SAN JOSE, Calif. — The day after an 18-year-old fatally shot 19 young pupils and two teachers at an Uvalde, Texas, elementary school and reignited the nation’s firearms debate, Los Gatos police said a middle school boy claiming access to guns had threatened to “shoot up the school.”
Later that day, police arrived at his father’s home with a court order to seize any firearms and left with the man’s shotgun. It was one of a half a dozen times in just the past six months that police in Santa Clara County used the state’s “red flag law” to head off threats of potentially deadly school shootings.
With Congress poised to expand such laws nationally — a bipartisan bill package would mark the most significant federal gun legislation in decades — the cases offer a window into how and why California’s law has been used locally. Police employing their red flag powers were able to quickly assess and respond to the threats, although the individuals involved in the cases didn’t always turn out to have firearms.
“We believe that they have been effective, not just in school situations but across the board,” said San Jose City Attorney Nora Frimann, whose office has represented city police involved in most of the recent gun threats to schools.
As with other red flag cases involving domestic violence, mental health and suicidal crises, threats to co-workers, neighbors and road rage, the seriousness of the alleged school threats are speculative. The recent cases include:
— A 24-year-old San Jose man threatened in a random text message June 1 to a woman he didn’t know describing himself as a “mass shooter” with “rifles on deck.” He suggested an imminent shooting at Valley Fair mall or a school, referencing a recent Tulsa shooting and saying he wanted to “feel the experience myself.”
— A 43-year-old San Jose State University employee who owns two rifles and a pistol attacked a custodian who found him destroying campus property on April 11. Days earlier the employee bit a police officer who had found him naked outside his home in an apparent mental health crisis.
— A 23-year-old man on March 21 called the principal at San Jose’s Willow Glen Middle School, where the man had previously been a student, and threatened to shoot it up.
— A 47-year-old employee at San Jose’s East Side Union High School District who owns a handgun had an altercation with his supervisor Feb. 15 and reportedly said, “This is why I feel I need to bring a gun to work.”
— A 13-year-old San Jose boy posted a video to social media Dec. 27 with images of what appeared to be a military-style rifle and stated, “aright, all the magazines are loaded, now we go to school.”
A study earlier this month by the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis found the state’s law, enacted in 2016 and hailed by gun restriction advocates as the country’s first “robust” extreme risk protection bill, disarmed 58 people who threatened gun massacres in the law’s first two years.
Advocates say red flag laws allow police to quickly disarm gun owners whose remarks, actions or social media postings suggest they’re a danger to themselves and others but haven’t risen to the level of criminal threats that would warrant an arrest.
But gun rights advocates say the law takes away a person’s due process. “You can effectively take away someone’s rights without ever seeing them in court,” said Matthew Larosiere, policy counsel for the Sacramento-based gun rights group Firearms Policy Coalition who has researched the laws.
Under California’s red flag law, police, family members, educators, employers and co-workers can ask a judge to approve a gun violence restraining or emergency protection order barring the subject from having guns for 21 days. The subject must surrender any firearms to police or an authorized gun dealer. The order can be extended up to five years after a civil court hearing.
More than 1,700 removal orders have been issued through 2019, according to the bill’s author, Assemblyman Phil Ting, D-San Francisco. At least 52 have been filed in Santa Clara County this year, compared with half a dozen in Contra Costa County. Alameda County court officials did not make records immediately available.
It was unclear whether any were issued in other Bay Area counties over school threats, though such threats have occurred throughout the region.
On June 14, San Mateo-Foster City School District officials notified parents that a Borel Middle School student had been expelled after police received a report that the student “was viewing images of weapons and a list of student names on their laptop.” Police determined the student had no access to weapons.
On June 1, authorities charged a 16-year-old Berkeley High School student with attempting to recruit other students into a mass shooting plan at the school.
The Santa Clara County cases are making their way through the system. The subjects declined or did not respond to requests for comment, or were in custody.
In the Willow Glen case, the accused, who this news organization is not identifying due to mental health issues, and his parents don’t have firearms registered to them, court records said. He told police he had been bullied when he attended the school years ago and was described in court records as a former special education student who was “mentally impaired but still cognitively able to function.” His mother told police he has autism and “had no intentions or the ability to be an active school shooter.” He has been charged with making felony criminal threats.
In the June 1 text threat to Valley Fair or a school, police traced the texts to a San Jose man who also complained of mental health issues. They didn’t find any weapons at his home. He told police he wanted someone to listen to him and that he was never going to kill anyone. He was arrested and charged with making felony criminal threats.
In the San Jose State case, the temporary gun restraining order against a university biologist expired May 5. He’s facing misdemeanor charges of battery of a police officer.
In the East Side Union High School case, the subject surrendered his guns and did not contest the extension of the gun violence restraining order to February 2027. He has not been criminally charged.
In the Los Gatos middle school case, the boy’s father declined to comment for this story. But Los Gatos police Capt. Clinton Tada said the department “takes all concerns about school safety very seriously” and that “it is law enforcement’s responsibility to thoroughly investigate and take necessary enforcement action when concerns arise.”
In the December case involving another teen boy, police determined that the image the home-schooled 13-year-old posted on SnapChat was of a plastic-pellet-firing Airsoft rifle. But his father owns nine guns, which he told officers were kept in a safe in the house. The boy’s father, who had bought him the Airsoft gun, told police his son was only joking. It did not appear his guns were taken.
Though the boy’s threat didn’t involve a real firearm, the city attorney argued in court filings that as a juvenile, the boy still may possess rifles or shotguns in California under supervision for recreational shooting or hunting. She argued a restraining order would keep his parents from giving him access to guns for five years until he’s 18. A hearing is scheduled for June 28.
As Frimann put it, “No one wants another Uvalde.”
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(Mercury News staff writers Nate Gartrell and Katie Lauer contributed to this report.)
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