Study: State’s ‘red flag’ law may have stopped 58 mass shootings

With Congress poised to expand red flag laws nationally in response to outrage over deadly mass shootings, a new study reveals how California’s sixyear-old law is making an impact: It disarmed 58 people who were threatening a gun massacre.

The study by the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California-Davis is the first detailed description of California’s gun violence restraining order cases in the state since the law was enacted in 2016.

“The gun violence restraining order law is working to prevent cases of firearm suicide and mass shootings,” said lead author Veronica A. Pear, an assistant professor at the Violence Prevention Research Program.

Many of the patterns revealed in the 202 cases reviewed were unmistakable: Nearly all of the people whose weapons were seized were men. More than half threatened to harm others, often intimate partners. And in nearly 30% of the cases, officers used the law to seize weapons after threats of mass shootings, including six students who had described unleashing violence at school.

Now, red flag laws, also known as extreme risk protection orders and in California, gun violence restraining orders, are a key component of a proposed bipartisan federal bill package aimed at reducing mass shootings like the rampages at an Uvalde, Texas, elementary school on May 24 and on May 14 at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket.

The gunmen in both cases were 18 years old and armed with military-style semiautomatic rifles they had bought legally after passing background checks. The Buffalo gunman was motivated by racial hatred; the Uvalde shooter was a high school dropout with a troubled home life.

Texas doesn’t have a red flag law, but New York does, and it could have disarmed the gunman had someone disturbed by his actions called police.

California is among 19 states with red flag laws, adopted after a 2014 mass shooting near UC-Santa Barbara by a 22-year-old sexually frustrated man who fatally shot two women outside a sorority and a man at a deli before taking his own life after a gunfight with police.

The law allows law enforcement or family members to ask a judge to temporarily order removal of guns from someone deemed an imminent threat to themselves or others. The state expanded the law in 2020 to add educators, employers and coworkers to those who could seek the orders, which can be extended to five years after a hearing.

Ari Freilich, state policy director for the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said California was “the first in the nation to pass a robust extreme risk protection bill into law, so has had a bit more time to implement it than some other states.”

Advocates say red flag laws let authorities swiftly disarm a menacing gun owner whose behavior hasn’t yet risen to the level of criminal threats or obvious psychiatric crises. But gun rights advocates have criticized the laws as open to abuse, with the initial seizure order issued before the subject can object in court.