This article examines the application and effectiveness of a 2006 Indiana law designed to prevent gun violence by authorizing police officers to separate firearms from persons who present imminent or future risk of injury to self or others, or display a propensity for violent or emotionally unstable conduct. A court hearing is held to determine ongoing risk in these cases; a judge decides whether to return the seized firearms or retain them for up to five years. The study examines the frequency of criminal arrest as well as suicide outcomes for 395 gun-removal actions in Indiana. Fourteen individuals (3.5%) died from suicide, seven (1.8%) using a firearm. The study population’s annualized suicide rate was about 31 times higher than that of the general adult population in Indiana, demonstrating that the law is being applied to a population genuinely at high risk. By extrapolating information on the case fatality rate for different methods of suicide, we calculated that one life was saved for every 10 gun-removal actions, similar to results of a previous study in Connecticut. Perspectives from key stakeholders are also presented along with implications for gun policy reform and implementation.
Advocates of gun violence prevention in the United States have focused attention on point-of-sale background checks as a key to preventing risky individuals from accessing firearms.1 Many people who pose a high risk of harming others or themselves, however, have no gun-disqualifying record under current laws and would pass a background check. Many others at risk are legally disqualified but still obtain firearms in private transactions that avoid a background check. Extreme risk protection orders could help overcome some of the shortcomings of background checks in keeping guns out of the wrong hands.2 Extreme risk protection order laws authorize local police with a civil court order to temporarily remove firearms from people who demonstrate a high risk of inflicting harm to self or others. Thirteen states (i.e., California,3 Connecticut,4 Delaware,5 Florida,6 Illinois,7 Indiana,8 Maryland,9 Massachusetts,10 New Jersey,11 Oregon,12 Rhode Island,13 Vermont,14 and Washington15) and the District of Columbia16 have enacted laws that authorize risk-based, time-limited gun removal through a civil court procedure. Several other states are considering bills with similar provisions. There is limited research on how extreme risk protection orders work in different jurisdictions and whether they save lives. This article extends the evidence from our recent evaluation of Connecticut’s risk-warrant law to examine the implementation and effectiveness of a similar regime in Indiana, the second state to enact such a law in the United States.
Our previous study in Connecticut, a record-based follow-up analysis of 762 gun-removal cases, found evidence that the law was effective in preventing suicides; we estimated that for every 10 to 20 gun-removal actions, one life was saved.17 Another research group recently reported results of a quasi-experimental study of state population-level death rates that suggests that gun-removal laws in both Connecticut and Indiana have reduced suicide and homicide rates in those states.18 An earlier study described certain aspects of the population subjected to gun seizure in Marion County, Indiana, but did not examine subsequent violence-related outcomes.19 The current study adds to this literature by examining arrest and criminal conviction as well as suicide outcomes, at the individual level, in the Indiana gun-seizure population.
By design, risk-based gun removal is a public health intervention and not a criminal justice action; a court’s decision to retain a person’s firearms is made in a civil proceeding and is not intended to be criminalizing. Thus, an important empirical question in evaluating these laws is whether gun seizure in practice is associated with criminal arrest, either in conjunction with the confiscation incident itself or by selectively targeting people whose risky behavior makes them more likely to be involved with the criminal justice system. A second question is whether, and to what extent, people whose guns are removed under the aegis of such laws avoid future criminal activity involving guns and are prevented from gun suicide. We take up these questions.
In what follows, we analyze patterns in matched arrest and death records for 395 gun-seizure subjects in Indiana to build further evidence regarding the implementation and effectiveness of risk-based firearm-removal policies. Comparing the year before and the year after gun seizure, we determine what proportion of subjects were arrested and convicted for crimes committed with and without guns; the frequency of arrest in conjunction with the gun seizure event itself, and whether these arrests resulted in conviction; and how many of these individuals eventually died of suicide, using which methods, and how many more might have died had their guns not been removed. In general, we examine how the law has worked, and how well, in a state with fewer gun control laws and far more guns and gun deaths than Connecticut.20,21 Beyond the quantitative empirical analysis, we explore barriers and challenges to implementing the law and its perceived fairness and success in open-ended narrative interviews with key stakeholders and actors in Indiana’s gun-removal process.
