ME’s red flag law wants to cut risk without stigmatizing mental illness
When Maine voters approved a red flag gun law this fall, the change marked more than a shift in firearms policy. For mental health professionals, it signals a move away from a framework that explicitly tied firearm removal to psychiatric evaluation and toward one focused solely on dangerousness.
Under Maine’s former “yellow flag” law, law enforcement was required to take an individual into protective custody and secure a mental health evaluation before a judge could order firearms removed. The new red flag law creates a parallel process, allowing family or household members, or law enforcement, to petition a court directly without requiring custody or a mental health assessment.
“The National Association of Social Workers Maine Chapter and the Psychiatric Association of Maine were very much in favor of the red flag law,” said Nacole Palmer, executive director of the Maine Gun Safety Coalition. “They felt that the yellow flag law, by requiring a mental health evaluation, unjustly and unduly equated violence with mental health issues.”
Palmer said this distinction was central to the law’s passage. “People who have mental health diagnoses are far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators,” she said. “And there are also people who are very dangerous who are perfectly sane and would pass any mental health evaluation.”
By removing the evaluation requirement, Palmer said the red flag law avoids reinforcing the idea that mental illness itself is synonymous with violence. “[With the red flag law], the only criterion is dangerousness, which is what it should be,” she said.
Palmer emphasized that the red flag law does not place new obligations on clinicians, but said some may choose to become more familiar with how the process works to better guide families during moments of crisis.
“I believe that there are clinicians who are now going to become educated about how to use the red flag law so that they can educate families,” she said. In situations where families cannot or will not engage, Palmer added that clinicians could contact law enforcement directly to share their concerns, allowing law enforcement to initiate the red flag process.
However, Palmer stressed that the red flag process itself is “completely divorced from the mental health system.” There is no requirement that an individual receive treatment, nor is access to care a prerequisite for restoring firearm rights.
Still, Palmer described disarming someone if they are experiencing a crisis as a critical first step. She noted that, while the person is disarmed, they and their families can work with practitioners to access any care needed. In her words, “being disarmed is the most important lifesaving element of the entire process.
Looking ahead, Palmer said success might be difficult to measure quickly. “I don’t know that we will see a shift in suicide or homicide numbers in one year, but we could,” she said. Even stabilizing rates, she added, would be meaningful. “The real proof will be in lives saved, and those are lives we often cannot count or name.”
As Maine becomes the fifth of six New England states with a red flag law, Palmer said she hopes clinicians see it not as a mental health mandate, but as a tool to reduce risk without reinforcing stigma.
“When you pass a law like this, it’s about prevention,” she said, noting that true prevention means intervening before a situation escalates and its full impact is felt.