‘Red flag’ bill clears Senate hurdle
Backers of a “red flag” bill letting courts take firearms from people posing a risk to themselves or others say the measure’s Senate passage sends a clear response to the youth who marched for gun reform in the wake of the school shooting in Parkland, Fla.
“We are saying to them: ‘You came. You talked. We heard, and we did something,” said state Sen. Cynthia S. Creem, who navigated the House’s extreme-risk protection order bill through the Senate.
The bill allows family or household members to petition a judge to remove guns from a person at risk of harming themselves or others and bar them from possessing firearms for up to a year. Gun owners can appeal the order to show they are not a danger and have their guns returned.
Gun rights advocates say the Senate’s bill left them with many concerns.
“There’s still a lot of due process issues, property rights issues. We tried to fix all of those things and were rejected,” said Jim Wallace, executive director of the Gun Owners Action League of Massachusetts. “We had a historic opportunity to really address suicide and mental health. I think suicide will continue to increase because we lost the opportunity to have a positive effect in reducing it and unfortunately this turned into a gun debate rather than a mental health project.”
The extreme risk orders primarily seek to reduce suicides by letting families step in and remove firearms from a person in distress. Suicides account for two-thirds of all gun deaths in the United States. The measure, though, gained steam in the wake of the Parkland shooting that killed 17 and was a legislative goal of the thousands who marched in Boston for gun reform.
Oregon, California, Washington, Connecticut, Vermont and Indiana have similar laws, and other extreme-risk protection order laws are being considered in New York, Illinois, Maryland and Alaska.
Negotiators from the House and Senate plan to start next week to iron out differences between the two bills and send a final measure to Gov. Charlie Baker, who says he’s “conceptually comfortable” with the reforms.
“We’ll obviously take a good look at what comes out of the process,” Baker said prior to the Senate’s vote, “but we’ve said before the House started debating this that we were conceptually comfortable with it.”
Creem said the time had long passed for Massachusetts to give families and household members the ability to intervene, and she credited its passage to dedicated youth calling for the change.
“We should have done this with Newtown,” Creem said. “I had several kids in my district saying how frightened they were, how they shouldn’t be afraid to go to school, how they don’t want a backpack that’s bulletproof and that this is something they thought would be helpful. I think they made a huge difference.”
Senators voted down an amendment by state Sen. Sonia ChangDiaz to address interstate gun trafficking and bulk firearms purchases.
“As it stands, the bill before us does little to prevent a different kind of gun violence that makes victims of young people across our commonwealth,” she said, “and it will be a travesty of justice if we respond with empathy and a sense of responsibility to the deaths of some youth people but turn a blind eye to others.”