Like your rights? Get involved. Johns Hopkins Extreme Risk Protection Order (Red Flag) Model Policy Guide
Like your rights? Get involved. Johns Hopkins Extreme Risk Protection Order (Red Flag) Model Policy Guide
The message is clear: get involved.
The video linked below is a Free State Colorado interview with Rep Armagost, half of the founding members for Colorado's Second Amendment Caucus.
You get to hear his history. You get some behind the scenes info about policy (and the ignorance of those making policy) coming from the legislature. It's worth a watch.
What I took from it is what I hope you take from the interview and this page: get involved.
If you value your second amendment rights, if you are a gun owner, if you are concerned about the erosion of your rights, your ability to defend yourself, start speaking up and getting involved.
I've written before about donating money, so I won't repeat that here. Let's talk about other ways to get involved.
Write or call your state rep and/or senator. Tell them your thoughts on guns and gun control.
Help educate others about guns. Maybe this looks like getting all the way involved and helping run a, for example, hunters safety or self defense class. Maybe this looks like simply talking about what gun safety and ownership means to you with someone who has no history with firearms. Maybe it means inviting that friend who has seemed curious about guns out with you to a range.
Write or call Rep Armagost and ask if you can help with the Second Amendment Caucus or associated work.
The point being that there are many people here in Colorado who might be swayed in their preconceptions about guns if they had a chance to learn more about them and to learn more about the people who use them or depend on them for safety. And as their preconceptions are changed, so too changes their desire for regulation.
Nothing about this is automatic, however. If this issue is important to you, get involved.
Johns Hopkins Extreme Risk Protection Order (Red Flag) Model Policy Guide
A recent newsletter from the Firearm Injury Prevention Initiative had a link to something I wanted to share.
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (it will probably not surprise you if you follow gun rights issues to note the Bloomberg in there) has gone all in on gun violence and public health.
The newsletter contained Hopkins' model policy guide on Extreme Risk Protection Orders, ERPO's or red flag orders.**
Given how gun control and gun regulation efforts have started to become nationalized with gun control groups and others shopping their laws around to states where they think they stand a good chance of having them pass, my guess is that some of the aspects you see in the model policy guide may make their way to our state.
Hell, some are already here.
Read up on it to get sense of what may be coming in the future and the rationale behind it. Below you'll find first a link to Hopkins' ERPO page and then below it a link to their model policy guide.
If you want to read up more on what Hopkins has in mind for gun violence and public health in general, click on the "Center for Gun Violence Solutions" in the top banner of the webpage.
**Just in case you hadn't heard the term, a model policy guide is something that a group will put out to explain their position on how best to craft and enforce a law or some other policy: "here's how you best do ERPO's in our opinion".
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