As someone who was raised as the son of a police officer, I feel a pain upon any officer’s death in the line of duty. I remember when someone I looked up to, Officer Randy Brown, was killed in the line of duty when I was a child. That comes back every time.
I don’t give cops a pass, but I do respect the job they do, and I mourn them being killed, which is what happened to an officer in Las Vegas recently.
Now, people are asking questions about how the killer was armed, but are they the right ones?
The Las Vegas man identified by police as the gunman in the killing of a police officer had been the subject of prior welfare checks and had struggled with his mental health, according to police records and a family member.
But despite a cousin’s description of him as “detached from reality,” reports that he believed the FBI, CIA and law enforcement were harassing him, and at one point voicing suicidal thoughts before the shooting, Angel Lucas Lindsey may have still been legally entitled to buy and keep guns — because his mental health struggles may not have met state and federal thresholds to disqualify him.
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Police confirmed that Lucas Lindsey legally purchased the gun, which also occurred before he had summoned Metro officers for a wellness check in May and told a dispatcher he did not want to live. It was not clear when exactly he bought the gun.
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“Nevada largely tracks federal law where people are only prohibited if they have been adjudicated ‘mental defective,’ or they have been involuntarily committed,” Chittum said. “‘Mental defective’ means somebody has found you mentally incompetent and that could be to stand trial or some other court decision. Those are the triggering events, so if a state puts a person on a temporary mental health petition to examine them, but they’re not held beyond that, that is not a disqualifying event. Even a voluntary commitment that lasted for a very long time is not disqualifying.”
But if someone is, in fact, that far gone, they probably should be locked up for their own safety, which is possible under current law in pretty much every state, including Nevada.
That means someone is removed entirely from the ability to get a gun, even through illegal means.
It also means that someone who has that level of paranoia likely has something like schizophrenia, which can rise to the level of being enough to have someone adjudicated as “mentally defective,” especially if they’re not going to take their meds. These are people who have trouble distinguishing reality from fantasy, and they can be dangerous. Very dangerous.
While some are going to be quick to make the case, as this piece seems to do, that the problem is the laws are too permissive. They’re not. The problem is that no one seemed to see the darkness closing in with Mr. Lucas Lindsey and act in not just his best interests, but the interests of society as a whole.
As a result, an officer is dead, Mr. Lucas Lindsey is dead, and no one came out ahead except for the gun grabbers who love stuff like this, even if they say they don’t.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their extreme gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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