In a deep-red state, this lieutenant’s blueprint for removing guns from abusers is spreading

On February 2, 2023, when the fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals announced its decision to strike down the federal law banning domestic abusers under protective orders from possessing guns, Lieutenant Valerie Martinez-Jordan, of the Lafourche Parish Sheriff’s Office in Louisiana, was inundated with phone calls and emails. More than 25 survivors reached out, voicing their fears that their abusers might regain access to their firearms. 

In 2020, The Trace and The Daily Beast published a story about how Martinez-Jordan had spearheaded an inventive effort to remove guns from the hands of domestic abusers in Louisiana, one of the reddest states in the country.

When Martinez-Jordan first joined the Sheriff’s Office in the early 2000s, people with misdemeanor domestic violence convictions or active protective orders were prohibited from owning firearms under federal law, but local police officers lacked the authority to enforce it. Martinez-Jordan, a survivor of abuse, grew frustrated whenever she found a domestic abuser who had a gun. In intimate partner violence cases, she well knew, the victim is five times more likely to be killed when their abusive partner has access to a firearm. 

When a 2009 Violence Policy Center report revealed that Louisiana ranked third nationally for domestic violence homicide rates of women killed by men, Martinez-Jordan decided to take action. With the support of her supervisor, she shared her plan with Sheriff Craig Webre, who immediately backed her. Soon after, she began working with agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and implemented procedures to prevent domestic abusers in Lafourche Parish from owning guns.

Even as the deep-red state contends with the loosening of federal gun laws, her decade-long effort has become a blueprint for other police departments throughout Louisiana.

Martinez-Jordan said she has now trained over 2,000 officers across the state, and more than half of the parishes have implemented the firearm divestiture program. At least 33 of the 64 sheriff’s offices completed proof-of-transfer forms—some of which Martinez-Jordan originally drafted—in 2023. 

Martinez-Jordan credits exceptional colleagues like Detective Kelly Downey, from Bossier Parish, who leads the Domestic Violence Unit—consisting of only two members—at the  Sheriff’s Office. Downey is one of many officers who were sent to shadow Martinez-Jordan before implementing relinquishment programs in their respective police departments. 

“Because of Lieutenant Martinez, [on] Day One, we were ready to go,” Downey said.  “We were ready with the forms, we were ready with policy—everything was completely ready. It’s really her passion that was spread across the state as far as gun laws.”

Downey, who has worked for 16 years in her office, and spent half of them in the domestic violence unit, continued: “Being able to see a person transform from victim to survivor is amazing.”

Martinez-Jordan said that Downey is “very passionate about this work, as I am. My goal was to come in, get legislation passed, and provide a template. And then those respective agencies take that template, and they make it their own, be creative. That is what she’s done. She kind of owns it, and she is very effective.”

Martinez-Jordan began this work in Lafourche in 2009 by compiling a list of every resident with a domestic violence restraining order or conviction. Then she sent them notices saying that federal law prohibits them from owning firearms. Her sheriff’s office offered to help those who did own guns to relinquish them and created systems to flag newly convicted abusers. Martinez-Jordan helped to draft relevant state legislation that passed in 2018. After that, her unit notified over 40 licensed gun dealers in its area about a new requirement to inform police of background check denials.

Between November 2022 and June 2024, those local gun dealers notified the Lafourche Parish Sheriff’s Office of 384 background check denials for attempted gun purchases. In 2023, her unit received 46 civil and criminal orders for gun transfers. Thirty-six defendants declared that they did not possess guns, and the office processed nine firearm transfers directly to their storage and third parties. 

Prospective officers for the Sheriff’s Office are still required to undergo 16 hours of training on the deadly combination of firearms and domestic violence before they get out in the field, plus take a yearly refresher. 

“For us, it’s just like writing traffic tickets now,” she said. “It’s just part of what we do.”

Martinez-Jordan said she still receives calls occasionally from other sheriff’s offices across the state, primarily inquiring about new updates to her forms. She recalled receiving a call a few months earlier from a small sheriff’s office seeking her guidance on how to handle a court order for a firearm transfer—it was their first time navigating the process. 

In general, however, fewer calls mean these agencies can now handle the reforms on their own, she said. 

“Before, I was getting calls all day, every day,” Martinez-Jordan said. “So that leads me to believe that the process is operational. It’s being done, and they don’t need me as much because they’re learning on their own.” 

For instance, the Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Office, located about 70 miles northwest of Lafourche Parish, dealt with 624 court orders for gun transfers in 2023. Of these, 233 defendants submitted written declarations stating they did not have guns, and the Sheriff’s Office processed 17 firearms transfers to third parties and via legal sale.

Different scenarios ensued for the remaining 382 court orders, according to Valerie R. Ponseti,  the Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Office’s public information officer. “Some forms were transferred out of the parish, based on where the defendant lives,” she wrote in an email. “Other cases involved paperwork that was received incomplete or without proper documentation from the courts.”

After The Trace’s initial reporting, several other publications and advocacy groups covered Martinez-Jordan’s efforts. Notably, in 2021, her reforms were featured in the LETTAC Clearinghouse, which curates resources, expertise, and insights from the Office on Violence Against Women and partner agencies. In November of that same year, she appeared in an episode of “The Problem with Jon Stewart” titled “The Problem with Guns,” in which she discussed the statewide rollout of the firearm divestiture program, as mandated by the 2018 state law.

Martinez-Jordan now leads the Police Social Services Section at her Sheriff’s Office. She and the victim services program have received numerous state and national awards and honors. 

Louisiana is one of 22 states that have enacted laws requiring prohibited domestic abusers to turn in any guns they already possess while under a restraining order, and it is one of only 17 states explicitly requiring gun relinquishment after a conviction. 

Tennessee is another red state with a strong gun culture, but according to a recent ProPublica story, a few years ago, one of its counties became a model for its efforts to prevent domestic violence from worsening. 

Tennessee laws bar domestic abusers from having guns, but allow them to give their gun to a third party, like a friend or relative, rather than to a law enforcement agency or a licensed firearms dealer. It is among a small number of states that allow the transfer of a gun to an unidentified third party. But these laws are rarely enforced; an abuser could claim to give up their guns but still have access to them. 

In response, Scott County, a small and rural county in East Tennessee, updated its firearms form to require abusers, since April 2021, to provide the name and address of the person holding their guns. The third party also has to verify that they have the guns.

Scott is the only one among the state’s 95 counties to have done so. It’s hard to measure its success so far, ProPublica notes. 

Last June, the Supreme Court found, in its 8-1 United States v. Rahimi decision, that the federal law barring people subject to domestic violence restraining orders from owning guns is constitutional—reversing the Fifth Circuit ruling that had prompted all the calls to Martinez-Jordan. Meanwhile, in Lafourche Parish, she occasionally gets a little chuckle. “We’ll receive an order from another parish because the defendant lives here, but their criminal case was there,” she explained. “And I’ll get a copy of the order to transfer, or for nonpossession, and I’m like, ‘I made that. I made that form.'”

The Trace’s Changemakers series is funded in part by a grant from the Levi Strauss Foundation.

This story was produced by The Trace and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.