But gun safety advocates, law enforcement officers and health care workers think more lives could be saved.
If you or someone you know may be experiencing a mental health crisis, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by dialing or texting “988.”
Adriana Pentz’s brother could be alive today.
In 2017, Luc-John Pentz was 30 years old and starting to struggle, burdened by life’s stressors and trying to cope by leaning heavily on alcohol. Adriana soon found out he had purchased a gun months earlier.
Of her three siblings, she had the most in common with Luc growing up — they were both academically driven and competitive swimmers. They remained close into adulthood, with Luc supporting her when she became a mother. So, when she noticed his behavior starting to shift, she was immediately troubled.
“I was scared when I found out that he had a gun,” she said. “I know that it offered him a sense of security, a sense of protection, which he felt like he needed at that particular point. But my siblings and my mom didn’t feel comfortable that he was not in a good place, and we knew he had something at home that was dangerous.”
Her brother died by suicide May 23, 2017, in the woods near his home in Wallingford, Connecticut.
What Adriana Pentz didn’t know at the time was that Connecticut had a law that would have allowed her, her family or police officers to petition a civil court to seize his gun when it was clear he was a potential harm to himself or others.
In 1999, Connecticut became the first state in the country to pass what is commonly known as a red flag law, which allows family members, law enforcement and sometimes health care workers, friends and co-workers to file what is often called an extreme risk protection order.
After considering evidence and hearing from both the petitioner and the gun owner, a judge may temporarily take a person’s weapon if they deem the gun owner to be a potential danger to themselves or the community. Orders usually last one year.
Now, 21 states and the District of Columbia have such laws. Voters in Maine will decide in November whether to join that list. The use of extreme risk protection orders has surged in recent years, with petitions filed across states that have such laws jumping by 59% in 2023 over the previous year, according to data collected by Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control research and advocacy group.
But the laws’ effectiveness relies on their implementation, supporters say: Law enforcement and judges must be trained properly and the public needs to be aware that the law exists.
“The challenge in this is that too many people, too many law enforcement people, too many families, are not aware that there is an extreme risk law in their state,” Sarah Burd-Sharps, the senior director of research at Everytown, told Stateline.
A Stateline analysis shows the usage rates rose from six petitions filed per 100,000 residents in 2022, to 10 per 100,000 in 2023. The analysis used Everytown’s petition data and U.S. Census Bureau population estimates for the District of Columbia and the 19 states with active red flag laws in 2023.
In 2023, there were 46,728 gun-related deaths in the United States, including suicides, murders and accidents, with a national rate of 14 gun deaths per 100,000 people, according to the latest data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Suicides accounted for nearly 6 in 10 of the gun deaths. Recent research on the protection orders’ impact estimates that one suicide is prevented for every 17 to 23 petitions filed. Based on this estimate, nearly 990 lives could have been saved in 2023 for every 17 petitions filed.
Pentz feels her brother’s death every day. “It was a horrible, horrible, horrible moment in our lives to have lost him,” she said.
“I know for sure that if it was something that I was aware of in 2017, I would have petitioned to have my brother’s gun taken from him in that moment of crisis. I do believe it could have saved his life.”
As retired detective Christopher Carita travels around the country to meet with law enforcement agencies on how to better use their state’s red flag laws, he consistently hears one concern: Is this a gun grab?
“Law enforcement, we’re gun folks,” said Carita, who worked for the Fort Lauderdale Police Department in Florida. “There’s always this hesitancy when it comes to risk protection orders and removing firearms that needs to be overcome.”
So, when he designed his training, he emphasized due process protections embedded in these laws: Gun owners get ample notice about the petition, and they have the right to defend themselves in court through multiple hearings. The laws are based off long-held domestic violence and other civil orders and are backed by the U.
