By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
Nevada state law NRS 202.265 seems perfectly clear: the campus at Nevada State University is essentially a gun-free zone where alleged triple-killer Anthony Polito, 67, brought a handgun and murdered three people before being fatally shot by campus police officers.
Here’s the pertinent text:
NRS 202.265 Possession of dangerous weapon on property or in vehicle of school or child care facility; penalty; exceptions.
1. Except as otherwise provided in this section, a person shall not carry or possess while on the property of the Nevada System of Higher Education, a private or public school or child care facility, or while in a vehicle of a private or public school or child care facility:
(a) An explosive or incendiary device;
(b) A dirk, dagger or switchblade knife;
(c) A nunchaku or trefoil;
(d) A blackjack or billy club or metal knuckles;
(e) A pneumatic gun;
(f) A pistol, revolver or other firearm; or
(g) Any device used to mark any part of a person with paint or any other substance
Yet, as noted by the Washington Post in its coverage of the shooting, the university sent out an alert during the incident to “evacuate to a safe place. RUN.HIDE.FIGHT.”
The WaPo is reporting that the suspect was shot by two campus officers, after the rampage began on the fourth floor of the university’s Lee Business School building.
According to ABC News, Polito had been a professor at colleges in North Carolina and Georgia. He reportedly had applied for a position at the university in Las Vegas, but was not hired.
In reporting the event, news agencies differed in how they discussed mass shootings in the U.S. Some reports quoted the statistic of 630 mass shootings set by the Gun Violence Archive, while the Washington Post keeps its own data, and reported 39 shootings so far this year, based on different criteria than used by the Archive.
President Joe Biden issued a statement from the White House, calling on Congressional Republicans to “join with Democrats in Congress to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, pass a national red flag law, enact universal background checks, require the safe storage of guns, and advance other commonsense measures that will help stem the tide of gun violence.”
Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, issued a scathing reaction to Biden’s remarks.
“At least Joe Biden is consistent,” Gottlieb said, “which is to say he’s like a broken record, repeating the same misleading rhetoric over and over. The president and his speech writers should find a new script, or at least wait until they have some facts on which to base their statements. Instead, they seem to go on auto-pilot whenever they can exploit a gun-related tragedy.
“It is hard to know whether Biden is intentionally lying, or if it is dementia,” he stated. “Either way, his one-size-fits-all gun ban fixation is intellectually bankrupt. It purposely promotes a false impression that banning modern rifles will result in a crime-free Utopia.
“Biden is locked into an obsession to ban modern semiautomatic rifles,” Gottlieb observed, “but he ignores two details. Rifles—of any kind—are used in a fraction of all homicides in any given year, and banning rifles will have zero impact on the criminal misuse of handguns, other than perhaps increasing the use of pistols in crime. In Biden’s case, his rifle ban rhetoric amounts to political bait-and-switch, and he’s hoping nobody notices. It’s disingenuous, if not downright dishonest.”
