A maintenance worker employed by the city of Las Vegas is behind bars and facing murder charges after allegedly shooting and killing a co-worker earlier this month, and the Las Vegas Review Journal says the murder of 41-year-old Joey McLean would “likely” not have happened were it not for the city’s handling of the months-long feud between the pair.
What’s remarkable about the paper’s stance is that the editor’s aren’t pointing the finger at a city policy that allows many municipal employees to lawfully carry on the job, so long as they possess a valid carry license.
Authorities still haven’t said whether 31-year-old Brysen Kim, who’s accused of shooting McClean at a city maintenance yard, even has a carry permit, but that hasn’t stopped some gun control advocates from blaming the city’s carry policy for the shooting. The Review-Journal, however, has a very different take.
At a news conference last week, Mayor Shelley Berkley defended city policy, which allows municipal employees who have concealed carry permits, or whose jobs require firearms, to pack heat while on the clock. Workers can be disciplined for displaying or wielding their weapons without cause.
“We follow state law,” Mayor Berkley said, “and state law allows concealed carry. Whether I think that’s great or not is irrelevant. We can pass any ordinance we want, but if it is in contradiction with state law, state law will prevail.”
Indeed, a more pressing concern in this unfortunate case is that city officials apparently let a longtime feud simmer to a boil for months without taking concrete steps to end it.
According to the arrest report, the two men had been engaged in a number of run-ins, with the dispute having been “brewing for approximately six months, all of which involved” the city’s Human Resources Department. A co-worker of the men told police that “Brysen (Kim) was a good person and always friendly, but Joey (McLean) was a nuisance and often caused problems in the workplace causing friction within the team and company.”
The pair’s supervisor told investigators that he would take complaints from the men “and email his supervisors, along with HR, outlining some of the issues.” He estimated this had happened five or six times. The supervisor said that McLean was a “complicated worker” who had recently come back to his job after being put on a 15-day administrative leave — which is typically paid — for refusing to work.
Honestly, when I saw the paper’s headline calling the shooting “a tragedy that could have been prevented,” I was steeling myself for a dumb argument that, if only the city’s property were “gun-free zones” this never would have happened. I’m glad to see the Review-Journal’s editors aren’t that simplistic or naive.
Instead, the editors correctly point out that the city’s HR department was well aware of the growing animosity between Kim and McLean, but apparently took no steps to defuse the situation.
I don’t know all of the details about the disputes, but one thing from the editorial stands out to me: McLean getting a 15-day paid suspension for refusing to work. In the private sector, that would typically have led to McLean getting fired, not a three-week paid vacation. What does it take to actually be terminated for cause by the city of Las Vegas, and why weren’t those steps taken after McLean refused to do the job he was being paid to do?
Brysen Kim maintains that he killed McLean in self-defense, a position the prosecutors in Clark County vehemently dispute. We’ll see what evidence emerges as the case moves forward, but I’m glad that in the court of public opinion, one of the city’s biggest media outlets has correctly pointed to the city’s inaction, not its carry policy, as adding fuel to the feud between the two men.
Editor’s Note: The mainstream media generally continues to deflect, gaslight, spin, and lie about our right to keep and bear arms, which is what makes this particular editorial so noteworthy.
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