Bipartisan bill would allow guns to be taken from people judged to be at risk of hurting themselves or others; opposition voiced

• A concerned community member brings evidence about potential harm to one’s self or others, and law enforcement can then file a legal petition to remove that person’s guns temporarily.
• A judge will “approve or deny the temporary transfer petition after conducting a strict, independent judicial review.”
• If the judge grants the petition, guns belonging to the person in question are handed over temporarily to law enforcement or “a trusted person outside of the owner’s household.”
• A hearing is then held to determine next steps, which may include “identifying opportunities for important support services for the individual in crisis.”
• Once the person is not in crisis, the guns are returned.

It’s unclear what Kentucky’s specific legislation would look like. Westerfield is working on two draft options, he said, which may “change a lot.”

“It gives the respondent the option,” Westerfield explained. “You can have a hearing within X number of hours, near immediate. Keep your guns until then, not keep your guns — that’s up in the air. Or, you can give us your guns now, and we’ll have a hearing in a week.”

“The respondent has the burden of defending that in that particular case,” he said. Timelines are adjustable, he added, since there may be practical problems getting a hearing so soon.

“If you tell someone that you fear has … a mental-health issue, or a trauma, something that you’re worried they’re about to break, and then you don’t act with some near immediacy, you might actually provoke the act,” he said. “That’s the concern. And you’re balancing that risk and that concern with the Second Amendment right that they have and no one disputes that they have.”

The second version of Westerfield’s proposal includes an ex parte hearing, in which the judge would hold without the gun owner present.

This version “still has the law-enforcement steps,” Westerfield said. “So, it’s not just anybody on a whim asking for a judge to get your guns. There has to be some articulated, specific reasons” for the move.

Westerfield said whatever version of bill he files will be “meaningfully different in a couple of ways” from so-called “red flag” laws. “First of all, the timelines are shorter,” he said. “The burden of proof is going to be higher.”

Rep. Savannah Maddox, R-Dry Ridge, reiterated her “longstanding opposition to this proposal” and concern that it has the potential to violate constitutional rights such as due process and protection against government search and seizure.

“When law enforcement comes to seize the firearms, do they automatically know where to find them?” she asked. “Are they told where to find them? Do they dig through the entirety of the house?” She said this could lead to a registry of some kind.

Westerfield said he isn’t proposing any kind of “search” or “ransacking of a home,” and “I think it’s on the honor system.”

Maddox said, “We must fervently resist any effort to pass gun-control legislation. And we must be serious about analyzing the data and putting a stop to these ineffective policies that put innocent citizens in harm’s way. And we have to encourage privately held entities to do the same.”

Whitney Austin, who co-founded Whitney Strong after surviving a mass shooting in Cincinnati, told the panel that “we know that misuse of firearms is not tied to law-abiding, mentally well gun owners. CARR was not created for them. CARR was created to surgically identify the small subset of gun owners, including those in lawful possession of a firearm, who are on the brink of misusing their guns to harm themselves or others.”

Sheila Schuster, a licensed psychologist and executive director of the Kentucky Mental Health Coalition, told the Lantern that she supports CARR, but “The truth is that people with a mental illness are 10 times more likely to be a victim of violent crime than to be a perpetrator.”

She explained, “At the point that someone commits an act, particularly hurting someone else, it’s very likely that they are suffering with rage, with paranoia and in terms of feeling like somebody has done something to wrong them and they’re gonna (get) revenge.”

Schuster added that suicidal people taking their lives happen at an “astronomical percentage higher if there’s a gun within reach than if there’s not.”

In a written statement to the lawmakers, Schuster said: “As a psychologist and mental health advocate, I am painfully aware of the stigma of mental illness and the confusion in the minds of many people that mass shooters are undoubtedly mentally ill. This is not the case and the CARR legislation does a very good job of not adding to nor reinforcing that false narrative.”

Kentucky has a law that requires mental-health professionals to warn potential victims if a client makes a threat to someone’s safety. Kentuckians who are mentally ill and at risk of harming themselves or others and can benefit from treatment can be involuntarily hospitalized if that’s the least restrictive mode of treatment available.

Support at the committee meeting came mainly from Jefferson County. Westerfield’s intended co-sponsor is Sen. David Yates, D-Louisville. Rep. Pamela Stevenson of Louisville, this year’s Democratic candidate for attorney general, endorsed CARR, saying “with every right there’s a responsibility. . . . We’ve got to be brave enough to not let people just die nilly-willy.”