Michigan isn’t one of the six states that have banned red flag gun orders, but a national trend now reshaping how law enforcement handles firearms in crisis situations is moving fast enough that Lansing should be paying attention.

Six states have outlawed so-called extreme risk protection orders, which allow police and family members to ask a judge to temporarily remove guns from someone in imminent danger of hurting themselves or others. Three more states are weighing similar bans in 2026. In some of the newer laws, officials who try to enforce the orders face fines or criminal charges. That escalation from symbolic prohibition to active punishment marks a shift that gun violence researchers say is unlike anything they’ve tracked before.

The orders, widely called ERPOs or red flag laws, are used across 22 states. Courts issue them on a temporary basis, and they’re credited most often with preventing suicides, which account for the majority of gun deaths in the United States each year.

Texas banned ERPOs last year. A resident of Santa Fe, Christina Delgado, became a gun reform advocate after the May 18, 2018, shooting at Santa Fe High School, where a teenager used his father’s guns to kill eight students and two teachers. Delgado told the Texas Senate committee weighing the ban that the attack might have been stopped with the kind of legal remedy lawmakers were moving to prohibit. “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 the first to act, banning ERPOs in 2020 with a law that blocked cities and counties from enacting the orders or taking funding to carry them out. West Virginia and Tennessee followed. Those early bans carried limited penalties. The newer wave, as the Michigan Advance has covered, goes further, attaching criminal liability to enforcement itself.

That’s the part that worries researchers.

“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 other advocates warn the growing patchwork of conflicting state rules leaves courts, police, and families without clear guidance, especially in cases that cross state lines or involve federal law.

The political history here is complicated. ERPOs once had broad Republican support. The National Rifle Association backed federal funding for the orders in 2018. President Donald Trump expressed support after the Parkland shooting that same year. The Parkland massacre accelerated ERPO adoption nationally, and states from both parties passed the measures in the years following.

That bipartisan window has closed.

The states now banning the orders are acting on Second Amendment grounds, arguing that even temporary firearm removal without a criminal conviction violates constitutional rights. Proponents of ERPOs counter that the orders come with judicial review, that they’re temporary by design, and that the data on suicide prevention alone justifies keeping the tool available.

What doesn’t get said enough in these legislative debates is that ERPOs aren’t primarily used in mass shooting scenarios. Judges issue them most often when a family member or officer flags someone in a mental health crisis who has access to firearms and has expressed intent to hurt themselves. That’s the core use case. It’s quiet, it doesn’t make the news, and according to research tracked by Everytown for Gun Safety, the orders have been associated with measurable reductions in firearm suicide rates in states that use them consistently.

Michigan passed its own ERPO law in 2023, one of the more recent states to do so. The law allows courts to issue the orders and carries requirements for how law enforcement petitions are handled. Nothing in the current legislative session in Lansing has targeted the law, but the national momentum is clear, and the 2026 election cycle is already producing candidates in statehouse races who’ve made rolling back gun restrictions a central platform point.

Walsh’s concern about “escalations within the laws themselves” is worth sitting with. The shift from banning ERPOs to punishing the officials who enforce them represents a meaningful change in how these state-level fights are playing out, and Michigan’s 2023 law exists in a national environment that looks increasingly hostile to the legal framework behind it.