Texas weighs 'red flag' laws to remove guns temporarily from homes of dangerous people

Rick Jervis | USA TODAY

AUSTIN – As President Trump met Thursday with some survivors of the Santa Fe High School shooting, Texas lawmakers mulled over Gov. Greg Abbott’s wide-ranging plan to reduce gun violence and prevent school shootings.

Tucked on Page 34 of the Republican governor's 40-point plan is a pitch to study “red flag” laws, which allow a judge to temporarily remove weapons from the home of an individual considered a risk to himself or others.

Eight states have similar laws — including California, Florida and Vermont — and 29 others have introduced such bills. Backers say red flag laws would probably have prevented the shootings at a Sutherland Springs, Texas, church in November that killed 26 and at a high school in Parkland, Fla., in February that left 17 dead.

Ten people were killed May 18 in the school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas. Trump, in Texas Thursday for fund-raisers, spent more than an hour offering private condolences to some of the families affected by the shooting.

Of all the gun initiatives, such as uniform background checks or bans on assault-style weapons, red flag law proposals seem to have the greatest momentum since the Parkland shooting, winning bipartisan support in several states, said John Rosenthal, co-founder of the Massachusetts-based Stop Handgun Violence.

"It's the new and probably most prevalent discussion around gun violence prevention, post-Parkland," he said.

If a similar law is passed in Texas, a gun-friendly state, the initiative could get a major boost nationally. "It might help be a tipping point for states who have been traditionally opposed to any gun violence prevention," Rosenthal said.

The laws, known as a “gun violence restraining order” or “extreme risk protection order,” allow family members or law enforcement officials to seek a court order temporarily restricting an individual's access to firearms when the person shows "red flags" of being a danger to himself or others.

The firearms are taken away for three weeks to a year. Afterward, the owner can petition the court to have the weapons returned.

In his 44-page "School and Firearm Safety Action Plan," Abbott urges the Texas Senate and House to consider allowing "law enforcement, a family member, school employee or a district attorney to file a petition seeking the removal of firearms from a potentially dangerous person only after legal due process is provided."

Shortly after the release of Abbott's plan Wednesday, Texas House Speaker Joe Straus, R-San Antonio, called on the House Criminal Jurisprudence committee to study the initiative and come up with a legal process to implement it.

"It's critically important that students and parents know when they return to school in August that schools are significantly safer and less vulnerable to a shooting tragedy, and today the state has taken the first steps toward giving them that assurance,” Straus said in a statement.

Critics of the proposed law say it would infringe on constitutionally protected rights by having guns removed after a court hearing often not attended by the gun owner.

"As in the film Minority Report, Americans are stripped of their fundamental constitutional rights based on the subjective possibility of a 'future crime,' " Michael Hammond, legislative counsel for Gun Owners of America, a gun rights organization, wrote in an April editorial in USA TODAY.

"And we know from our limited experience that many accusers lie or make mistakes — even more reach delusional conclusions — and the target is frequently an abused victim who is most in need of the wherewithal to protect against an abuser," he wrote.

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Supporters of a red flag law say the gun owner would have due process through the court, but the measure would address immediate threats to prevent them from being carried out. Before the Parkland shooting, the family of suspect Nikolas Cruz tried repeatedly to alert law enforcement of the 19-year-old's erratic behavior and access to guns, though nothing was done.

A red flag law could drastically cut gun suicides, a major component of gun deaths in the USA, advocates say. Of the 96 people killed by gun violence each day, 59 — or 61% — die from suicides, according to the Washington-based Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

A study in 2017 led by Duke University researchers found that Connecticut's red flag law averted at least 72 suicides. An average of seven guns per person were removed under the law, the study said.

Connecticut's law offered several layers of due process — two police officers and a state's attorney had to sign off on removing the guns, plus the gun owners were allowed to tell their side at a court hearing, said Jeffrey Swanson, a Duke University sociologist who led the study. The law flagged scores of at-risk people who otherwise would legally possess guns, he said.

"There are lots of people who do pose a risk of harming others or themselves who would pass a gun background check," Swanson said. "Here's a law designed to point out who those people are."

Contributing: John Moritz, USA TODAY Network

Follow Jervis on Twitter: @MrRJervis.