Connecticut’s ‘red flag’ gun law praised, questioned

Co-workers were concerned after Justin Olden, a Stafford public works employee, told them there would be “a mass shooting” if he continued to be reassigned to jobs outside the municipal garage.

The co-workers were aware Olden owned guns and called the Stafford Police Department, which sought a risk warrant from a court to seize 18 rifles, shotguns and other weapons from his home.

State police were able to remove Olden's guns from his home because Connecticut enacted a law 20 years ago — the first in the nation — aimed at preventing people from hurting themselves or others.

Since that law was enacted in 1999, nearly 2,000 risk warrants have been issued.

But now there are questions of whether Connecticut's law is tough enough.

The popularity of risk warrants, also called extreme risk protective orders, or “red flag” laws has increased with the rise of mass shootings in the nation and are now at the center of a public debate in Washington on how to respond to the recent massacres in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, which together claimed 31 lives.

The number of states that adopted red flag laws surged after the Valentine's Day 2018 shooting in Parkland, Fla., that killed 17 students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Ten states adopted red flag laws after that massacre and there was an attempt, which failed, to pass a federal extreme risk protective order law.

Connecticut approved its red flag law after a disgruntled accountant with the Connecticut Lottery Corporation used a 9mm Glock pistol and a knife to murder four co-workers before shooting himself in the head. The shooter, Matthew Beck, previously had attempted suicide and was being treated for depression.

“Connecticut's innovative statute established the legal practice of pre-emptive gun removal as a civil court action based on a risk warrant, a process that neither requires nor generates a record of criminal or mental health adjudication as its predicate,” said a 2017 study of Connecticut's law by scholars at Duke, Yale, the University of Connecticut and the University of Virginia.

According to the risk warrant issued May 24 to confiscate Olden's guns, one co-worker thanked Olden at the end of the day for his help mowing the grass at the town's cemeteries in preparation for Memorial Day. The co-worker said Olden replied “Yeah, if they keep moving me around, there will be a mass shooting.” Two other co-workers also spoke to police about what they characterized as Olden's disturbing behavior that day. One said Olden had once told him he had caught a man sleeping with his wife and put a gun to that man's head.

According to Connecticut law, Olden had a right to a court hearing to request the return of his weapons within 14 days of their seizure. But the case was postponed until this week and continued by a Tolland County Superior Court judge, so no decision on whether to return his weapons will be made until at least Sept. 3. Neither Olden nor his attorney responded to requests for comment.

The Duke study concluded that Connecticut's law has prevented dozens of suicides and probably numerous homicides. The number of risk warrants issued has increased over time, especially since 2010, but state court officials could not say why.

But despite the successes of Connecticut's red flag law, the study of its risk warrant policy found “there are significant barriers to carrying out these gun removal actions at the policing level, which hampers broader implementation of the statute,” and that an average of only 50 guns a year had been removed since the law was first enacted in 1999.