RED FLAG LAWS

How California’s ‘red flag’ law thwarted gun threats at Sunnyvale Ford, Netflix, and Palo Alto City Hall

By John Woolfolk

The Mercury News
September 16, 2019

Just days after a fired employee fatally shot his supervisors at the Ford Store Morgan Hill this June, an eerily similar threat emerged at the automaker’s Sunnyvale dealership: A mechanic about to lose his job for drunkenness had recently threatened to kill a supervisor and brought guns to work.

The owner of the Sunnyvale dealership called police, but there was not enough evidence to charge the fired worker with making criminal threats. So authorities turned to California’s “red flag” law, getting a court order that allowed them to temporarily take away the 54-year-old mechanic’s cache of seven rifles, three shotguns, four handguns and high-capacity ammunition magazines.

“It’s a very effective tool in preventing acts of violence involving firearms,” said Sunnyvale Department of Public Safety Chief Phan S. Ngo. “Potentially we prevented somebody from going and doing major damage with his arsenal, and I’d rather go this route of prevention than responding to a mass shooting incident.”

It was among several recent Bay Area cases in which police used California’s gun violence restraining order law to temporarily disarm allegedly threatening employees or lovers and others reported to be delusional or suicidal.

Among other examples this year: A fired Netflix security contractor in July who allegedly threatened to use his guns to take revenge at the Los Gatos company, and a Palo Alto city employee who in April menacingly likened her “continued mistreatment” to that of a 1988 workplace shooter.

In the East Bay, cases included a man whose psychiatrist called Hayward police in July concerned the patient was hearing voices and had guns, prompting authorities to seize a rifle and pistol from him last month. And Pleasanton police in August seized firearms from a woman after her husband called to report she suffered from mental health issues, had recently purchased a lot of guns, and made a suicidal gesture with one of them.