One day in early February, a Bloomington police detective got a call that a man had told his family that he planned to shoot himself in the head.

The detective, Matt Jones, found the man at his home where, according to a Minnesota District Court filing, he “admitted to officers that he was planning to buy a gun today and always believed that when he dies it will be by his own hand.”

Jones then took a step that is becoming increasingly common among officers in Hennepin County and, to an extent, throughout the state: He persuaded a state court judge to stop the person with suicidal thoughts from owning or buying a gun.

Jones used the Extreme Risk Protection Order Act (informally known as the red flag law or ERPO), a remnant of the DFL’s 2023 legislative smorgasbord, which went into effect

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