The Push for Red Flag Laws to Prevent Suicides Has Fundamental Flaw

Red flag laws are one of the more popular bits of gun control out there. Even many Republicans favor them, believing them to be effective in preventing mass shootings and suicides.

Of course, mass shootings are relatively rare, despite what the media may claim, but suicides are far more common. As such, supporters of such laws like to push that as the reason for them in the vast majority of cases.

And we keep seeing it because it actually sounds like a good idea if you don’t think to hard about it. That’s especially true when the media likes to start their push with an anecdote:

Adriana Pentz’s brother could be alive today.

In 2017, Luc-John Pentz was 30 years old and starting to struggle, burdened by life’s stressors and trying to cope by leaning heavily on alcohol. Adriana soon found out he had purchased a gun months earlier.

Of her three siblings, she had the most in common with Luc growing up — they were both academically driven and competitive swimmers. They remained close into adulthood, with Luc supporting her when she became a mother. So, when she noticed his behavior starting to shift, she was immediately troubled.

“I was scared when I found out that he had a gun,” she said. “I know that it offered him a sense of security, a sense of protection, which he felt like he needed at that particular point. But my siblings and my mom didn’t feel comfortable that he was not in a good place, and we knew he had something at home that was dangerous.”

Her brother died by suicide May 23, 2017, in the woods near his home in Wallingford, Connecticut.

What Adriana Pentz didn’t know at the time was that Connecticut had a law that would have allowed her, her family or police officers to petition a civil court to seize his gun when it was clear he was a potential harm to himself or others.

In 1999, Connecticut became the first state in the country to pass what is commonly known as a red flag law, which allows family members, law enforcement and sometimes health care workers, friends and co-workers to file what is often called an extreme risk protection order.

Of course, there are studies that seemingly suggest that red flag laws are useful for preventing suicides.

I say “seemingly suggest” because there is a major issue with most of those studies. None seem to look at other methods of suicide beyond a firearm.

This one tried to argue that, for every 17 or so red flag orders issued, one suicide is prevented, but again, they didn’t report on anything to do with other methods of suicide, and that’s probably the fairest study on the topic I’ve come across.

See, the issue with red flag laws is that they focus exclusively on guns, not the person pulling the trigger.

Every state in the nation has some kind of law in place that will allow someone to be admitted to a psychiatric facility for a period of time against their will if they represent a threat to themselves or others. This removes the person from not just their guns, but any other method of taking one’s own life, too.

While firearms may be the most common method of suicide, and one of the most “effective,” there are other methods that are nearly as effective that are generally ignored.

We don’t hear about those, though. Those don’t seem to matter. No one is saying, “Oh, man, we should have gotten a red flag order for his rope” or his razor blades or anything else. That never enters the equation.

You can’t keep selling this as suicide prevention when you can’t even really show us it’s preventing suicide in general as opposed to just “gun suicides” or whatever idiotic term they want to use.