A Florida School Received a Threat. Did a Red Flag Law Prevent a Shooting?

The requests were granted. But the results of the search were not what the detective expected.

Nationally, more than 20,000 petitions for extreme risk protection orders were filed from 1999 to 2021, according to data collected by Everytown for Gun Safety, an advocacy group. A vast majority of those petitions — more than 18,600 — were filed after the 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, a Fort Lauderdale suburb.

Florida — a state controlled by Republicans, who have traditionally been loath to impose restrictions on gun ownership — enacted its red flag law in response to that shooting. Its courts handled more than 8,100 petitions for risk protection orders from 2018 to 2021, according to Everytown.

In Fort Lauderdale, the memory of Parkland is strong.

Detective Chris Carita, who has a master’s degree in public health from Johns Hopkins, trains fellow officers in how to use the state’s red flag law. On a recent Wednesday, he could be found in a bare-bones classroom with seven new officers.

“Law enforcement is a gun culture; the thought of taking someone’s firearms away may not sit well with us, right?” he told them. “That really is a problem for some of us, and so it’s important to understand the legal framework for these laws so that you can be comfortable and understand why it’s being used and how it’s being used.”

There are roughly 17,500 state and local law enforcement agencies in the United States; about 85 percent of them have fewer than 50 full-time officers. Many are unable to provide the kind of training available in Fort Lauderdale, said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a nonprofit in Washington.

Even in bigger police departments, getting officers accustomed to using the orders can be a challenge. In Fairfax County, Va., Chief Kevin Davis has assigned a single officer to manage all emergency substantial risk orders, as they are called in that state. His department obtained 11 orders in 2020 and 26 in 2021. Last year, the number jumped to 80.

White House Says It Does Not Keep Visitor Logs at Biden’s Delaware Home

WASHINGTON — White House officials said on Monday that there are no visitor logs that keep track of who comes and goes from President Biden’s personal residence in Wilmington, Del., where six classified documents were discovered in recent days. A top House Republican demanded on Sunday that the White House turn over visitor logs for […]

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A Colossal Off-Year Election in Wisconsin

Lauren Justice for The New York Times Conservatives have controlled the court since 2008. Though the court upheld Wisconsin’s 2020 election results, last year it ruled drop boxes illegal, allowed a purge of the voter rolls to take place and installed redistricting maps drawn by Republican legislators despite the objections of Gov. Tony Evers, a […]

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A Year After a Fiery Voting Rights Speech, Biden Delivers a More Muted Address

Mr. Warnock, however, said in his victory speech that night that he won despite voter suppression. Stories of Georgia voters waiting for hours in long lines that wrapped around buildings, he said, were “most certainly not a sign voter suppression does not exist.” Early figures indicated that nationally the Black share of the electorate in […]

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