Red Flag Laws: Psychologist Duties and Professional Responsibilities

Abstract

In their Ethics in Motion lead article, Stagner et al. (2025) review the current movement of state legislatures to remove firearms when an individual has been judged to be dangerous to self or others. They point out how many of the legislative proposals involve mental health professionals in determining if an individual should have a firearm. Following this, they go on to review the complexity of arriving at such a determination from a legal, ethical, and clinical perspective. The four separate discussion articles review the complexity of this area from a variety of directions to include whether psychology should even be involved in these determinations and whether we have the skills to ethically arrive at these types of conclusions with validity and reliability.