In the year since the Lewiston mass shooting, Maine’s yellow flag law has been invoked more than 400 times by police seeking to take weapons away from people they believe pose a danger to themselves or others.

Law enforcement used the law far more sparingly prior to the tragedy – only 81 times from when the law first went into effect in 2020 until the state’s worst-ever mass shooting on Oct. 25, 2023. From the day after the shooting through Oct. 22 this year, it was used 412 times.

The average number of yellow flag interventions rose from about five per month before the shooting to an average of 34 each month after. And there is no indication that police are less aggressive now than they were in the weeks right after the tragedy, or that the risk of violence has subsided. The number of cases spiked in September to 50, the highest monthly total to date.

Ben Strick, vice president of adult behavioral health for Spurwink, a Portland-based nonprofit that provides 24-hour telehealth screenings as part of the yellow flag process, said despite greater use of the law, the severity of what they are seeing has not diminished.

“These continue to be scary incidents,” Strick said. “I can’t say this with certainty, but my hope is that this law has prevented suicides, homicides and deadly-force incidents.”

Maine is the only state with a yellow flag law, while 21 states have red flag laws on the books that make it easier for law enforcement to temporarily remove weapons from people who are a danger. Gun reform advocates are pushing to replace Maine’s law with a more aggressive version known as a red flag law, while the Mills administration and others argue that Maine’s current law is working.

The Lewiston shooting left 18 people dead at two locations, a bar and a bowling alley. The shooter, Robert Card, later killed himself and was found in a storage trailer in Lisbon. Card had a history of severe mental illness, and had been hospitalized after threatening violence in New York state for two weeks in July 2023.

The law was updated this spring to streamline the process and make it easier to use for law enforcement, the courts and mental health providers, advocates of the current law say.

The Maine Attorney General’s Office provides a summary of each time the yellow flag law is used, without using names or other identifying details. The accounts reveal harrowing details of domestic violence, suicide threats and other volatile incidents that could have resulted in more tragedy.

For example, on Oct. 19, 2024, Gorham police used the yellow flag law when a “50-year-old man (was) struggling with girlfriend to retrieve handgun to shoot himself; 14-year-old son restrained him until arrival of police,” according to the summary.

On Oct. 10, in an unidentified area of Androscoggin County, the sheriff’s office reported that a “36-year-old man badly assaulted two co-workers unprovoked while in a manic state. (He) believes that his dead mother is guiding him and he’s a prophet.”

In another incident on Oct. 19, the York County Sheriff’s Office reported a “25-year-old man texted photo to girlfriend, holding pistol to his head and a threat to kill himself.”

Red flag law data in California, Connecticut, Maryland and Washington indicate that one suicide is prevented for every 17 to 23 times a red flag law is used to temporarily remove weapons, according to a study published in August 2024 in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law.

People are expressing suicidal or homicidal intentions in more than 90% of yellow flag cases, according to state data. More than half of the cases – 52% – cite threats of suicide, while 17% involve threats of homicide. The rest involve both types of threats or do not identify the nature of the potential violence.

Sanford police Maj. Mark Dyer, who heads up his department’s support services, said the “steady increase” in the law’s use since the Lewiston tragedy is “due to officers, judges and hospitals getting familiar with and used to how the law works.”

Sanford has a mental health unit within its police department and has been one of the statewide leaders in helping other police forces learn how to use the law.

The law requires police to take subjects into protective custody, have them evaluated by a mental health professional to confirm they pose a threat to themselves or others and secure a hearing before a judge for an order to temporarily take away someone’s firearms.

Changes to the law – proposed by the Mills administration and passed into law this spring – have helped make the law work more seamlessly, Strick and Sanford police said.

Sgt. Everett Allen, who works in the Sanford Police Department’s mental health unit, said one of the big changes was extending the amount of time police are allowed to arrange and have a hearing before a judge from 14 days to 30 days.

“It allowed us to not work in such a frantic way,” Allen said. “It gave us time to get everyone on the same page and understand what was happening in each case. It’s a better collaborative process.”

Strick said the updates to the law that went into effect in August were “a whole bunch of little fixes that were designed to make things work better in specific situations.”

Strick said from the mental health evaluation side, under the updated law they can now use “third-party” information when conducting the mental health assessment. That’s helpful because when the person who could have their weapons taken away refuses to talk, mental health professionals can now use information from friends or family members and use other evidence, such as text messages, to determine if the law needs to be used, he said.

But Margaret Groban, a board member for the Maine Gun Safety Coalition and a retired prosecutor, said despite the improvements to the yellow flag law this year, the law is still far more cumbersome than the red flag laws on the books in 21 other states.

The red flag laws do not require a mental health screening. Under red flag laws, family members or police can directly petition a court to determine whether someone’s weapons should be temporarily removed because they pose a danger to themselves or others.

“There’s a reason we are an outlier,” Groban said. “The initial judgment for a weapons restriction order should not be based on mental illness. What we really care about is whether someone is dangerous.”

The Maine Gun Safety Coalition will be collecting signatures on Election Day to put the issue directly before voters in an upcoming election.

“The yellow flag law was a good start, but we can do better,” Groban said. “I hope that Maine will see (passing a red flag law) as an opportunity to make our state safer.”

Vice President Kamala Harris, in a written statement marking one year since the Lewiston shootings, urged Congress to pass a series of gun reforms, including a national red flag law.

But state Sen. Lisa Keim, R-Dixfield, said Maine’s yellow flag law doesn’t need to be scrapped.

“I see no reason to throw out the yellow flag law and replace it with a red flag law,” Keim said.

Keim said Maine’s yellow flag law and New York state’s red flag laws could have been used in Robert Card’s case, but neither state did so.

“The main thing is we have constitutional rights, Second Amendment rights,” Keim said, referring to the right to bear arms. “We should safeguard those rights to the highest level possible.”

Meanwhile, Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, also supports the updated yellow flag law.

“The governor believes the changes made earlier this year strengthen the law by providing additional useful tools for law enforcement to remove weapons from individuals who should not have them,” said Ben Goodman, a spokesman for Mills, in a statement. “More broadly, she believes that law enforcement recognizes the value of the law, particularly in the wake of the tragedy in Lewiston, and with more training and a greater familiarity of it, have made a strong and concerted effort to take greater advantage of it to protect their communities.”