This is a retrospective. The video above and the bill it covers date back several years, to when Senator Dianne Feinstein introduced the Extreme Risk Protection Order Act, her attempt to take California’s red flag system national. Feinstein has since passed away and that particular bill never became law, but I’m keeping this post up because the idea it contained never really dies. It just gets reintroduced with new sponsors. Check the current legislative status before assuming anything here still applies.
I’m Lance Rankin, a gun dealer and gunsmith in Roanoke, Texas, and here’s why this old bill is still worth understanding.
What the bill proposed
The Extreme Risk Protection Order Act was modeled on California’s law, which that state calls a Gun Violence Restraining Order. The mechanics: a petitioner asks a court for an order that both prohibits a named person from possessing or purchasing firearms and requires him to surrender the ones he has. The petition has to lay out the justifying facts under oath.
The list of who could petition was the striking part. Law enforcement, sure. But also family members, household members, and, following California’s 2020 expansion, co-workers, employers, and in some post-secondary settings, teachers. That’s a wide circle of people empowered to start a firearm seizure, and not all of them will know you well or wish you well.
The ex parte problem
Feinstein said these orders “save lives by keeping guns out of the hands of people who are a threat to themselves or others” and that California’s version respected due process. The critics’ answer, which I share, centered on the ex parte mechanism: a court could issue the order without the subject present, without notice, and without him having heard a word of the case against him. The guns get seized first, and the burden then falls on the individual to prove he isn’t dangerous in order to get them back.
That’s the constitutional rub with every red flag law, then and now. It inverts the normal order of things. We don’t usually suspend a person’s rights based on an unanswered accusation and make him litigate his way back to them.
The Isla Vista argument
Feinstein pointed to the 2014 Isla Vista killings as the origin of California’s law. That attack was a genuine horror, and people who were students at UC Santa Barbara then carry it with them still. But the commentator in the video, who has a personal connection to that event, makes a point that deserves a fair hearing: the Isla Vista killer had multiple contacts with law enforcement before the attack, and he killed with more than firearms. A red flag law wouldn’t have stopped him. When a tragedy is used to sell legislation that wouldn’t have prevented it, skepticism is the honest response.
Why this still matters
The Feinstein bill died, but the model won. State red flag laws kept spreading after this bill was introduced, and I covered a recent example in my post on Maine’s new red flag law, which stripped out even the safeguards its old system had. Federal proposals to fund or mandate these systems resurface regularly. The names on the bills change. The ex parte mechanism, the broad petitioner lists, and the burden-shifting stay remarkably consistent.
So the takeaway from this bit of history is simple: read these bills when they appear, look for who can petition and whether the accused gets heard before the seizure, and tell your representatives what you think while it’s still a bill. Texas doesn’t have a red flag law as of this writing. Keeping it that way requires paying attention.
Lance Rankin is the owner and Chief Gunsmith of Western Sport, a family-run Type 07 FFL and Class 3/SOT dealer in Roanoke, Texas, serving shooters since 2007. Born and raised in Texas with over 50 years of experience handling firearms, Lance purchased Western Sport in 2017 and turned his lifelong passion into his profession. He specializes in AR-15 and AR-10 platform rifles, manufactures Western Sport’s own AR-15 line under the Rankin Industries brand, and runs the shop’s in-house Cerakote coating operation. When he’s not behind the counter or the workbench, you’ll find him on his ranch deep into the night, hunting coyotes with an AR-15 and thermal optics. Lance holds an MBA and personally shoots and tests the products Western Sport sells.
