How a Federal Bill Supporting Red-Flag Gun Laws Could More Effectively Reduce Suicides

A bipartisan red-flag gun bill in the U.S. Senate should be amended to allow mental health providers to petition courts for temporary gun removal from their patients at imminent risk of harming themselves or others.

So argues Cleveland Clinic psychiatrist Brian Barnett, MD, in recent commentaries in the Wall Street Journal and on the healthcare website STAT. Dr. Barnett contends that including mental health providers among those who may petition for temporary gun removal — along with the at-risk individual’s family members and law enforcement officers — would increase the lives the bill would save from gun violence, particularly from suicide.

The federal legislation, known as the Extreme Risk Protection Order and Violence Prevention Act and introduced in the Senate earlier this year, would use federal grants to incentivize states to implement red-flag laws, as 17 states have already done.

Such laws permit the temporary removal of guns from people deemed to be at serious risk of harming themselves or others. To qualify for funding under the federal bill, states would have to permit law enforcement personnel or family members of the at-risk individual to request a court hearing to determine whether temporary gun removal is justified.

Dr. Barnett applauds the proposed bill, which he believes would reduce U.S. gun deaths. But his commentaries point out two key points surrounding the legislation:

• Although prompted in large part by the rise in mass shootings, the bill’s biggest benefit would lie in reducing suicides, as U.S. gun deaths from suicide dwarf those from mass shootings.
• The legislation could be far more effective if its provisions for state funding included mental health professionals among the parties who may petition courts for gun removal.

He writes that evidence shows red-flag gun laws at the state level reduce suicide rates from firearms, with one suicide avoided for every 10 to 20 gun removals. He adds that mental health providers are uniquely well positioned to initiate temporary gun removal in situations that may lead to suicide.

In his piece on STAT, Dr. Barnett notes that he often treats patients who have been hospitalized for a suicide attempt or suicidal ideation. He writes that after these patients are stabilized but before they are discharged back to their communities, “I must figure out what to do when such individuals have one or more guns at home, since the rate of suicide following discharge is 30 times higher than in the general population.”

Because health privacy laws in many states prohibit mental health providers from informing law enforcement about patients who may pose threats to themselves, “[t]he only option for providers when discharging these patients,” he writes, “is to ask family members to take away their guns and encourage them to inform local police about the situation.”

Including mental health providers as petitioners could fill at least two important gaps, he argues:

• They treat many patients who are estranged from family and unknown to law enforcement.
• They don’t have to grapple with the emotional conflict of potentially angering a loved one that family members often face when petitioning for gun removal.

Dr. Barnett, who notes that he is a gun owner raised in rural Appalachia, concludes by arguing that including mental health providers as petitioners would “greatly magnify” the federal bill’s impact, particularly in saving lives from suicide. “Don’t leave us out if you want effective, common-sense gun control,” he writes on STAT.

Dr. Barnett’s Wall Street Journal commentary is available here (subscription required). His STAT commentary is available for free here.