6 States Ban ERPOs—And Jail Officials Who Enforce Them Anyway

Six states. Done. ERPOs banned.

And some of those states didn't stop at repeal—they wired in criminal penalties for any official who decides their politics outrank the law. That's not a warning. That's a loaded consequence.

Michael Bloomberg's gun-control house organ, The Trace, is not handling this gracefully.

The outlet wants readers to believe ERPO opponents are trafficking in "false claims" about due process violations and systemic abuse. **Translation: millions of Americans read the plain text of these laws, understood exactly what they were, and said no.** That's not misinformation. That's literacy.

Here's what an ERPO actually does. A judge can strip a law-abiding citizen of their firearms on a third-party accusation—before any crime is committed, before the gun owner sets foot in a courtroom, before they get any meaningful shot at defending themselves. No charge. No conviction. No day in court first.

That's not a protection order. **That's prior restraint on a constitutional right with a therapeutic rebrand.**

The Trace mourns the collapse of "bipartisan support" for these laws. What they bury in the fine print is *why* that support collapsed: documented cases of angry ex-partners weaponizing the process, neighbors settling personal scores through ERPO petitions, and gun owners losing their firearms for weeks or months before a full hearing ever materialized. The abuse isn't a talking point. It's a paper trail.

The pushback now has real teeth. States aren't just pulling ERPO statutes off the books—they're building accountability mechanisms for officials who treat the ban as optional. That's a direct answer to years of bureaucrats and local law enforcement deciding which laws apply to them based on political convenience. **The era of selective enforcement running one direction is over in at least six states.**

The Trace frames all of this as a rollback of public safety. Gun owners should call it what it is: constitutional restoration. Every state that bans ERPOs is a state that decided the Second Amendment is not a privilege a judge can suspend at 2 a.m. because someone filed a complaint.

Watch the next move carefully. Bloomberg-funded groups are already laying narrative groundwork to pressure Congress and holdout state legislatures to *harden* ERPO statutes before more states follow. They will use this story as a fundraising alarm and a lobbying battering ram. They are fast, they are funded, and they do not sleep on momentum.

**Six states drew the line. The question is whether yours is next—or whether the gun-control machine locks it in place first.** Find your state legislators. Send them this story. Demand ERPO prohibition legislation before the opposition finishes loading.