Las Vegas was home to the worst mass shooting in modern American history. We all know it. We know what happened, we know the aftermath, and we know that if the city never saw another mass shooting, it would still be marred by what happened.
Unfortunately, events at UNLV on Wednesday made it clear that Las Vegas and its past wouldn’t provide immunity for the future.
On Wednesday, three people were killed.
The gunman who killed three people and wounded a fourth in a mass shooting at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, has been identified as a career college professor who had applied for – but failed to be accepted for – a job at the school, according to reports.
The shooting unfolded at around 11.45am on Wednesday morning when gunfire rung out from Beam Hall, where the college’s Lee Business School is located.
Students, staff and faculty were warned about an “active shooter” threat, and hunkered down in classrooms and offices.
Three victims – who have not been named – were killed while a fourth was hospitalised and is now in stable condition.
Police shot and killed the gunman, a 67-year-old professor who it seems might have been disgruntled at not getting a job at UNLV. He’d been an associated professor at East Carolina University for 15 years.
It also seems the victims were faculty or staff, not students.
As of right now, we know very little else, though that is likely to change as the day proceeds.
Unsurprisingly, Giffords didn’t wait long to way in, despite the lack of information.
Again and again, we put our children through active shooter drills and lockdowns.
— GIFFORDS (@GIFFORDS_org) December 6, 2023
OUR CHILDREN DESERVE BETTER. https://t.co/wN0AqpW7Bb
Of course, Nevada law made UNLV a gun-free zone, so absolutely no one could have the means to defend themselves on campus, but that didn’t make it in Giffords post, now did it?
And these aren’t children. These are college students, meaning the vast majority are over 18. If they’re old enough to vote, they’re not children. They’re adults, even if most of us didn’t act very adult-like at 18.
What people like Giffords haven’t really comprehended is that guns aren’t going away. Their focus on gun control, however, has made it impossible to have a conversation about what makes these people do these kinds of things. We have to understand what drives these kinds of attacks if we really want to prevent these kinds of attacks.
It’s easy to say rage, especially since the killer was rejected for a job at UNLV, but that’s too simple an explanation. We all feel enraged from time to time. We don’t kill people, especially strangers who did nothing to us.
I expect the more we learn, the more we’ll hear from the anti-gun crowd about how much we need more gun control laws. Never mind the failures of their gun-free zones. They don’t want you to think about that one.
Instead, they’ll start attacking anything and everything to do with firearms, all before we even know if this guy got his gun legally, if there were any red flags in his history that provided even a hint of this sort of thing, or literally anything else.
It’s how they roll.
