Chicago has one of the highest rates of gunshot deaths in the United States. Chicago is also an area where police have the authority to take guns away from people who threaten to commit murder. But since 2020, there have been more than 8,500 shootings and nearly 1,800 deaths. The red flag rule was used only four times during this period.

During this period, there were approximately 600 gun homicides in New Mexico and the red flag law was used eight times, while Massachusetts had approximately 300 homicides and the law was used 12 times.

Many US states do not use red flag laws to prevent gun violence before it happens. A lack of proper awareness of the laws and the resistance of some authorities to enforce them, even in the case of a shooting, is driving up the rate of gun homicides.

Authorities in 19 states and the District of Columbia have attempted to remove guns from people 15,049 times since 2020 using the Red Flag Act. But experts say none of these laws are enough to stop gun violence, given the countless death threats from millions of gun owners.

"It's too small a pebble to make a ripple," Duke University sociologist Jeffrey Swanson, who has studied red flag gun surrender orders across the nation. He added that both those who have this law and those who do not are the same.
"The number of people caught using the red flag law is incalculable. It doesn't seem like the law will reduce gun homicides," said Jody Madeira, a law professor at Indiana University.

The search for solutions comes amid a string of mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, Uvalde, Texas, and Highland Park, Illinois, and a spike in gun violence not seen in decades: 27,000 deaths so far this year, following 45,000 deaths each of the past two years.

Florida led with 5,800 such orders or 34 per 100,000 adult residents, but that is due mostly to aggressive enforcement in a few counties that don't include Miami-Dade and others with more gun killings. More than a quarter of Illinois' slim 154 orders came from one suburban county that makes up just 7% of the state's population. California had 3,197 orders but was working through a backlog of three times that number of people barred from owning guns under a variety of measures who had not yet surrendered them.

There are nearly 2,000 counties that oppose gun reform laws. "These kinds of laws call into question the right to protect one's property and life," argued former Arizona Sheriff Richard Mack, head of the pro-gun Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association.

Red flag laws, most of which came into effect over the last four years, allow police officers who believe gun owners are an imminent danger to themselves or others to petition a judge to order firearms surrendered or, barring that, seized for an "emergency". period, typically two weeks. The judge can then convene a court hearing in which petitioners present evidence to withhold weapons longer, typically a year, and the owner can argue against that.

An emergency order is followed by a longer one as a single order if they involve the same gun owner. In rare cases where no one asked for an emergency order and only a longer one was requested and granted, that also counts as a single order. Several states reported incomplete data.

Some states also allow family members of gun owners, school officials, work colleagues or doctors to ask for gun removal orders, also known as extreme risk protection orders. All petitions in several states were initiated by the police possibly because, as several surveys have shown few people outside law enforcement is even aware the laws exist.