It can take a would-be gunman threatening fellow cops, but the law is being used by sheriffs who declared their jurisdiction “2nd Amendment sanctuaries”:
Dolores County Sheriff Don Wilson never expected to use Colorado’s red flag law when it was passed in 2019. He thought the law made it too easy to take a person’s guns away.
The statute allows law enforcement officers or private citizens to petition a county court to confiscate firearms temporarily from people who pose an imminent threat to themselves or others.
“All it is is one person’s word against another,” said Wilson, whose sparsely populated territory is in southwestern Colorado near the Utah border.
Then, in August 2020, a Dove Creek man threatening to kill his neighbors and himself pointed a semiautomatic rifle at a deputy. Wilson petitioned for and was granted an extreme risk protection order to remove the man’s weapons, though the sheriff said his mistrust of the red flag law has not changed.
“If a gentleman pulls a rifle on my deputy and then comes and threatens to shoot up my courthouse and kill me, kill the judges, and kill the district attorney,” Wilson said, “I’ve got a problem with that person having a gun.”
Well, it’s better than nothing, I guess.
You can read the entire article here.
