Michigan isn’t on the six-state list that’s banned red flag gun orders. Not yet. But the legislative wave moving through state capitals right now is fast enough that Lansing can’t afford to treat it as someone else’s problem.
Six states have outlawed extreme risk protection orders, the legal mechanism that lets police or family members petition a judge to temporarily remove firearms from someone deemed an imminent danger to themselves or others. Three more states are weighing similar bans in 2026. What’s changed in the newer versions isn’t just the prohibition itself. It’s the teeth. Officials who attempt to enforce these orders in some jurisdictions now face fines or criminal charges. That’s a different kind of law than symbolic defiance. That’s a state government threatening its own officers for doing their jobs.
These orders go by a few names: ERPOs, red flag laws, extreme risk laws. They’re active in 22 states. Courts issue them on a temporary basis, and research tracked by Everytown for Gun Safety credits them most consistently with preventing suicides, which make up the majority of gun deaths in the United States every year.
Texas banned ERPOs in 2025. Christina Delgado, a Santa Fe resident who became a gun reform advocate after the May 18, 2018, shooting at Santa Fe High School, testified directly against the prohibition. The attack, carried out by a teenager who used his father’s guns to kill eight students and two teachers, was exactly the kind of crisis an ERPO is designed to interrupt. Delgado told the Texas Senate committee considering the ban that the outcome might have been different with that legal remedy available. “Had timely and appropriate intervention and support been provided to that family, a different outcome may have been achieved,” she said. They passed the ban anyway.
Oklahoma was first. Its 2020 law didn’t just prohibit ERPOs. It blocked cities and counties from enacting them independently or taking outside funding to carry them out. West Virginia and Tennessee followed with similar restrictions. Those early laws were blunt instruments but relatively contained. The penalties were limited. The newer generation of bans is something else, and the Michigan Advance has covered how the shift toward criminal liability for enforcement represents a meaningful escalation in the legal stakes.
Gun violence researchers don’t use the word “escalation” loosely here.
“We’re very concerned about the trajectory of anti-ERPO laws, both in the rise in the number of states passing these laws and the escalations within the laws themselves,” said Emily Walsh, a law and policy adviser at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions. Walsh and others tracking the issue say the spreading patchwork of conflicting state rules creates real problems for courts, law enforcement, and families, especially in cases that cross state lines or bump up against federal authority. That’s not hypothetical. It’s already happening.
The political backstory here is worth keeping in mind. ERPOs weren’t always a partisan fault line. The National Rifle Association backed federal funding for the orders in 2018. That same year, President Donald Trump voiced support in the aftermath of the Parkland shooting. The massacre accelerated ERPO adoption nationwide, with states across the political spectrum passing versions of the law through 2023. That bipartisan window has clearly closed.
What’s left is a growing divide between states that are expanding access to these legal tools and states that are criminalizing them. Michigan sits on one side of that divide for now. The question is whether Lansing watches passively as the map shifts around it, or whether lawmakers take the momentum seriously enough to get ahead of it.
The Santa Fe shooting happened on May 18, 2018. Eight years later, a survivor advocate is still standing in front of state legislatures arguing that the law could have saved those kids. She testified. It didn’t matter.
