Does society have the conviction to take action to prevent gun violence?

Thursday, Dec. 7, 2023 | 2 a.m.

On Wednesday, Southern Nevadans shared the terror of yet another mass shooting.

“I am used to sending emails to students to ask where their paper is,” Michael Kagan, the Joyce Mack Professor of Law and Director of the UNLV Immigration Clinic posted on X (formerly Twitter). “Today I am sending emails just to make sure they are alive.”

While the swift, courageous and highly coordinated response of numerous law enforcement and emergency response agencies is worthy of praise, the demeanor and professionalism of those first responders is also noteworthy. They displayed a level of compassion and kindness that should be a model for other communities in the face of such tragedies.

Numerous individuals told Sun staff that first responders were not only effective at preventing further loss of life but were also effective at limiting — to the best of their ability, given the circumstances — the trauma of the experience.

Parents, arriving on the scene in the hopes of finding children were treated with patience, understanding and empathy, despite heightened emotions and fears about what tragedies lay before them.

And students, many of whom bore witness to the carnage or lived through the fears of barricaded classrooms, were reunited with family as quickly as possible and given access to the resources that will allow them to start the process of healing.

We applaud those first responders, as well as the doctors, nurses, counselors, therapists and others who will spend untold hours, days, and even years helping the surviving victims of the shooting recover both physically and emotionally.

Yet the fact remains that no matter how good and praiseworthy the actions of law enforcement and other first responders may be, they typically can’t “respond” until after shots have been fired.

It is the American people and our elected officials who bear the responsibility of preventing mass shootings from occurring so frequently and making those that do occur are less deadly.

In 2017, the Oct. 1 Route 91 Harvest festival shooting left 58 people dead (a number that eventually swelled to 60). We hoped that such an overwhelming loss of life would inspire swift action to prevent mass shootings moving forward. Instead, in the past six years, the U.S. has experienced 3,332 more mass shootings, including 632 this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

In Las Vegas, we’ve experienced two mass shootings in the past week, as a gunman shot one person and injured four others at a homeless encampment Friday.

Then Wednesday, a shooter targeted students at UNLV. Despite the tragic warning of six years ago, we chose to do almost nothing to prevent the carnage.

As a society, we continue to elect lawmakers who value the right to possess a firearm above the rights of people to go to class, concerts, church, movies, nightclubs, the grocery store or myriad other places where Americans have been gunned down for nothing more than existing.

While no solution is 100% effective, we know how to stop at least some of these shootings, because murderers like the man who killed five people at a bank in Louisville, Ky., have told us how.

“I certainly would not have been able to do this were it more difficult to get a gun,” he wrote.

In other words, he did it because he could, because no one did anything to stop him or even tried to make it more difficult for him.

That’s not to say we don’t claim to want to do something about it.

According to a poll last year by the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 71% of Americans say gun laws should be stricter, including about half of Republicans and a majority of those in gun-owning households.

Democratic legislators have even tried to do something about it.

Just hours before the UNLV shooting, Republicans in the U.S. Senate blocked passage of an assault weapons ban and universal background checks legislation.

Here in Nevada, Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo vetoed all three of this legislative session’s gun-control bills, including bills to keep guns out of the hands of convicted criminals and to reduce the prevalence of untraceable “ghost guns.”

We can’t know for certain if any of these bills would have prevented yesterday’s carnage, but we do know with absolute certainty that despite popular support for reasonable gun control, Republicans weren’t even willing to try.

At the time of Lombardo’s vetoes, Assembly Majority Leader Sandra Jauregui called on the governor to “have the basic empathy to realize his responsibility to prevent future mass shootings and gun violence tragedies.” She continued by saying, “Too many Nevadans have lost their lives to gun violence and even more have been left as survivors, wondering when it will happen again.”

The answer to her question came Wednesday at UNLV. Mass shootings will continue to happen over and over again until we stop electing lawmakers who we know will do nothing to protect Nevadans from gun violence.

While some readers may criticize this editorial board for being insensitive by discussing politics at a time of tragedy, we believe it is far more insensitive to ignore our elected officials’ and society’s role in that tragedy.

We are grateful for the courageous and compassionate action of first responders, and our thoughts and prayers go out the victims of the shooting and their families.

But while thoughts and prayers may console the bereaved, they will not stop these senseless murders. Only the actions of good, decent and clear-eyed citizens intent on stopping this insanity can do that.

At the very least, acting — finally — can give innocent lives a chance.