To combat gun violence, Minnesota law enforcement turns to ‘red flag’ law

One day in early February, a Bloomington police detective got a call that a man had told his family that he planned to shoot himself in the head. 

The detective, Matt Jones, found the man at his home where, according to a Minnesota District Court filing, he “admitted to officers that he was planning to buy a gun today and always believed that when he dies it will be by his own hand.”

Jones then took a step that is becoming increasingly common among officers in Hennepin County and, to an extent, throughout the state: He persuaded a state court judge to stop the person with suicidal thoughts from owning or buying a gun. 

Jones used the Extreme Risk Protection Order Act (informally known as the red flag law or ERPO), a remnant of the DFL’s 2023 legislative smorgasbord, which went into effect at the start of 2024.

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Minnesota Judicial Branch data shows that more ERPO petitions were filed throughout the state in the first seven months of this year than in all of 2024. Also, of the 284 petitions filed through Aug. 1, just 14, or 5%, were rejected by a state court judge.

Gun control is a center-stage issue following the assassination of DFL House leader Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark Hortman. 

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Gov. Tim Walz is open to metal detectors at the Capitol. Meanwhile, the state Supreme Court has cast doubt on the legitimacy of a state statute banning certain guns without serial numbers. And a report released this month found that Minnesota gun deaths climbed in 2024 from a year prior. 

Amid this scrutiny, ERPO has quietly gained steam as a tool to prevent further tragedies.

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“If you read any of the Hennepin County petitions, you will be thankful this law exists,” said Rana Alexander, assistant attorney at Hennepin County. “I feel confident that they have saved some lives.”

Here is what we know about ERPO’s impact on public safety and taking away Minnesotans’ guns. 

How does this law work?

If you think someone in your family or household poses a threat to themselves or someone else, you can petition a judge to take away that person’s gun and stop them from buying a new firearm. You can also ask law enforcement to write the petition on your behalf. 

There is an emergency petition for taking away someone’s access to guns for two weeks, and there’s a petition to remove access for a year. For the latter, the defendant can hire a lawyer and argue why they should still be able to possess a firearm. 

In the Bloomington example, the city’s police department petitioned for both a two-week and year-long order. Within an hour of the filing, Judge Charlene Hatcher granted the emergency request, checking a box stating that “respondent has made prior suicide attempts or has a serious mental illness.”

Hatcher scheduled a Zoom court hearing for 10 days later on the year-long ban. At that hearing, the respondent did not mount a legal defense, and a different judge, Theresa Couri, granted the 12-month petition. 

The Bloomington case tracks with statewide implementation. Of the 284 cases reviewed, 233, or 82% of petitions were filed by law enforcement as opposed to a concerned member of a family or household. And in 211, or 74%, of these cases, an emergency order and a one-year ban order were granted. 

Minnesota is the 21st state to adopt an ERPO law, according to the Center for Gun Violence Solutions at Johns Hopkins University.

When it comes to the number of cases filed, the fact that police officers or sheriffs bring most of the petitions, and that the filings mostly succeed in court, “Minnesota is pretty average compared to other states,” said Spencer Cantrell, an assistant scientist at Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Where things get a lot more interesting is the accelerating case rate. 

Why are the number of petitions on the rise?

Because there is growing buy-in from police. 

Last year, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty hired Alexander away from Standpoint, a St. Paul-based social services group for survivors of domestic violence. With Hennepin County, Alexander has one job: Advise police officers on the filing of ERPO petitions. 

“The law was so new that nobody knew about it,” Alexander said. 

Alexander does “a lot of training and technical assistance. I’m speaking with officers who might say, ‘Hey, let me run this situation past you’ or ‘I’m trying to e-file the ERPO. Help me figure it out.’”

In Hennepin County, there were 33 ERPO petitions filed in 2024. In the first seven months of 2025, there have been 39 filings. 

Recently, Moriarty made a second hire, Bridget Liverca, to focus on cases that domestic violence survivors and other private individuals want to file. Alexander, meanwhile, continues to work with police. 

According to Rick Hodson, general counsel for the Minnesota Sheriffs Association, there was similar training in Blue Earth and Waseca counties, the counties with the highest per capita ERPO petitions. 

Hodson met on Zoom and in person with county law enforcement, “providing a blow-by-blow in how the process works for the retrieval and transfer of weapons.” 

To be clear, there is not ERPO enthusiasm throughout the state. In 39 of Minnesota’s 87 counties, not a single petition has been filed. 

But law enforcement’s broader concerns about the law have not come to pass. 

One worry had been that, unlike the issuing of many warrants, the respondent in an ERPO petition knows ahead of time police are paying a visit. 

“If you are going to a farm and taking away a bunch of guns from a long driveway, there’s the threat of an ambush,” said James Stuart, executive director of the Minnesota Sheriff’s Association. 

But the sheriff’s association reports not a single safety incident stemming from ERPO law enforcement. 

What do gun owners think? And what evidence is there that this works?

Gun owners worry the law short circuits due process. 

“Although the law was sold as a tool for families in crisis, in practice it’s predominantly police-driven and circumvents seizures that would have otherwise required a warrant,” said Rob Doar, senior vice president of government affairs for the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus. 

Also, it’s not clear in some cases why judges made the decisions they did. 

“Counties and reporters have described instances where removals allegedly averted harm, while sealed filings and records limit a comprehensive auditing of errors,” Doar said. 

Doar’s criticism drives at the dilemma of red flag gun laws. The statute’s logic depends on confiscating a weapon before a crime can occur. So how do we know the law makes a difference?

“It is hard to prove a negative,” said Cantrell at the Center for Gun Violence Solutions. 

Nonetheless, Cantrell and her Johns Hopkins colleagues have data showing that ERPO has worked in states that have had such laws on the books for decades. 

For example, a Duke University study estimated that Connecticut’s law was associated with a 14% drop in firearm suicides, while Indiana’s measure led to an 8% decline in suicides there. For every 10 to 20 ERPO issued in these two states, one suicide was prevented. 

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One startling nugget from the Duke study was that for each red flag operation, officers recovered, on average, seven guns from the subject. Hodson said that to his knowledge, many Minnesota ERPO cases have involved multiple guns. 

No one really knows how many guns there are in Minnesota. As of the end of 2024, the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension reported 408,356 valid gun permits. 

Maggiy Emery, executive director of gun control group Protect Minnesota, said the state is low in gun deaths compared to gun ownership levels. Still, Protect Minnesota released a study showing that in 2024, statewide gun deaths ticked up 6% to 564 total. 

“While we are low in terms of pro capita gun deaths, every day one or two people in Minnesota died because of guns,” Emery said. “Every single one of them was preventable.”

Editor’s note: This article first appeared on MinnPost and was written by Matthew Blake, state government reporter for MinnPost. It is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

MinnPost is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization committed to producing high-quality journalism for people who care about Minnesota.