A New York City police officer walks past flowers placed outside the midtown office building where a gunman killed four people on July 29, 2025 in New York City.
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Stephanie Keith/Getty Images North America
Records released this week by Las Vegas Metropolitan Police confirm they had several contacts in recent years with Shane Tamura, the 27-year-old man who drove to New York and killed four people on July 28. The records show he was known to suffer from mental illness, had been the subject of two emergency psychiatric evaluations, and yet was still allowed to buy firearms legally — including the AR-15-style rifle used in New York.
The information includes 911 calls from Tamura’s mother, who reported that her son was suicidal, and that he’d been diagnosed with anxiety, depression and bipolar disorder. She also told dispatchers her son had owned a gun in the past, and might still have one.
The incidents, in 2022 and 2024, both resulted in police filing paperwork to commit Tamura to emergency psychiatric care, often referred to as a “mental health hold.”
Tamura was still allowed to buy firearms because Nevada doesn’t automatically upload information about temporary mental health holds to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), according to Jeff Swanson, a Duke University professor who studies the intersection of law and public safety, and has written about the firearms background check system.
“About half the states do have a law that would render one of those short-term holds — a 72-hour hold — a gun-disqualifying record,” Swanson says. But not Nevada.
“Under Nevada law, a law enforcement officer or health care professional can initiate a 72-hour emergency mental health [hold] for a person deemed [a] danger to [him or herself] or others. This does not automatically trigger a firearm prohibition under federal or state law, unless it progresses to a court-ordered involuntary commitment,” he wrote to NPR in an email. “These emergency holds by themselves are not reported to NICS and wouldn’t show up in a background check.”
Swanson adds that when it comes to identifying people who pose a risk, the criteria for inclusion in the NICS federal background check system for mental incapacity “tend to be too broad and too narrow at the same time.”
Under federal law, a person must be “adjudicated” as a “mental defective” by a court or other authority before being included in the national list of people prohibited from buying guns. NICS currently has more than eight million names in that category.
“They identify lots of people who are never going to be violent, but they might have had a civil commitment 20 years ago. And then there are a lot of other people who might have really impulsive anger traits and a really short fuse and they’re not prohibited, necessarily, because they don’t have one of these records,” Swanson says.
Swanson puts more stock in “red flag” laws, which allow police and sometimes family members to ask courts to issue emergency risk protection orders, or ERPOs, for someone in a mental health crisis who’s deemed a threat to self or others.
Twenty-one states have red flag laws, including Nevada.
The law in place allows a court to seize an individual’s firearms and prevent them from purchasing new ones for up to one year.
If Tamura had been subject to a year-long ERPO following his previous mental health evaluation in August, he would have been prohibited from legally acquiring the rifle he used in the recent incident in New York. However, there is no indication that law enforcement attempted to obtain such an order for him.
According to April Zeoli, a gun violence researcher at the University of Michigan, the frequency of ERPO requests varies significantly from one location to another.
“Ultimately, it comes down to law enforcement and their awareness of the law,” she explains. “If law enforcement agencies in a jurisdiction are not actively training their officers on how to utilize this tool, it is unlikely to be utilized.”
Zeoli suggests that officers should be provided with detailed instructions on how to seek court intervention when a gun owner displays signs of being a threat. In 2022, the Nevada attorney general’s office launched a program to fund red flag law training for law enforcement and affected family members.
Despite these efforts, Nevada still falls behind other states in the issuance of ERPOs by courts, with only 28 issued in 2024, in contrast to thousands issued annually in states like California and Florida. Political considerations may also be a factor. Nevada’s red flag law was passed in 2019 without any Republican support, and some sheriffs in other Western states have been hesitant to implement the laws, citing concerns about gun rights infringement.
