At the end of July, a Nevada man drove across the country to a Manhattan commercial high-rise building, where he fatally shot four people before taking his own life. Investigators believe that the shooting suspect intended to target offices belonging to the National Football League, an organization that the suspect blamed for the lingering effects of concussions he sustained while playing high school football.

In the aftermath of tragedy, human nature often compels people to seek two things: first, someone or something to blame, and second, easy solutions to prevent similar tragedies in the future.

As the responses to the New York City shooting demonstrate, however, Americans are often quite bad at calculating who or what ought to be held responsible for high-profile acts of gun violence. And, as more information comes to light about the suspect and his access to firearms, it’s increasingly evident that this shooting underscores an uncomfortable reality—sometimes, there aren’t easy solutions to complex problems.

But we can at least try to learn the right lessons.

Here are three key things the American public should understand about the New York City shooting.  

This had nothing to do with “assault weapons.”

Gun control activists and anti-gun politicians immediately fixated on the perpetrator’s use of a so-called assault weapon, blaming Nevada’s supposedly lax gun laws for the tragedy.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a longtime critic of the right to keep and bear arms, noted that the suspect used “an AR-15-style assault rifle” otherwise illegal to possess in the state. She called for Congress to pass a nationwide ban so that guns could no longer “be obtained in a state with weak gun laws and brought to New York to commit mass murder.”

Setting aside her conflation of semi-automatic rifles with “assault rifles”—which are capable of fully automatic or burst-mode firing, and which, unlike so-called semi-automatic “assault weapons,” have been heavily regulated for almost a century—her ire is wholly misplaced. 

In reality, a nationwide ban on semi-automatic rifles with pistol grips or barrel shrouds wouldn’t have mitigated the deadly outcome. Why? Because, contrary to popular mischaracterizations by gun control advocates, banning “assault weapons” isn’t the same as banning semi-automatic rifles chambered for common intermediate rifle calibers like the 5.56 NATO the suspect used.

An “assault weapon” ban only restricts a person’s ability to own a semi-automatic rifle with a detachable magazine if that rifle has certain external features like a pistol grip, barrel shroud, or a collapsible stock. But those features in no way affect the gun’s functionality or lethality. In fact, any New Yorker can readily purchase and possess a firearm that is functionally identical to the one used by the suspect—just without some of the scary-looking “features.”

In other words, had the gunman been limited to a New York-compliant “non-assault” semi-automatic rifle, he would have remained capable of shooting the same number of people with the same type of bullets that would have exited the gun with the same muzzle velocity and killed the same victims in precisely the same way.

The problem wasn’t that ordinary civilians in Nevada can legally purchase one of the nation’s most commonly possessed semi-automatic rifles—it was that a specific person with violent intentions had access to any firearm at all.   

Crisis intervention laws only work as well as we choose to use them.

As information continues to trickle out about the suspect’s mental health history, it’s becoming increasingly clear that his is an all-too-familiar story of missed opportunities and failures to utilize existing laws effectively.

We know that the suspect spent years in chronic pain, suffering from “frequent, debilitating headaches” that led him to seek out medical treatment from specialists regularly. We also know that these physical health struggles had a well-documented negative impact on the suspect’s mental health.

According to officials, he’d been placed under emergency mental health holds on two separate occasions within the last three years—once in 2022 and again in 2024. Emergency mental health holds aren’t formal civil mental health commitments. Instead, they allow police to detain a person for up to 72 hours at an emergency room or crisis center for further evaluation when they reasonably believe the person may be suffering from a mental health crisis.  

In both instances, the suspect’s mother reported to police that she was concerned her son was suicidal and had access to both firearms and sleeping pills. In neither instance did the suspect deny the allegations.

However, the state declined to initiate formal civil commitment proceedings both times and released the suspect after the emergency mental health hold expired. It’s unclear whether he independently followed up with mental health professionals, though investigators did find prescription bottles for antipsychotic and antiepileptic medications in the suspect’s home. 

In between his emergency mental health holds, the suspect was gambling at a casino when he became “agitated” and refused to cooperate with security guards after being asked to show his identification. While police initially arrested the suspect for misdemeanor trespassing, prosecutors later dropped the charges. 

All of these incidents may be concerning, but none would necessarily have prevented the suspect from legally possessing firearms.

Yes, under both Nevada and federal law, people who’ve been involuntarily committed to a mental institution are prohibited from owning firearms. And Nevada’s concealed carry permit laws require those permits to be revoked if a person is “voluntarily or involuntarily admitted to a mental health facility.”

But Nevada—like most states and the federal government—doesn’t consider an emergency mental health hold to automatically disqualify a person from his or her right to keep and bear arms. That’s because these emergency holds can be initiated without the same type of due process protections afforded during formal civil commitment proceedings, and a person subject to an emergency hold often has limited legal recourse during those 72 hours.

Even so, local officials and the suspect’s family members had an additional option for intervening.

Nevada is one of more than 20 states with a so-called “red flag law.” These laws are designed to act as stop-gap measures when a person’s actions demonstrate that he’s dangerous but he hasn’t yet committed a felony offense, doesn’t clearly suffer from a serious mental illness, or otherwise falls outside the reach of existing criminal or mental health laws designed to disarm dangerous individuals. They authorize both police officers and certain private citizens (like immediate family members) to file petitions with a court requesting that the person be temporarily disarmed because he or she poses an imminent and serious risk of violence.

Nevada’s red flag law allows courts to consider a broad range of “high-risk behaviors” as evidence that a person is dangerous. These behaviors include “engaging in a pattern of violent threats” against oneself or others, using or threatening “the use of physical force against another person,” and “engaging in conduct which presents a danger to yourself or another person while in possession…of a firearm.”

It certainly seems as though the suspect’s actions here might reasonably have warranted police or family members pursuing this avenue of temporary disarmament. In fact, situations such as these are precisely the scenarios for which red flag laws are supposed to exist. But, as with all crisis intervention laws, they’re only as effective as our willingness to use them when it matters.

Physical security measures help save lives.

For all of the laws that did not or would not work to protect innocent victims in this shooting, one factor is worth noting for the positive impact it had that day: the incredible security of the high-rise building compared to the “soft targets” that active shooters usually choose.

The suspect had to navigate several layers of physical security measures, including at least two security personnel stationed in the lobby—one of whom was an armed and uniformed police officer working off-duty as a private security contractor.

Locked turnstile gates in front of the main ground-floor elevator bank prevented anyone other than employees or authorized guests with security passes from gaining easy access to the rest of the building. Additionally, the lobby’s front desk had an emergency button that, when activated, would immediately shut down the elevators.

Unfortunately, the gunman was able to fatally shoot both security officers before they could meaningfully respond to the threat. Similarly, while advanced weapon-detection software properly flagged the suspect as armed before he entered the building, this did not, apparently, immediately trigger lockdown protocols.

Even so, these physical security barriers significantly disrupted the gunman’s plans by denying him the ability to access many floors and delaying his access to those few floors that he was eventually able to reach.

That delay mattered. It meant that an NFL employee who’d been shot and wounded in the lobby had enough time to call his colleagues and alert them to the threat. Moreover, countless potential victims then had sufficient time to hide themselves in bathrooms intentionally designed to double as “safe rooms,” or to create their own physical barriers when access to the safe rooms was impossible.

In a world where gun control activists often deride calls by school safety analysts to protect our nation’s students with similar types of physical security measures, it’s important to see how well these measures can work—even when they don’t work perfectly.

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