Nevada Senator Jacky Rosen speaks during a campaign event in Las Vegas Friday, Jun 28, 2024.
Saturday, June 29, 2024 | 2 a.m.
Enacting “commonsense” gun safety measures doesn’t mean taking away people’s firearms, but some conservatives have falsely framed any steps as a move toward gun-grabbing, U.S. Sen. Jacky Rosen said.
“We can protect the Second Amendment and keep families safe. They aren’t mutually exclusive,” Rosen said Thursday during a roundtable discussion on the subject in Las Vegas.
Topics ranged from the regulation of homemade, hard-to-trace “ghost guns” to rapid-fire bump stocks to gun safety as a public health issue.
Bump stocks, which use a semiautomatic rifle’s recoil to rapidly fire multiple rounds, were federally banned after the 2017 mass shooting on the Las Vegas Strip that ultimately resulted in 60 deaths and more than 800 injuries.
The gunman, who fired from a hotel tower into a crowd at a country music festival, employed weapons fitted with bump stocks in the attack.
During the roundtable discussion, federal and state lawmakers, along with gun-safety advocates, expressed concern over a recent Supreme Court ruling overturning the federal bump stock ban.
While Nevada has a state ban, a bill to ban bump stocks nationally was blocked in the Senate only days after the Supreme Court’s ruling.
Passing gun-safety measures at the state level has also proven challenging, state Sen. Dallas Harris, D-Las Vegas, said.
Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo, who was Clark County sheriff at the time of the Las Vegas mass shooting, has turned out to be an obstacle, she said.
Lombardo’s first vetoes in office were of three gun-safety bills passed during the 2023 Legislature. The bills would have raised the minimum age to purchase semiautomatic rifles to 21 and placed additional restrictions on ghost guns.
Jamie Bunnell, an organizer for the group Moms Demand Action, said being in favor of gun safety does not mean being against gun owners.
It’s the responsibility of gun-safety advocates to educate people about the difference, said Bunnell, a gun owner.
She said being a gun owner should be synonymous with the responsible use of firearms.
Las Vegas pediatrician Anjali Agrawal said firearm safety was also a public health issue.
Doctors should become more accustomed to discussing gun safety with their patients, like asking whether families have smoke detectors or the quality of their living conditions, she said.
Gun violence is the leading cause of death in the United States for people ages 1 to 19. The U.S. surgeon general on Monday declared gun violence a “public health emergency.”
“I think pediatricians have known for a long time that gun violence is a public health crisis,” Agrawal said.
Ivet Aldaba, a social work professor at UNLV, has seen first-hand the traumatic and lasting impact of gun violence.
She was walking past a classroom building on Dec. 6 when a gunman inside opened fire, killing three professors and wounding another. Students and staff on campus scrambled for safety.
The gunman, a former business professor who was turned down for a job at UNLV, was killed during a shootout with police.
“It angers me that we had to go through that,” Aldaba said. “My students, they continue to struggle with what happened on Dec. 6.”
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