Nearly nine out of ten gun confiscation orders issued under Michigan's red flag law last year were carried out without the subject ever receiving prior notice or a hearing. The gun owner's first indication that the state had moved against them came when police knocked on the door to seize their firearms.
Details from the latest annual report on Michigan's Extreme Risk Protection Order Act reveal that 459 requests were made for orders to be issued without notice. Eighty-nine percent of all gun confiscation orders were issued ex parte, meaning no one bothered to inform the person losing their constitutional rights before those rights were revoked.
Rights stripped first. Questions asked later.
The mechanics of this law deserve scrutiny because the process itself is the punishment. An ex parte order means a judge hears one side of the case and then authorizes the confiscation of firearms from someone who has no idea it's coming. There is no opportunity to contest the claims beforehand, no chance to present evidence, no adversarial proceeding of any kind. The state simply shows up and takes your property.
According to Breitbart, the NRA posted on X about the findings:
"New Michigan data shows how red flag gun confiscation orders are being used to trample 2A rights. Nearly 90% of gun confiscation orders were issued without notice or a prior hearing — meaning rights are stripped first and questions are asked later."
The number of ex parte orders in 2025 was more than 30 percent higher than those seen in 2024. This law is not stabilizing. It is accelerating.
A March 2, 2026, Detroit News article reported that the red flag law has been used in select cases over the past year against individuals on college campuses and within the K-12 school system, including cases in which guns have been seized from homes because elementary-age children were deemed a threat to themselves or others.
A six-year-old in Northville Township, Michigan, appears to be the youngest individual subjected to a red flag order.
Think about what that means operationally. A child who cannot legally purchase, own, or operate a firearm triggered a legal mechanism that resulted in guns being confiscated from a household. The order does not require the subject to be the gun owner. As the NRA-ILA warned back on March 10, 2025, Michigan's law:
"Specifically allows the issuance of orders against minors, uses an expansive definition of 'possession or control' of a firearm, and allows for the confiscation of guns from persons who are not the subject of the order."
So the state can name a child as the subject of a protection order and then use that order to disarm the adults in the household. The gun owners themselves may have done nothing wrong, threatened no one, broken no law. Their firearms are taken anyway, based on a proceeding they didn't know was happening, targeting someone who can't legally possess a weapon in the first place.
Red flag laws have always occupied uncomfortable constitutional territory. Their defenders argue they save lives by removing firearms from dangerous individuals before tragedy strikes. The argument has a surface appeal that collapses the moment you examine what "before" actually means in practice.
"Before" means before any crime has been committed. Before any due process has been afforded. Before the accused has spoken a single word in their own defense. The entire framework rests on the premise that the government can deprive citizens of an enumerated constitutional right based on a prediction of future behavior, adjudicated in a one-sided proceeding.
Every other area of law treats this kind of prior restraint with deep suspicion. You cannot be jailed for a crime you haven't committed. You cannot have your speech suppressed because someone believes you might say something dangerous. But under Michigan's red flag statute, your Second Amendment rights can be suspended on a petition you never saw, decided in a hearing you never attended.
The 30-percent jump in ex parte orders from 2024 to 2025 tells a story about institutional behavior. Once a tool like this exists, its use expands. The threshold for invoking it lowers. The categories of people it targets broaden. A law initially sold as a narrow intervention for imminent threats is now being applied to elementary school children and entire households.
This is the pattern with every grant of extraordinary government power. It starts targeted. It ends the routine. The emergency exception becomes the default procedure. And by the time the public notices, 89 percent of all orders are being issued without the subject's knowledge.
Proponents of red flag laws often point to the post-seizure hearing as the safeguard. You get your day in court, they say, just after the fact. But the burden has already shifted. You are now the person petitioning the government to return your own property, your own rights. The presumption of innocence has been quietly inverted, and the citizen must prove they deserve what the Constitution already guarantees them.
Michigan's data is not an anomaly. It is a preview. Every state that adopts a red flag framework will face the same gravitational pull toward ex parte proceedings, because that is the path of least resistance for law enforcement and petitioners alike. It is faster, simpler, and requires convincing only a judge, not a respondent. The system has every incentive to default to secrecy and no institutional incentive to protect the rights of the person on the other end of the order.
The question was never whether red flag laws would be used. The question was whether they would be used with the restraint their advocates promised. Michigan has answered that question. Eighty-nine percent of the time, the answer is no.
A six-year-old in Northville Township can tell you how seriously the state takes its own guardrails.