The legislation stands little chance of enactment in its current form, but the idea of incentivizing states to allow guns to be taken from dangerous people is in play in bipartisan Senate talks.
The House on Thursday voted nearly along party lines to pass legislation that would allow guns to be temporarily confiscated from people deemed by a federal court to be dangerous, acting a day after it passed a sweeping measure to bar the sale of semiautomatic weapons to people under the age of 21 and ban the sale of large-capacity magazines. The bill, which passed 224 to 202, would create what is known as a federal red-flag law that allows family members or law enforcement to obtain an “extreme risk protection order” for a person considered to be a danger to themselves or others. Currently, Washington, D.C., and 19 states already have such laws in place. The legislation would set it as a national standard. The measure garnered only five Republican votes and stands little chance of enactment in its current form. But the idea is one that has some degree of bipartisan backing in the Senate and is a centerpiece of discussions among a small group of Republicans and Democrats in the Senate that is focused on finding a compromise that could draw the 60 votes necessary to move forward. The group is discussing providing grant money to incentivize states to pass their own red-flag laws. The action is unfolding after several mass shootings — including a racist attack that killed 10 Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo and a school massacre in Uvalde, Texas, that killed 19 children and two teachers — have pushed the issue of gun violence to the forefront in Washington, where years’ worth of efforts to enact gun restrictions in the wake of mass shootings have failed amid Republican opposition.
