This story is from The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to reporting on gun violence. 

Gun safety advocate Rachael Joseph knows the lasting toll of gun violence. Twenty years ago, Joseph’s aunt, Shelley Joseph Cordell, was being stalked, harassed, and threatened for greater than a yr by her distant cousin, Susan Berkovitz. On September 29, 2003, on the seventeenth floor of the Hennepin County Government Center in downtown Minneapolis, Berkovitz opened fire outside of a hearing room where harassment cases were being heard, killing Cordell and wounding her attorney.

Berkovitz’s stalking and harassment were well-documented leading as much as the shooting, Joseph said. A close-by county had banned her from filing court complaints, labeling her a “frivolous litigator.” A court reporter had complained that Berkovitz was harassing her. Still, Berkovitz was in a position to buy a .38 revolver for just $60 in an unregulated private sale at a gun show.

“The courts didn’t protect her,” Joseph, who runs a survivors advocacy group, told The Trace of her aunt.

On the time, and for years after the incident, Minnesota continued to permit private sales to proceed without background checks and offered no means by which law enforcement or members of the family could seek an emergency order to stop dangerous people from possessing a gun. That modified earlier this yr, when the Minnesota Legislature approved bills to expand background checks and implement an Extreme Risk Protection Order law.

The ERPO law, also often called a red flag law, is about to enter effect in January, and it can allow members of the family, romantic partners, and law enforcement officers to petition a court for an order to seize guns from people deemed to be imminently dangerous.

Joseph believes that her aunt could have used such an order back then.

“In any case of the stalking and harassment, Shelley absolutely would’ve utilized a gun violence protection order against Susan in the event that they’d been available,” Joseph said. “Unfortunately, my family doesn’t get to return.”

Minnesota and Michigan are the most recent of 21 states to enact Extreme Risk Protection Order laws. The 2 Great Lakes states moved on the heels of the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the primary significant federal gun reform laws in nearly 30 years. Though the law didn’t include a national ERPO measure, it did include funding incentives and support for states to enact and implement state-level versions. Minnesota was the primary to take Congress up on that provide.

Though it doesn’t go into effect until 2024, state officials, lawmakers who authored the bill, and gun reform advocacy groups are already preparing for its implementation. They hope that setting a powerful foundation and getting adequate infrastructure, resources, and support in place will help Minnesotans take full advantage of the law on Day One.

“We’re hoping to avoid wasting lives. And I believe that it can,” said state Rep. Cedric Frazier, DFL-Latest Hope. “In every single place we glance in states which have already implemented the laws, their data says that they’ve been in a position to intervene in situations where people have been showing dangerous behavior.”

As with many gun violence prevention policies, how the state’s ERPO is implemented will play a giant role in determining whether it can be as effective in saving lives as its supporters hope.

There’s dearth of gun violence research, and the evidence on ERPOs and their effects on gun deaths is restricted. But studies suggest that ERPOs may reduce gun deaths, including in cases of threatened violence and potential mass shootings. And the evidence is stronger that they could reduce firearm suicides; when Indiana implemented its risk order law, it was related to a 7.5 percent decline in firearm suicides.

However the research that’s available also shows that awareness, training, and enforcement are key. Connecticut’s law was related to a 1.6 percent decline within the firearm suicide rate after its passage in 1999, but that reduction rose to 14 percent when enforcement of the law was increased in 2007. In California, just a few counties drove a rise in using the law in 2018 and 2019, suggesting that local leadership, protocols, and training of law enforcement — who typically file most petitions — played a job.

Minnesota’s ERPO laws laid out much of the framework for a way the method will work, and lawmakers considered implementation concerns on the front end, Frazier said, together with lessons from other states. The Minnesota Department of Public Safety will coordinate the statewide implementation of the law, in accordance with the bill’s text, while individual county courts and native law enforcement will likely be doing the majority of the work on the bottom.

To file for a risk order, local law enforcement or a member of the family will petition their local district court. And although mental health professionals cannot file a petition on their very own, there may be a special provision within the law for mental health professionals to notify law enforcement when someone is a risk to themselves or others in order that law enforcement can file a petition.

For family petitioners, the barriers could also be twofold: knowing that the choice exists, after which going through what may very well be an advanced legal process for some. For law enforcement, it can also require resources and training to handle court paperwork and filings. And if an order is granted, it can take manpower, protocols, space, and money to implement those orders, safely retrieve firearms, report prohibitions to the background checks system, and store seized firearms.

“One among the things that got here up from a few of our local law enforcement jurisdictions was how are we going to do that,” Frazier said. “We don’t have the space to accommodate the guns if we take them into our possession. So we’re gonna need resources for that.”

The Minnesota Legislature put aside funding for that purpose when it passed the ERPO law. Local jurisdictions will give you the chance to request grants from the state for funding to assist implement the ERPO laws of their local jurisdictions, Frazier said.

However the state can be getting assistance from the federal government through the Safer Communities Act. Earlier this yr, it received a $3.7 million grant from the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance. It’s certainly one of 51 awards that the DOJ has made to support crisis interventions like ERPOs, amounting to greater than $238 million within the 2023 fiscal yr. To assist get the infrastructure in place in Minnesota, much of that funding will likely go to local law enforcement and courts.

Before the grant money could be put to make use of, though, the state is organising a requisite advisory board to make decisions about where it should go. Along with basic infrastructure to run the method, it is also used to support a public awareness campaign and compile required reports on how often the law is used to petition courts, and the way a lot of those petitions end in court orders.

“One thing we also learned from a number of the other states was that, even when the law was in place, not many of us were aware that it existed and so not many of us were actually using the tool,” Frazier said.

Across the U.S., the degree to which ERPO laws are used varies by state and even by county. While some states like Florida, which passed an ERPO law after the 2018 Parkland shooting, have seen 1000’s of petitions filed and orders issued, other states see their laws used relatively infrequently, even when taking into consideration population.

“It seems to me like there’s just fairly often this lack of information from the community that ERPOs exist, that this tool is on the market when a crisis moment is going on,” said Maggiy Emery, the manager director of Protect Minnesota, a gun violence prevention organization.

Protect Minnesota is taking up a part of the tasks of public education and awareness, preparing for a campaign surrounding the law that it expects will launch in partnership with the state and other advocacy groups. “That is going to need to appear like a partnership between the state and between organizations like ours, who’re really leading the charge on this gun violence prevention work,” Emery said.

While Minnesota has a lower gun death rate relative to other states, greater than 600 Minnesotans still die yearly by firearms. In 2021, suicides were 68 percent of the state’s gun deaths, and most occurred in Greater Minnesota, the agricultural parts beyond the Twin Cities metro area. “Once we were talking about extreme risk protection orders and what that might appear like in Minnesota, there’s loads of gun violence that they’ll address, but for us, loads of it was largely about firearm suicides and reducing firearm suicides here in our state,” Emery said.

Nonetheless, most of the lawmakers from the agricultural districts with the very best suicide rates opposed the ERPO law, signaling that local officials there may hesitate to make use of the law within the places where it may very well be most useful. MinnPost previously reported that some county sheriffs opposed the red flag law and may very well be more reluctant to file petitions to remove guns, leaving it as much as members of the family to be the first petitioners. But a corporation representing sheriffs across the state expects they may comply in relation to carrying out court orders.

“The MSA stance stays consistent,” James Stuart, the manager director of the Minnesota Sheriffs’ Association, told The Trace. “The sheriffs held some hesitation initially based on certain laws that had been enacted in other states. Specifically, they desired to make sure that nobody’s rights were neglected, and that due process was included as a part of the proceeding.”

Now that Minnesota is rolling out the law, Stuart said, the sheriffs are working with other stakeholders to develop outreach, training, and implementation processes, adding: “I’m confident that the sheriffs will perform the laws and that all of them want safer communities.”

Various levels of usage inside a state should not an unusual occurrence. In Colorado, for instance, some counties see high uptake while others don’t. Denver County has seen nearly six times the variety of ERPO orders issued in comparison with El Paso County, which has roughly the identical population — the result of local officials who declared themselves a “Second Amendment sanctuary” and resisted using the law. Minnesota has a lot of its own Second Amendment sanctuary counties, largely in Greater Minnesota.

“There are these cultural differences between greater cities which can be going to be eager and willing to implement this where it will probably save lives, and perhaps Greater Minnesota rural places, where the best way that they give thought to guns is culturally different,” Emery said.

Frazier said that once they wrote the bill, lawmakers were already considering the chance that some parts of the state could also be more hesitant to participate than others. That’s a part of why the state is developing uniform filing requirements and processes although local courts will likely be handling those processes. The Legislature also directed local courts to supply “simplified forms and clerical assistance” to assist with the writing and filing of ERPO petitions.

And it provided some leeway for petitioners to file in a unique county in some circumstances, comparable to when the petitioner lives in a unique county than the respondent.

While the ERPOs can have the most important impact on suicides, Joseph said she doesn’t want victims and survivors of stalking, and domestic and intimate-partner violence, to be disregarded of the conversation, irrespective of what a part of the state they’re from.

“Bureaucracy and system delays with implementation could absolutely cost people their lives in abusive situations,” Joseph said.

For Emery, there’s no time to attend to implement the law. The method needs to be accessible on Day One, when courts reopen in the brand new yr.

“If we are able to save any amount of lives with ERPO next yr, I don’t think we now have a alternative,” she said. “I believe that we’d like to enact this with the urgency that the epidemic calls for.”