Maine Gun Owners Leery of Rising Red Flag Campaign Six Months Before November Referendum

While Maine already has in place a Yellow Flag law that includes a due process element before authorities may strip of gun owner of their firearm, anti-gun activists are now gearing up for a campaign to support passage of a more restrictive Red Flag law.

Otherwise known as an “Extreme Risk Protective Order” (ERPO), a Red Flag law empowers law enforcement to disarm an individual who family members, friends or others say poses a risk to themselves or the community at large. 21 states currently have Red Flag, or ERPO, laws in effect.

Prior to the October 2023 mass shooting in Lewiston, law enforcement had attempted to interview the shooter, Robert Card, at his residence but were unsuccessful. That event helped spur the call for stricter ERPO provisions in Maine, despite strong resistance from citizens across the state.

With nearly half of its households legally owning at least one firearm, Maine has the second-highest rate of gun ownership in America and one of the lowest rates of shootings or gun violence.

Gun control advocates in Maine filed 80,000 signatures calling for a Red Flag law with the Secretary of State’s office earlier this year, which last month it certified, guaranteeing a question eliciting up or down support on the measure will be on the ballot this November. Previous efforts to pass Red Flag laws through the legislature have failed on multiple occasions.

In 2020, the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine (SAM) worked together with Governor Janet Mills (D) to pass a unique Yellow Flag law, which is intended to remove firearms from individuals who might use it to harm themselves or others. This compromise move acknowledges the danger posed by mentally ill persons having access to a gun, but also requires an evaluation of mental illness before authorities can act.

[RELATED: ‘Red Flag’ Laws Wrong for Maine, Bipartisan Legislators and Sportsman’s Alliance Agree]

In mid-February, SAM held a conference together with Maine State Police and others to provide an update on the Yellow Flag law’s implementation. Since the Lewiston shooting, law enforcement said there, Yellow Flag has been invoked at least 600 times, successfully de-escalating potentially tragic situations, experts then said.

Since then, the Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows in early March certified 74,888 of the signatures the Maine Gun Safety Coalition submitted, meeting the 67,000 signature threshold (10 percent of votes cast in the last gubernatorial election) needed to get a referendum question on this year’s ballot.

The first version of the language the SoS’ office proposed reads:

“Do you want to allow courts to temporarily bar a person from having dangerous weapons if law enforcement, family, or household members show that the person poses a significant danger?”

The public comment period for that proposed language ends this week, after which point the SoS’ office will finalize the ballot wording in a way that, theoretically, takes outside views into account. Recent reporting by The Maine Wire indicates that under Bellows’ leadership, phraseology of such questions has come with implied bias.

[RELATED: Will Shenna Bellows Thwart the Will of Mainers with Tricky Wording? How Her Effort to Quash Voter ID Plays Out in November Will Ultimately Tell]

Two days before Bellows notified the legislature of that the ballot question had been certified, her office proposed bill language that mirrors that of states that have passed Red Flag laws.

“Red flag laws are a function of ‘big government’, take law enforcement out of the equation and bypass critical due process and civil rights protections of the accused,” State Rep. Donald Ardell (R-Monticello), himself a licensed gun dealer and former federal law enforcement officer, told The Maine Wire when Bellows reported to the Maine Legislature that the Red Flag signatures had been certified.

Rep. Ardell is not alone in his skepticism about Red Flag laws.

“It’s commonly understood that Yellow Flag laws are about people, while Red Flag laws are about guns,” Gun Owners of Maine President Laura Whitcomb told The Maine Wire on Tuesday. Her group will be working to raise awareness among Maine voters in the coming months about the implication this ballot question, which has yet to be assigned a number, would have for law-abiding gun owners.

“80 percent of the people who have been ERPO’d in other states have never committed a crime,” Whitcomb pointed out. Also, she said, the statistics that boosters of Red Flag laws, such as the Michael Bloomberg-funded Everytown for Gun Safety use to support their arguments that restrictive ERPO measures are necessary may be skewed.

States that have ERPOs in effect have seen a reduction in suicides by one-in-seventeen, the national antigun group claims. This ratio is down from an earlier claim of one-in-ten, she said, and is itself extrapolated. Whether or not someone truly committed to killing themselves would be deterred by being dispossessed of their firearm is almost impossible to measure, she agreed.

Yet gun rights groups in Maine expect outside money to come pouring into the state over the coming months to bolster a Red Flag referendum question with advertising and a well-resourced ground operation. On past measures, including one to mandate a universal background check, anti-gun proponents outspent gun rights groups by between five and six to one ratios.

[RELATED: Billionaire Michael Bloomberg Selects Maine as Next Target for Gun Control Agenda]

“Bloomberg’s Red Flag referendum is just the latest political temper tantrum by extreme progressive groups in Maine. Lawmakers know that Red Flag laws are not a good fit for Maine, that is why year after year, a bipartisan coalition has shot down this California-style gun confiscation scheme,” NRA Executive Director John Commerford told The Maine Wire.

“After once again failing to gain any traction in Augusta,  gun control groups are now attempting to utilize their deep pockets to circumvent the legislative process and trick Mainers into voting their rights away. Luckily for Mainers, the NRA, Gun Owners of Maine, and the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine are unified in their fight to stop this dangerous agenda,” he added.

In the state of Florida, ERPOs have been invoked against over 450 children, some as young as eight or nine years old, reporting there indicates. In Michigan, Whitcomb observed, the trend of issuing ERPOs against kids is also surging, which is counterintuitive given that children cannot legally possess firearms.

“In 97 percent of cases in Florida where ERPOs have been requested, they have been granted,” she said.

The Maine Wire reached out to the Maine Gun Safety Coalition for comment on this article, but they did not immediately respond. We will continue to track the campaign both for and against the Red Law ballot initiative in the months ahead.