This letter to the editor was originally published in The Oregonian on June 14, 2026.

News coverage of the recent Multnomah Athletic Club attack highlighted that the suspect was required to surrender firearms this past February under Oregon’s extreme risk protection order or “red flag” law, (“MAC bombing suspect lost guns under Oregon ‘red flag’ law,” May 3). This law can prevent individuals from accessing firearms when at serious risk of harming themselves or others.

Media coverage of ERPOs increases after incidents of mass violence, contributing to public perception that these protection orders are used mostly for mass violence prevention. In this case, news articles indicated that the protection order used in February was in response to the suspect’s attempted suicide. However, the use of ERPOs for suicide prevention is lost in the broader narrative surrounding these cases.

This loss translates into meaningful differences in use of extreme risk protection orders. Law enforcement officers in Oregon and across states with red flag laws report lower willingness to use such orders in cases involving suicidality than in cases involving threatened assaults or mass violence. Our team’s research shows that ERPOs are being used to address risks of suicide in Oregon, but most often only when individuals also threaten harm to others. This reflects a potential under-utilization of protection orders for suicide prevention alone.

Given that the majority of firearm-related deaths in Oregon are suicides and research shows the strongest effects of protection orders are in suicide prevention, their limited utilization in response to suicidality represents an opportunity for intervention. This begins with shifting the narrative, so that law enforcement, clinicians, people working in suicide prevention and families facing a crisis consider ERPOs as part of their suicide prevention toolkits.

Rebecca Valek, MSPH, is research project coordinator at the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health Gun Violence Prevention Research Center.

Kathleen F. Carlson, Ph.D., is the director of the Gun Violence Prevention Research Center and an expert on firearm injury epidemiology.