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Before diving into our March-April research recap, a few updates:
As most of you know, in 2013 the Consortium developed a policy now commonly known as the Extreme Risk Protection Order. Six years later, on March 26th, the Senate Judiciary committee, chaired by Senator Lindsey Graham, held a hearing examining guidelines for this state policy. Not only was it a federal-level, bipartisan discussion on the importance of these laws, but it was a robust conversation highlighting: 1) this policy is based on risky behavior, not a mental health diagnosis; 2) there is built-in due process; 3) it is a civil, not criminal, order; and 4) it is evidence-based. These are core tenets of the policy as crafted six years ago by the Consortium, and we were ecstatic that the witnesses and Senators highlighted these exact points. (You can see the full hearing here).
In April, Colorado became the fifteenth state (plus the District of Columbia) with an extreme risk law, and legislation has been introduced in more than twenty other states. At the federal level, Senator Feinstein and Representative Carbajal introduced the Extreme Risk Protection Order Act of 2019 (S. 506 and H.R. 1236), which would incentivize states to pass extreme risk laws by creating a grant program to help fund implementation efforts, including law enforcement training and public education.
In other Congressional news, Dr. Daniel Webster testified in front of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies on March 7 for the hearing “Addressing the Public Health Emergency of Gun Violence.” Dr. Webster spoke about the importance of federally funded gun violence research and highlighted the risk-based approach to gun violence prevention, even giving the Consortium a nice shout out. (You can see the full hearing here).
Finally, we relaunched our Consortium twitter presence as we strive to share gun violence prevention research with broader audiences. Our handle is @Consortium_RBFP – we hope to connect with you!
As always, please send us any recently published studies or projects throughout the month, and we will compile and distribute them in this newsletter.
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