Studies have shown state-level versions of 'red-flag' laws have been effective at preventing suicide. But can they actually address the separate issue of mass shootings? Surprisingly, experts think they could. More, via FiveThirtyEight:
. Experts say that when someone is suicidal, if they decide to act on that feeling, they are likely to turn to a familiar tool they’re already comfortable using — and when that tool is a gun, it’s particularly likely to be lethal.. In the decade after passing a red flag law, Indiana saw a 7.5 percent reduction in firearm suicides. In Connecticut, a red flag law was associated with a 13.7 percent reduction in firearm suicides between 2007 and 2015.
Law enforcement has long tried to profile the people most likely to commit these crimes — and we aren’t very good at it, experts told me. Even once you identify some, such a large swath of the population shares these traits that the “profile” is fairly useless for prevention.
For the researchers who study mass violence, what’s appealing about red flag laws is that these rules have the potential to shift the emphasis from a cut-and-dried checklist of dangerous traits to a more nuanced system that accounts for a person’s big-picture emotional state. And that matters, because, it turns out, family and friends of a mass shooter are often aware that something is wrong long before the violence happens.
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