Following Newsroom Shooting, a Look at Maryland's New 'Red Flag' Gun Safety Law

The shooting^[1] in a Maryland newsroom this week that left five people dead came less than six months before a new law takes effect in that state that allows people to raise “red flags” restricting a person’s access to guns.

There is no way of knowing if the events in Annapolis would have played out differently, but the new law, an extreme risk protective order law, allows relatives and law enforcement officials to ask a court to temporarily restrict a person’s access to guns if they are found to be a risk to themselves or others. The law will go into effect in October.

“Given the facts of this case, I think there was a strong possibility that law enforcement would have been able to obtain an extreme risk protection order against this person and therefore the person’s guns might have been removed or he wouldn’t have been able to buy this gun,” said Lindsay Nichols, the federal policy director at the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a gun control advocacy group.

Maryland’s gun laws are typically stronger for handguns than long guns but the extreme risk protection order applies to all firearms, she noted.

The accused shooter^[2], 38-year-old Jarrod Ramos, bought the pump-action shotgun he used in the killings legally a year or so ago, Anne Arundel County Police Chief Timothy Altomare told reporters on Friday.

Ramos apparently had a longstanding grudge against the newspaper over a 2011 column about his pleading guilty to criminal harassment. According to court records, he pleaded guilty to the charge in July 2011 in Anne Arundel County and later sued the newspaper unsuccessfully over the column. A former publisher, Thomas Marquardt, told The Baltimore Sun that Ramos