalo, New York,
Uvalde, Texas, and Highland Park, Illinois, and a spike in gun violence not
seen in decades: 27,000 deaths so far this year, following 45,000 deaths each
of the past two years.
AP’s count,
compiled from inquiries and Freedom of Information Law requests, showed wide
disparities in how the laws were applied from state to state, county to county,
most without regard to population or crime rates.
Florida led
with 5,800 such orders, or 34 per 100,000 adult residents, but that is due
mostly to aggressive enforcement in a few counties that don’t include
Miami-Dade and others with more gun killings. More than a quarter of Illinois’
slim 154 orders came from one suburban county that makes up just 7% of the
state’s population. California had 3,197 orders but was working through a backlog
of three times that number of people barred from owning guns under a variety of
measures who had not yet surrendered them.
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. New Mexico and Nevada reported only about 20 orders
combined.
“The law
shouldn’t even be there in the first place,” argued Richard Mack, a former
Arizona sheriff who heads the pro-gun Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace
Officers Association. “You’re taking away someone’s property and means of
self-defense.”
Red flag
laws, most of which came into effect over the last four years, allow police
officers who believe gun owners are an imminent danger to themselves or others
to petition a judge to order firearms surrendered or, barring that, seized for
an “emergency” period, typically two weeks. The judge can then convene a court
hearing in which petitioners present evidence to withhold weapons longer,
typically a year, and the owner can argue against that.
AP’s tally
counts an emergency order that is followed by a longer one as a single order if
they involve the same gun owner. In rare cases where no one asked for an
emergency order and only a longer one was requested and granted, that also
counts as a single order. Several states reported incomplete data.
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.
The recent
spike in shootings has brought renewed attention to red flag laws, with states
including Alaska, Pennsylvania and Kentucky introducing legislation to add
them. The Biden administration is seeking to foster wider use of red flag laws
by allocating money in a newly passed federal gun law to help spread the word
about such measures.
An AP-NORC
poll in late July found 78% of U.S. adults strongly or somewhat favor red flag
laws, but the backlash against them has been intense in some states,
particularly in rural areas. Opponents argue that allowing judges to rule on
gun seizures in initial emergency petitions before full hearings violates due
process rights, though court cases claiming this have generally found the laws
constitutional.
Many police
believe seizing guns can also be dangerous and unnecessary, even as a last
resort, especially in sparsely populated areas where they know many of the
residents with mental health issues, said Tony Mace, head of the New Mexico
Sheriffs’ Association, which lobbied against the state’s law.
“You’re showing up with 10 to 15 law
enforcement officers and coming in the middle of the night and kicking in the
door, and it’s already a dangerous environment,” said Mace, sheriff of Cibola
County, a sanctuary county with just one order since 2020. “You’re dealing with
someone in crisis and elevating it even more.”
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.
“We’re not
going to wait for an Uvalde, Texas, or a Parkland or a Columbine if we have the
information and people say that they’re going to shoot or kill,” said Judd, who
enforced 752 orders since 2020 in a county of 725,000 residents, a tally that’s
more than the total orders for 15 entire states. “We’re going to use the tools
that the state gave us.”
Florida’s
traditionally pro-gun Republican-led legislature passed its red flag law in
2018 following revelations police failed to act on repeated threats by an
expelled student who would go on to carry out the shooting at Marjory Stoneman
Douglas High School in Parkland earlier that year that left 17 people dead.
A recent
high-profile example of a red flag law not being used was for the 21-year-old
gunman accused of fatally shooting seven people and injuring dozens more at a
Fourth of July parade in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park. Robert E. Crimo
III drew police attention three years earlier when he threatened to “kill
everyone” in his house and officers acknowledged going to the home several
times previously because of a “history of attempts” to take his own life.
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.
Illinois
state Rep. Denyse Stoneback said there has clearly been a problem with
awareness of the law among those tasked with carrying it out. “We’d go to
police departments and they didn’t know anything about it,” said the Democrat
who helped push through a bill last year providing $1 million in police red
flag law training.
Asked why
Chicago had so few red flag firearm restraining orders, police spokesman Thomas
Ahern said many of the city’s gun killings are committed with illegally owned
firearms.
But Ahern
emphasized it remained a priority of the department to increase its awareness
and use of the red flag law. “If we are able to prevent one citizen from
getting hurt or killed that’s a law worth having and definitely not a low
priority,” he said.
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.
Payton
Gendron was a 17-year-old high school senior last year when he was investigated
by New York’s State Police and ordered hospitalized for a mental health
evaluation for typing into an economics class online program that his future
plans included “murder-suicide.” But since he was a minor, he wasn’t covered
under the state’s red flag law and it didn’t prevent him from later buying the
high-powered rifle authorities say he used to kill 10 Black people in a
racially-motivated shooting at Buffalo supermarket in May.
Since then,
New York has seen 779 gun surrender orders under its red flag law, equal to
nearly half of all its orders since the measure took effect three years ago.
Several
experts said it’s impossible to come up with an ideal number of red flag orders
and misleading to compare states by orders because of the widely varying rates
of gun ownership and gun homicides and suicides, among other stats.
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.
Still,
experts consulted by AP agreed more could be done to enforce red flag laws
given the prevalence of guns and the millions of gun owners that national
studies suggest could be dangerous to themselves and others. In red flag states
alone, figures compiled by the Gun Violence Archive show at least 21,100
homicides and 47,000 injuries during the 2½ years covered by AP’s count.
Several
studies suggest red flag laws can be particularly effective in preventing gun
suicides, which kill about 20,000 people a year. A Duke University study of
Connecticut’s-first-in-the-nation red flag law in 1999 estimated that for every
10 to 20 surrender orders a life from a potential suicide was saved. A study of
Indiana’s law came up with a similar ratio.
While the
impact of red flag laws on homicides is less well researched, studies suggest
many mass shootings could be avoided if the laws were implemented aggressively.
A study by the gun-control advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety showed
perpetrators exhibited dangerous warning signs before more than half of the
mass shootings in the dozen years through 2020 that accounted for 596 deaths.
Such warning
signs have led to many opportunities to stop gun violence, as well as missed
chances.
In Colorado
in 2020, police seized 59 guns from a man who complained of hit men coming to
get him, bragged about shooting someone and repeatedly threatened his ex-wife.
In New
Jersey in 2019, police took seven guns from a man threatening on Facebook to
attack a Walmart.
And in
Washington state in 2018, police removed 12 guns from the home of a man who
posted on social media about killing Jews in a synagogue and kids in a school.
None of
those threatened shootings happened.
But in
Indianapolis in 2020, failure to employ all aspects of a red flag law resulted
in disaster. After 18-year-old Brandon Hole’s mother alerted police that he was
threatening to commit “suicide by cop,” police seized his pump-action shotgun.
A county prosecutor could have gone further under the law to argue before a
judge that Hole should be barred from possessing or buying a gun, but that
never happened.
A few months
later, Hole bought two AR-style rifles at a gun store, turning to his mother
and saying, “They don’t have a flag on me.” Several months after that, he
fatally shot eight employees in a FedEx warehouse where he had worked and
injured seven more before killing himself.
“I feel the
state of Indiana is an accessory to murder,” a wounded Angela Hughley told the
Indianapolis Star shortly after the shooting.
Vehicles
pass crosses placed to honor the victims of the shootings at Robb Elementary
School on Aug. 25, 2022, in Uvalde, Texas. (AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)
Amber Clark,
a librarian in Sacramento, California, might still be alive today if police had
acted on a tip that Ronald Seay was armed and dangerous.
The gunman’s
twin brother called police in 2018 warning that Seay, who had a history of
mental illness and trouble with police, was making violent threats and had two
semiautomatic pistols. But the police never went to a judge to ask for a gun
surrender order or tell the sibling that he could do that himself.
A few weeks
later, Seay unloaded 11 bullets into Clark’s face, head and body at pointblank
range outside the Sacramento library.
“It is
obvious to me and my family that the application of California’s red flag law
in this case would have saved two lives – Amber’s and the shooter’s – and
prevented immeasurable grief,” said her husband, Kelly Clark. “My wife would
still be alive and the killer would have received the help he needed instead of
being condemned to life in prison.”
Condon reported
from New York; AP writer Terry Spencer in West Palm Beach, Florida, AP Data
Editor Justin Myers in Chicago and AP statehouse reporters across the country
contributed to this report.
Contact AP’s
global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org or https://www.ap.org/tips/