As schoolkids and adults from all over America descend on Washington for the March for Our Lives, on Saturday, is it utopian to suggest that, finally, something may be changing on gun control? Donald Trump, after pledging to support “comprehensive” legislation, in the immediate aftermath of the Parkland massacre, backed off after the National Rifle Association paid a visit to the White House. Congress’s only meaningful action since Parkland has been to attach a version of the bipartisan “Fix NICS” bill, which would slightly strengthen the background-check system, to a big spending bill that passed the House and Senate this week.
Things may not end there, however. On Thursday, Senators Marco Rubio and Bill Nelson, of Florida—a Republican and a Democrat—joined with Senator Jack Reed, a Democrat, of Rhode Island, to introduce a bill that would make it possible for police and family members to obtain so-called risk-protection orders from a court to confiscate the guns of individuals who are potentially dangerous. “I think, among the things that we could do after Parkland, one of the most effective is a gun-violence restraining order,” Rubio said in a statement.
The senators’ proposal largely mimics a so-called red-flag provision that the Florida legislature passed earlier this month, and which Florida law-enforcement authorities are already using against people they regard as potential threats, including Zachary Cruz, the younger brother of the Parkland shooter, Nikolas Cruz. On Tuesday, a Florida judge ordered Zachary, who was spotted at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Monday, to stay away from the campus, post a bond of five hundred thousand dollars, and submit to a psychological evaluation. The Broward County Sheriff’s Office said that it would also seek a red-flag order against Zachary, enabling the office to seize any firearms it might find in his possession. Meanwhile, in Orlando, a court authorized the removal of a gun from the home of a twenty-one-year-old student at the University of Florida who had posted messages online praising Nikolas Cruz and Stephen Paddock, the Nevadan who shot dead fifty-eight people in Las Vegas, last October.
Risk-protection orders are also available in several other states, including California, Connecticut, and Washington. That they have become a trend at a time when other gun-control measures continue to stall at the state and federal levels is the result of a concerted and careful lobbying effort, which sought to cross party lines and meet some of the concerns of gun owners. The success of this effort shows how, even in a political environment that often appears hostile to any restrictions on gun ownership, it is possible to make some progress.
After the terrible shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in December, 2012, Josh Horwitz, the executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, helped put together a group of prominent public-health and mental-health professionals and experts on gun violence. “A lot of people were saying, if we could just do something about mental health, we could stop something like Sandy Hook,” Horwitz recalled. “So we looked at the data on that. What we found is that mental illness is not a good predictor of gun violence, but violent behavior is. The biggest risk factor for future violence is past violence. People who break things, get into fights, and threaten people are more likely to be involved in violence in the future. And, if you put a gun in their hands, they are more lethal.”
In December, 2013, this group, which is now known as the Consortium for Risk-Based Firearm Policy, put out a report. Among the policy ideas the consortium proposed was “a new mechanism to remove, at least temporarily, firearms from individuals who represent a serious risk of harm to self or others.” This wasn’t a completely new concept. In 1999, Connecticut passed a bill that enabled courts to authorize the seizure of weapons from threatening individuals, and, in 2005, Indiana enacted a similar law. The consortium took these examples and built upon them.
New Yorker writers on the March for Our Lives.
Crucially, the group called for risk-protection orders to be made available not just to law-enforcement authorities but also to individuals who believed that their family members or intimates represent a grave threat “based on a credible risk of credible harm to self or others, even when domestic violence is not an issue.” Take, for example, a parent concerned about an unemployed son who is collecting guns and talking about killing himself or others. Under the consortium’s proposal, this parent could apply for a court order. If the judge granted it, law enforcement would be given a warrant to seize the son’s firearms.
The consortium was careful to respect the legal rights of the individuals targeted. Risk-protection orders would always be temporary. If a person had his guns removed pursuant to one, he would be allowed to challenge the order before a judge. And, once the order expired, the individual would get his guns back. These provisions were explicitly designed to meet the objections of opponents of gun control. “We designed this with lots of due process, so it would be very hard to oppose,” Horwitz said. “It was designed to appeal to both sides.” The consortium also framed its proposal to address the N.R.A.’s regular argument that people, and not guns, kill people. “We said we wanted to identify who these people are likely to be,” Horwitz recalled.
The supporters of risk-protection orders also provided evidence that they work. Together with some colleagues, one member of the consortium, Jeffrey Swanson, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at Duke, studied the Connecticut law, which was introduced after a gun rampage at the headquarters of the state’s lottery. They found that, in addition to providing an effective way of disarming people who are threats to others, the risk-protection orders had a substantial effect on the number of suicides.
“We found that one life is saved for every ten or fifteen gun-seizure actions,” Swanson told me.
Despite this, the N.R.A. still opposed the idea of risk-protection orders. Then, on May 23, 2014, in Isla Vista, California, a disturbed twenty-two-year-old man named Elliot Rodger killed six people near the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara. (Rodger stabbed three of his victims and shot the other three.) It subsequently emerged that, three weeks before the attack, Rodger’s parents, alarmed by his threatening behavior and the content of some videos he had posted on YouTube, had called the police. After interviewing Rodger, the cops decided that he didn’t meet the requirements for an involuntary holding order, and that they didn’t have the legal right to seize his guns.
Amid a public outcry, the gun-control movement in California pushed the state legislature to allow families to petition for risk-protection orders. Lawmakers passed a bill that enabled judges to remove guns from threatening individuals, initially for up to twenty-one days, and, after a subsequent hearing, for up to a year. In September, 2014, Governor Jerry Brown signed the bill into law. The victory started a West Coast trend. In 2016, the residents of Washington voted in a referendum for gun-violence restraining orders. In 2017, the state legislature in Oregon passed a bill that introduced the orders.
Then came the horrific events in Parkland. As in the Isla Vista case, law enforcement had been alerted prior to the shooting that Nikolas Cruz represented a serious threat but didn’t have a clear legal basis to remove his guns. Once again, the public was outraged. Governor Rick Scott, a Republican who hitherto had been a poster boy for the gun lobby, threw his support behind a gun-control bill that included the red-flag provision now being put into effect. And that may have just been the beginning. Similar measures have been introduced in more than a dozen states this year. The White House is encouraging states to adopt such measures, too—despite Trump’s reversal on a comprehensive gun-control measure. Even the N.R.A. appears to be going along for now. Earlier this month, Chris Cox, the head of the group’s lobbying arm, said in a video statement, “Congress should provide funding for states to adopt risk-protection orders. This can help prevent violent behavior before it turns into a tragedy.”
Still, this week, a spokesperson for the N.R.A. told me that the organization wouldn’t comment on the Rubio-Nelson-Reed bill until it had seen the actual language it contains. It’s also not clear what attitude the N.R.A. will adopt at the state level in the long run. But Cox’s statement appeared to indicate that the public mobilization after Parkland is having at least some effect.
To be sure, these developments need to be placed in context. America still has more than three hundred million guns in civilian hands, including an unknown but very large number of semiautomatic assault rifles. (The N.R.A. estimates that the figure is between eight and a half million and fifteen million.) The gun lobby retains a firm grip on the Republican Party, and it remains vehemently opposed to almost all broad-based restrictions on gun sales.
Horwitz is the first to admit that there is no straight line between the rising popularity of risk-protection orders and passing more ambitious measures, such as the ban on assault weapons that the organizers of Saturday’s march are demanding. But you have to start somewhere. Horwitz said, “Once you get politicians supporting something like this and getting reëlected, I think that gives them the latitude to look at some other things.”
