5 Years. No Charges. Minnesota's New Gun Grab Is Here.

The state's red flag law was already bad. What the DFL is pushing now is a different beast entirely.

Under the proposed expansion, Extreme Risk Protection Orders would stretch to a maximum of **five years**. Not five months. Five years. A judge hands down that order on the basis of one-sided, ex parte petitions—meaning the person losing their firearms often isn't even in the room when it happens.

Let that land: half a decade of disarmament. No charge. No conviction. No jury of your peers. Just a petition.

**That's not a safety net. That's a trapdoor.**

Here's what they buried deeper in the bill: any individual patrol officer on scene can now file the petition on the spot. Not a chief. Not a sheriff making a command decision. The officer responding to your noise complaint can initiate the process that takes your guns before you've dialed your attorney.

And when the government seizes your property? Under this proposal, they owe you nothing. The bill eliminates the requirement that police reimburse fair market value for confiscated firearms. The bare-minimum accountability measure that existed before—gone. Your guns, your money, your problem.

Now look at the numbers the bill's supporters are actually bragging about. ERPOs in Minnesota more than doubled—from 138 petitions in 2024 to 314 in 2025. Judges granted them in **96 percent of cases**.

96 percent.

**That is not due process. That is a rubber stamp with a robe on it.** Ex parte petitions heard without the accused present, approved at a rate that would embarrass a Soviet tribunal. If the system is green-lighting 96 out of every 100 requests, it is not carefully weighing evidence—it is waving people through.

Richfield Police Chief Jay Henthorne, president of the Minnesota Chiefs of Police Association, is cheerleading the expansion. He calls it a "tool that's being successful." Successful at what, exactly? Disarming Minnesotans who have never been charged with a single crime?

The NRA has already fired back, sending a letter to the Senate committee calling this what it is: a gun confiscation scheme. They're right. Dressing up confiscation in crisis-intervention language doesn't change the mechanism. Government agents take your firearms on the basis of an allegation. The word "safety" in the press release doesn't alter that fact one bit.

Rep. Cedrick Frazier, DFL-New Hope, is carrying the House version. It cleared committee with bipartisan support in the tied Minnesota House—which means Republican votes helped move it. **Find out who. Write it down.** The DFL-controlled Senate is running a parallel version through its own committees right now, and it has momentum.

The playbook here is deliberate: make ERPOs faster to file, easier to grant, cheaper for the state, and longer-lasting for the person disarmed. Every one of those levers moves in the same direction—away from due process and toward frictionless confiscation.

This is the architecture of a system designed to expand. Today it's five years. Watch what the next session brings.

**If you live in Minnesota, the clock is running.** Contact your state representative and senator now. Find every Republican who voted this bill out of committee and make clear there is a political cost for trading away due process. The Senate version is still moving. This is not over—but the window to stop it is closing fast.