Maine Voters Overwhelmingly Approve ‘Red Flag’ Law Ballot Measure

Gun-control advocates in Maine have a brand new motive to have fun following the 2025 off-year election.

Pine-Tree State voters formally authorised poll Query 2 Tuesday night time by a margin of 62 % to 38 %, in response to the Related Press. The measure will increase the authority of state authorities to quickly confiscate firearms from folks deemed a menace to themselves or others, within the type of a so-called purple flag order.

“Do you wish to permit courts to quickly prohibit an individual from having harmful weapons if regulation enforcement, household, or family members present that the individual poses a major hazard of inflicting bodily harm to themselves or others?” the query offered to voters learn. “Sure,” received.

As the one direct gun coverage gauge of the 2025 cycle, the result delivers a significant victory for gun-control supporters in a state that has sometimes rejected stricter gun legal guidelines. It brings Maine consistent with twenty-one different states which have already adopted variations of a purple flag regulation and will encourage activists to try to increase that whole by way of the poll field in states the place they’ve failed to realize traction by laws.

Like most state purple flag legal guidelines, Query 2 will permit regulation enforcement officers, members of the family, or cohabitants to petition a courtroom for an Excessive Threat Safety Order (ERPO) towards somebody. A choose would then be required to carry a listening to on the petition inside 14 days of its being filed. If the courtroom finds, by a preponderance of the proof offered, that the person in query poses a danger, the choose can order the confiscation of any firearms they personal and prohibit the acquisition of any new firearms for as much as one yr.

The regulation additionally contains the choice of petitioning for an “emergency excessive danger safety order,” which permits a choose to order the fast confiscation of any weapons earlier than a listening to in the event that they consider an individual poses an “fast and important hazard.” A courtroom listening to would then happen inside 14 days of the seizure.

Not like most different states which have adopted a purple flag regulation, Maine already had an emergency weapons confiscation statute on the books previous to Query 2.

Its so-called yellow flag regulation, adopted in 2020 as a compromise between gun-rights advocates and purple flag regulation supporters, permits regulation enforcement to provoke proceedings aimed toward eradicating firearms from individuals believed to be a menace to themselves or others. Nevertheless it first requires them to take the individual into protecting custody and conduct an impartial psychological well being analysis. Solely then can they search a courtroom order to quickly confiscate the individual’s firearms.

The yellow flag strategy and its procedural hurdles, nonetheless, got here underneath hearth from gun-control advocates following the 2023 Lewiston mass capturing–although an impartial fee investigating the failures that preceded that assault later decided that police had ample alternative and consciousness to make use of the regulation in that case.

The passage of Query 2 signifies that authorities can now use each processes.