US states have ‘red flag laws’ to reduce gun violence. Why don’t they use them?
- Many states barely use the laws touted as the most powerful tool to stop gun violence, due to lack of awareness and resistance by some authorities
- Laws allow police who believe gun owners are an imminent danger to petition a judge to order firearms be surrendered or seized for an ‘emergency’ period
Chicago is one of America’s gun violence hotspots and a seemingly ideal place to employ Illinois’ “red flag” law, which 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 that many US 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.
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“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 tally. “It’s as if the law doesn’t exist”.