Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio, Hey brain Stuff Lauren boglebam Here in California, the manager of a car dealership contacted police and described a scary situation. An employee allegedly had confided to a coworker that if he was fired from his job, he would shoot his supervisor and other employees, though he would warn the coworker in
advance so the coworker could escape. Thanks to the red flag law the California enacted in the police could take action in this case right away without having to charge the employee with a crime. The cops obtained a court order and the next day seized five firearms. The court subsequently issued another order allowing authorities to hold on to
the weapons for a year. That case, described in an article by University of California Davis researchers that was published in August of nineteen in the Journal and Alls of Internal Medicine, is an example of what many advocate as a way to prevent the mass shootings that have increasingly plagued the United States. Red flag laws are designed to give authorities a way to intervene and take guns away
from a person who's perceived as a possible threat. They can do that even if the person doesn't have a criminal record, or a history of being institutionalized for mental illness, or other factors that might show up in the federal instant background check system and prevent the person from buying
again from a dealer in the first place. The problem is that loopholes and emissions in state records submitted to the background check system have often enabled people who went on to become mass shooters to obtain guns even when they should have been disqualified. We spoke with Jeffrey Swanson, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University School of Medicine. He said, we focus all his attention on the point of sale upon people who have felony,
criminal record or mental health record. Those rules are too narrow and too broad. They identify lots of people because they had an involuntary commitment twenty five years ago and wouldn't hurt anybody, and they also failed to identify people who do pose a risk. We also spoke with Daniel J. Flannery, director of the Begun Center for Violence Prevention, Research and
Education at Case Western Reserve University. He said, this is about putting protocols in place so that when an individual is identified as potentially being a threat to themselves or other people, police and courts would have the authority to remove firearms. According to Flannery, red flag laws try to strike a middle ground between protecting public safety and individual rights.
A person who's flagged isn't arrested or charged with a crime, and authorities have to be able to convince a judge that them having guns poses a risk, and the person has an opportunity to get the weapons back at some point. Flannery said there's a due process to that so that it's not automatic and not permanent. So far, red flag laws have been enacted by seventeen states, plus the District
of Columbia. In Florida, where a red flag law was enacted in twenty eighteen in the wake of the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, authorities have utilized it to take guns away from more than two thousand pep bowl. Red flag laws have attracted some strong public support. A Washington Post and ABC News poll conducted an early of September twenty nineteen, for example, found that eighty six percent of Americans supported allowing the police to take guns away
from people whom a judge finds dangerous. That included of Democrats, Republicans, and eighty two percent of independence polled this August. Even President Donald Trump, who otherwise mostly has been an opponent of gun control, indicated his support for red flag laws. On the other side, the National Rifle Association's website criticizes existing red flag laws as violating gun owners Second Amendment rights.
Civil rights and Second Amendment advocates that are against red flag laws say the seizures of these individuals weapons is a violation of the u S constitutions guarantee to do process, which means the people should have the right to argue their case in court before their guns are taken, not after. And whether or not red flag laws do much prevent
mass shootings is a difficult question to answer. The study we mentioned at the top of this episode, conducted by the u C. Davis researchers, cited twenty one cases in California in which a court issued in order to seize guns quote after the subject of the order had made a clear declaration of intent to commit a bass shooting or had exhibited behavior suggesting such an intent, but it's not really possible to prove conclusively that any of the
individuals actually would have committed such an act. Swanson wrote in a Washington Post opinion piece that red flag laws aren't necessarily going to prevent killings by mass shooters, except in instances in which an alert citizen notices that an
angry young man is amassing and arsenal. Nevertheless, Swanson supports such laws because he and other researchers have found strong evidence that they reduce another sort of gun violence that cumulatively inflicts a much higher death toll, suicide by firearm in he and colleagues calculated that for every twenty guns
seized through red flag law, one suicide is prevented. Preventing people with the potential to develop suicidal ideation from getting guns does save lives because research shows that people who attempt suicide by other methods end up surviving of the time, but with a gun, they're effective at killing themselves almost all of the time. Swanson said, from the picture of public health, that's a good enough reason for red flag laws. Today's episode was written by Patrick Jake Tiger and produced
by Tyler Clang. Brain Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's has Stuff Works. For more on this and lots of other topics, visit our home planet how Stuff Works dot com and for more podcast my heart Radio, visit that I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.