If Michigan’s lawmakers had possessed the courage to pass a red flag law after Connecticut did so in 1999, Mary Miller-Strobel’s brother Ben might well be alive today.
If the state legislature, which has been dominated by the Republican Party for most of the past two decades, had passed red flag legislation after the mass shootings at Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, or any of the 50 mass shootings in the United States from 1999-2018 alone, gun safety expert Jonathan Gold says, the two friends he lost to suicide in recent years would almost certainly still be with us.
Now Democratic members of Michigan’s state House and Senate and gun safety advocates are once again pushing for extreme risk protection order legislation to give law enforcement officers the tools to remove firearms from people who are exhibiting signs they might be contemplating either suicide or yet another orgy of firearm-enabled mass murder.
Finally, after the country suffered through two mass shootings in a single August weekend, at least a few Republicans may for once go against the wishes of the “gun pimps” at the NRA and allow hearings and a vote on the legislation.
For Democratic State Sen. Mallory McMorrow, the issue is personal. “One of my closest friends in high school lost her older brother, somebody that I went to high school with, in the Virginia Tech shooting,” McMorrow told Daily Kos.
Sadly, that loss was just the beginning of McMorrow’s personal education on the dangers of allowing unstable individuals access to firearms. A friend of McMorrow’s knew both the Dayton, Ohio, shooter and the shooter’s transgender brother Jordan Coffer, who was also the shooter’s first victim. McMorrow’s younger sister attends Temple University, which was recently threatened by yet another angry young white man, who was buying boxes of .223-caliber rifle bullets.
But while that man was arrested before he could violently act out his personal issues, McMorrow’s sister still suffered a brush with gun violence during the August standoff in Philadelphia that left six police officers wounded.
“I'm one person, and this has come way too close way too many times,” McMorrow said of her passionate support of Michigan’s red flag bill, which would allow individuals, including family, friends, and law enforcement officers, to alert local circuit courts when someone with access to firearms poses a danger to themselves or others.
Under the package of bills, which were introduced once again in February, the courts would then be empowered to order all firearms removed from the individual for a period of one year. Individuals with an ERPO filed against them would have the opportunity to contest the order, and courts would have to hold a hearing on contested orders within 14 days.
Mary Miller-Strobel and her family unsuccessfully attempted their own urgent form of a red flag alert in 2006 when her brother Ben, an Air Force veteran, was struggling with mental health issues after serving in the Middle East. Miller-Strobel, who was visiting her parents at the time, said that she and her father went to all of the gun stores in their town, showed the shopkeepers a photo of her brother, and begged them not to sell Ben a gun.
“A number of the gun stores kind of told us the same thing thing, that there was nothing that they could do,” Miller-Strobel told Daily Kos. A few weeks later, Ben was able to buy a firearm and lost his life to suicide. “If this law was in place in 2006, we absolutely would have been able to save my brother's life,” said Miller-Strobel, who has been an activist with Moms Demand Action for the past two years.
In the past two-and-a-half years, gun safety instructor and former NRA lifetime member Jonathan Gold has lost two of his friends to suicide by gun. Those suicides might never have happened—or at least would have been far less likely to be successful—if a red flag law had been on the books where his friends lived.
According to a September 2019 fact sheet on red flag laws by Everytown for Gun Safety, 22,000 people in the U.S. lose their lives to suicide by gun every year. Access to a firearm also makes it much more likely that a person who attempts suicide will die.
“Among commonly used methods of self-harm, firearms are by far the most lethal, with a fatality rate of approximately 85 percent," the fact sheet notes. “Conversely, less than 5 percent of people who attempt suicide using other methods die, and the vast majority of all those who survive do not go on to die by suicide.”
While access to firearms is a massive risk to a person struggling with suicidal urges, the Everytown fact sheet indicates that red flag laws are an effective way to keep such people safer until they can get help: It notes, “An important study in Connecticut found that one suicide was averted for approximately every 11 gun removals carried out under the law,” while an Indiana study showed that the state’s firearm suicide rate decreased by 7.5% in the 10 years after that state passed its red flag law.
Extreme risk protection order legislation also shows some promise for decreasing the number of mass shootings. According to the Everytown fact sheet, disturbed individuals who are thinking about committing mass murder exhibited warning signs 51% of the time. Warning signs are “are even more apparent among perpetrators of school violence.”
Given that kind of advance warning, states with red flag laws on the books seem to be having some success preventing mass shootings. A California study mentioned in the fact sheet details 21 cases in which the law was used to prevent mass gun murder; Maryland has invoked its 2018 law in at least four cases involving “significant threats” against schools; Florida has used its law in “multiple cases”; and the city of Seattle has recovered 200 firearms as a result of 48 ERPOs sought to protect unstable individuals from themselves and others.
“To me, [red flag laws] are simple science. It’s about safety. It’s not about confiscation,” gun safety expert Gold told Daily Kos. And while Gold said he has some reservations about the full year called for before a person under Michigan’s proposed extreme risk protection order can once again have their guns back, he added, “Guns are killing tools. Anybody who tells you anything else is selling something.”
Gold, who said he has been involved with firearms for 25 years, also had some strong words for the National Rifle Association. The NRA has given, at best, tepid acknowledgment of the need for ERPO legislation—but only if such legislation meets the organization’s exacting requirements. When he originally joined the NRA, Gold said, the organization was about “safety and hunting and ecology, with an emphasis on training.” But in the past several years, he said, “They became gun pimps.”
Nationally, the NRA makes unverified claims of having 5 million members out of the approximately 62 million gun owners in the United States. A solid majority of those gun owners support ERPO legislation.
Regardless of whether or not the NRA supports Michigan’s proposed red flag bill, McMorrow added that legislators who don’t get on board don’t deserve their jobs. “I firmly believe that anybody who is standing in the way of progress on this issue needs to be voted out of office,” she said.
Dawn Wolfe is a freelance writer and journalist based in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
This post was written and reported through our Daily Kos freelance program.