In response to massacres like Wednesday's school shooting in Parkland, Fla., a small number of states have passed "red flag laws" that allow the seizure of guns before people can commit acts of violence.
California, Washington, Oregon, Indiana and Connecticut have statutes that can be used to temporarily take guns away from people whom a judge deems threats to themselves or others. Lawmakers in 18 other states -- including Florida -- and the District of Columbia have proposed similar measures.
Mental illness, escalating threats, substance abuse and domestic violence are among the circumstances under which a judge can order weapon restrictions.
"This morning I heard the sheriff [in Parkland] lament the fact that he did not have the tools to remove the firearms from the shooter," Joshua Horwitz, executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, said Thursday. "Had he lived in one of those states where this law is in place, he would have had the tools, and this shooting may have been averted."
The nation's patchwork of federal and state gun laws mainly involves background checks and actions to prevent people who pose a threat from buying firearms. The approach of red flag laws is to seize guns from people who have them and to restrict their access until they are no longer dangerous.
"We think of this as a new frontier," said Jonas Oransky, deputy legal director of Everytown for Gun Safety, an advocacy group founded in 2014. "We don't have a perfect system in this country, and we can't stop every act of gun violence. This is a way for states to take some care and be somewhat nimble when there is a dangerous case."
The laws allow family members or law enforcement officers to ask a judge for a "gun violence restraining order" or an "extreme risk protection order" against someone who behaves the way 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, the suspect in the Florida shooting, did in recent years.
Arkansas does not have a red flag law on the books or a pending bill, according to a spokesman for Attorney General Leslie Rutledge.
But if Arkansans think a person will harm himself or others they can petition a court to take action, said Rusty Byrne, an attorney and public defender in Pulaski County.
The concerned party has two routes, depending on the immediacy of the threat.
If someone believes that a person could hurt himself or other people but the threat is not imminent, the concerned person can petition a court to hold a commitment hearing, Byrne said.
That hearing must be held within 72 hours of the petition being filed, he said.
But, if a person says he is "heading to the store to buy ammo for a gun" to shoot up a high school, someone can ask the court for "immediate detention," Byrne said.
If a judge finds the evidence compelling, law enforcement officials are ordered to take that person to the appropriate health care facility, he said.
Anyone -- relatives, friends or strangers -- can ask a court to intervene in Arkansas, so long as that person has "knowledge" of the potentially dangerous person, Byrne said. That knowledge could include social media posts, he said.
According to news reports, Cruz killed squirrels with a pellet gun, trained his dogs to attack a neighbor's piglets, posted on Instagram about guns and killing animals and eventually threatened at least one teen. He showed signs of depression and had been treated at a mental health clinic.
Authorities say Cruz is the gunman who used an AR-15 rifle to kill 17 people and wound at least 15 others at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Wednesday.
In an Everytown study of mass shootings from 2009 to 2016, 42 percent of the attackers had shown warning signs of violent behavior. In most situations, however, the danger is suicide, not homicide.
When Duke University researchers looked at the application of Connecticut's red flag law between 1999 and 2013, they found that police served 762 so-called risk warrants during that period and estimated that a gun suicide was prevented for every 10 to 20 seizures.
The police found guns in 99 percent of the cases in which they served the warrants, seizing an average of seven firearms from each person. Twenty-one people went on to commit suicide anyway, six by firearm.
Information for this article was contributed by Lenny Bernstein of The Washington Post; and by Emma Pettit of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
RELATED ARTICLES
http://www.arkansas…">FBI did not act on tip in Floridahttp://www.arkansas…">State's schools size up security; 9 report threatshttp://www.arkansas…">Schools in state note threats since midweek
A Section on 02/17/2018