(Headline USA) The Justice Department is sending out more than $200 million to help states and the District of Columbia administer “red-flag laws” and other crisis-intervention programs as part of the controversial gun legislation passed by Congress over the summer, officials said Tuesday.
Red-flag laws, also known as extreme risk protection orders, are intended to temporarily remove guns from people with potentially violent behavior and prevent them from hurting themselves or others. Nineteen states and the District of Columbia have red-flag laws.
Although the nation’s capitol has some of the strictest gun laws, including a ban on allowing any guns to be taken outside the home, severe restrictions on what types of guns can be registered and limits on the amount of ammo in clips, it continues to be a hotbed of violent crime.
The same is true of blue states, such as California, whose draconian laws, often in conflict with the Second Amendment, have done little thus far to prevent a streak of recent mass shootings, oftentimes in places where people are at their most vulnerable, such as schools.
Efforts to disarm citizens have been exacerbated by those in many Democrat districts to defund or otherwise hamstring law enforcement, offering free rein to criminals who choose to disregard the rule of law only to be coddled by soft-on-crime judges and prosecutors.
Some of the $231 million in funding announced Tuesday, the fifth anniversary of the deadly school shooting in Parkland, Florida, will also go to crisis-intervention court proceedings and other gun-violence reduction programs—the same sort of programs that enabled convicted killer Nikolas Cruz to slip through the system undetected in a sea of bureaucratic and administrative red tape.
Red-flag laws have been touted by President Joe Biden and others as a powerful tool to stop gun violence before it happens. But an Associated Press analysis found they have had little impact as shootings and gun deaths soar around the U.S.
The nonbinary suspect in a mass shooting targeting an LGBT nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in November, for example, had allegedly threatened his mother with a homemade bomb a year and a half earlier, but there’s no public record that police or relatives tried to trigger Colorado’s law.
The laws differ by state, but they generally allow people like family members or law enforcement to petition a court for an order removing weapons, for up to a year.
The Justice Department insists the program has checks in place to ensure due process.
The funding is part of the $1.4 billion from the legislation provided to the Justice Department over five years for so-called gun-violence prevention measures.
The legislation passed in June was the most extreme anti-gun bill in decades. It toughened requirements for young people who seek to buy guns, denied firearms for more domestic abusers and bolstered funding for mental health programs and schools.
Attorney General Merrick Garland said the funding will “help protect children, families, and communities across the country from senseless acts of gun violence.”
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
