A Connecticut man who set up a wooden device to barricade the door to his house. A Washington state woman who claimed to see people who weren’t there. Dozens of people who threatened suicide. An Oregon man who planned to shoot the boss who fired him.

These are just a few of the people from across the country who had their guns taken away temporarily because of an extreme risk protection order, or “red flag,” law.

Some variation of this law exists in a dozen states and Washington, D.C., but each one implements it differently. As Colorado lawmakers debate passing an extreme risk protection order bill, The Denver Post reviewed data and interviewed law enforcement in several states to understand how these laws work in practice and what Colorado could learn.

Who loses their guns

Although the data was not complete and consistent in all states, some trends emerged.

Middle-aged males were by far the most likely to lose access to their firearms because a judge found them to be a risk to themselves or others, according to data from several states that track demographics.

For example, Duke University professors reviewed 14 years worth of data from Connecticut and found men made up 92 percent of the cases. The data didn’t include the marital status for all those men, but for the ones it did, 82 percent were married or living with a partner. The average age at time of gun removal was 47 years old, and 5 percent were veterans.

“The social circumstances and emotional features of risk that led to these gun removal actions were diverse — ranging from anger and conflict between intimate partners, to emotional distress over financial problems, to the sadness of loss in old age,” according to the study.

Risk of suicide, however, was the No. 1 reason given for gun removal in every state reviewed by The Denver Post.

Opponents of Colorado’s proposed extreme risk protection order bill repeatedly warned lawmakers in a House Judiciary Committee hearing Thursday that this law could be used disproportionately against people of color. Data from Indiana suggests otherwise.

Indiana University Professor George Parker studied Indianapolis, the state’s largest city, during the first two years of Indiana’s law — 2006 and 2007 — and found that 17 percent of people who had weapons taken were black while the overall black population in the city was 26 percent.

Suicide prevention

Suicide is the leading type of gun death in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And supporters of Colorado’s extreme risk protection order bill claim it would prevent some of those deaths from happening in the Centennial State.

“What we are doing with this bill is giving law enforcement a tool that they need to save lives,” said Rep. Tom Sullivan, D-Centennial. “The majority of the time it’s going to be someone who is going to do harm to themselves.”

The data supports Sullivan’s assertion that if Colorado allows extreme risk protection orders, the majority of cases will involve suicidal ideation. About 80 percent of the gun seizures in Indiana and 60 percent in Connecticut arose from concerns about suicide.

But did removing those guns prevent violent self-harm?

Aaron Kivisto, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Indianapolis who studied suicide rates in both states, said the answer is yes in Indiana and no in Connecticut.

Kivisto found a 7.5 percent reduction in suicides via gun in the decade following the enactment of Indiana’s law and a 13.7 percent reduction in Connecticut in the “post-Virginia Tech period, when enforcement of the law substantially increased.”

But he found something else in Connecticut: An uptick in non-firearm suicides meant the overall suicide rate was essentially unchanged.

He said he doesn’t know why the two states got two different results, but one possible explanation is the cultural differences between them.

“Taking the gun isn’t the end of the situation. It doesn’t reduce the crisis,” Kivisto said. “It leaves someone in a crisis without a gun.”

Laws’ limitations

Jane Dougherty, whose sister, Mary Sherlach, died in the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut, testified in support of Colorado’s bill last week.

“Six years — I have been coming down to my Capitol for six years to honor the promise I made to my sister, Mary, and save lives,” Dougherty said. “This is the year to get this live-saving bill passed.”

But the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting highlights a few shortcomings of risk-based gun removal laws: They rarely apply to minors and they don’t cover an entire household.

Connecticut law enforcement had been temporarily taking weapons from at-risk people for more than a decade at the time of the shooting. According to the Duke University study, about 140 orders were issued in 2012. But the 20-year-old man responsible for the elementary school massacre wasn’t the registered owner of the guns. He used his mother’s guns to kill her and 26 other people.

False reporting

One concern among Colorado opponents is that estranged spouses might make false accusations. In Connecticut and Indiana, only law enforcement can petition a judge to remove a firearm. But the laws in California, Oregon, Maryland and Washington let family members request an order — as would Colorado’s bill.

The Denver Post couldn’t find any case where someone was charged with making a false report in these states. Most don’t track the outcomes of individual cases beyond whether an order was granted.

What is known, however, is that many requests aren’t granted.

Extreme risk protection order laws generally allow law enforcement to initially seize a firearm for a short period of time — 14 days in the case of the Colorado bill. During that two-week period, a judge holds a hearing where the gun owner gets to explain why he or she should get their gun back. The judge also hears from the petitioner and decides whether to issue a second order that can last longer — 364 days under the Colorado bill.

In Connecticut, about 30 percent of cases are dismissed after the initial seizure of weapons. In Maryland, judges dismissed about half of the 302 cases filed during the first three months of the law’s implementation, Montgomery County Sheriff Darren Popkin told Maryland lawmakers in January.

A deadly outcome

Opponents of extreme risk protection order laws also point to the risk that may be created when attempting to take away someone’s guns. On Nov. 5, 2018, a police officer in Maryland shot and killed a man while attempting to serve him with such an order.

According to the Anne Arundel County Police Department, the man answered the door holding a gun and became irate when the officers began to serve the order. An officer attempted to take the gun away, and Gary Willis fired. A second officer then shot and killed Willis, according to the department.

It’s the only known police shooting during the execution of an extreme risk protection order.

Failing to appear

A far more common outcome: The person whose weapon is taken away never gets it back.

In 2007, more than two-thirds of the guns taken from Marion County, Ind., residents weren’t returned. It wasn’t because police or prosecutors argued to keep the guns longer, said George Parker, an Indiana University professor who studies the state’s law. It was simply because the defendants never showed up for court.

Indianapolis police seized firearms from 78 people in 2007, according to Parker’s research, and 53 of them never attended their hearings either because they ignored the notices or never got them.

“These are not motivated, suburban gun owners. For these people, it’s a pain to go to court; they move a lot and don’t get notified and get lost in the system,” Parker said. “These folks have limited resources. It’s harder for them to get their guns back.”