The Gun Violence Archive website, as of this writing, lists 21 mass shootings so far this month in the United States.
Three children and a teacher killed at a Bend, Ore., school on Oct. 15; a good Samaritan shot and killed the perpetrator. Five people killed (including the suspect) in Douglas, Ga., on Oct. 9. Four people injured on Oct. 4 right here in Reno.
Nine years ago, the epidemic of gun violence was the topic of the RN&R‘s cover story, penned by Dennis Myers. Nevadans were still in shock over the massacre at the Route 91 Harvest music festival in Las Vegas—the deadliest mass shooting in the country’s history—just a couple of weeks before. Dennis delved into the steps many Nevada lawmakers had taken in recent years to avoid gun-control efforts—even disregarding a ballot initiative narrowly passed by voters in 2016 expanding background checks.
A portion of the piece:
Sage Leehey was not sure where the bullets were coming from at the Route 91 Harvest country-music festival in Las Vegas. Actually, she wasn’t initially certain they were bullets.
She is young (25), very smart (a magna cum laude graduate of the University of Nevada, Reno), a fine writer (a former special projects editor for the RN&R), and now a teacher.
The situation seemed unreal to her as she and her friend Torre ran from place to place seeking somewhere to hide. That wasn’t easy when they didn’t know the bullets were coming from above. They thought it was ground level. “We just assumed it was on the ground, so we didn’t want to stay there.” Still, the popping did not sound like gunfire.
Then they encountered something that made it real—a body. It was very bloody.
At some point, she texted her parents, sister in law, and others a message she remembers as, “There are gunshots. I’m not sure that they’re real. I love you all.”
She kept telling herself, “Don’t lose Torre. Don’t lose my phone.”
They ran into the media tent. Tables there were overturned, and they crouched behind one. “Some guy came up and told us, ’No, no, no.’ He lifted up the tent.” They crawled out. The fellow stayed with them.
“We found his car and got down in the back.” He drove out of the area. “We decided to go to Town Square. I told my parents to come get us there.”
The immediate terror was over for Leehey, though like so many, she’s still badly shaken.
In the days after the massacre, Nevadans became familiar with the kind of didn’t-think-it-could-happen-here and what-does-this-mean questions that have previously afflicted folks in Colorado, Oregon, Connecticut and other places.
These incidents may not be omnipresent, but it sometimes seems so. A Canadian newspaper, the Toronto Metro News, was doing a telephone interview on Oct. 6 with Arizona gun control activist Jennifer Longdon about the mass shooting in Las Vegas when she got a text. It told her there had just been another one, this one in Arizona itself, about 45 minutes from Longdon’s home—four shot dead in Casa Grande. Longdon, a candidate for the Arizona Legislature, is herself paralyzed as the result of being shot by a stranger in a 2004 road rage incident. Three violent incidents are referenced in this paragraph.
The comic newspaper the Onion ran a story about the Las Vegas killings under the headline “’No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”
It ran similar stories after the mass murders in Isla Vista, California, in 2014, and in Charleston, South Carolina; San Bernardino, California; and Roseburg, Oregon—all in 2015. All of them headlined “’No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”
The Columbia Journalism Review asked, “Is the Onion’s repeated republishing of a satirical article about the inevitability of mass shootings still satire when it is no longer a caricature but actual news?”
There was commentary on Nevada, too. In the United States, readers read this headline in USA Today and YouTube: “Yes, you can buy a machine gun in Nevada.”
In Britain, readers read the headline, “Nevada voters approved a new gun control law—so why was it not enforced?”
But Nevada’s peculiar image lent itself to this kind of thing. No one raised questions about Nebraska or Indiana after incidents in Omaha and Terre Haute. …
The politicians and gun lobby skillfully framed the post-Las Vegas issue around peripheral matters, like bump stocks and silencers, not automatic and semi-automatics, and journalists went for it like children offered candy by strangers.
Gun regulation is not the only issue. It’s also whether gun regulation is discussed. The gun lobby tries to suppress such discussion. There is a federal law which vaguely discourages gun control research. No one knows exactly what that means, but at the CDC, they got the message. No one is going to put a job on the line over such an ambiguous instruction. At the Nevada Legislature, when a committee was formed in 2012 to advise legislators on criminal justice and recommend law changes, the committee voted 8 to 5 not to talk about assault weapons. Silence is always politically safe.
Since this piece ran nine years ago, Nevada has taken some meaningful gun-control steps. The Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence today gives the state a B- grade.
The Giffords site says: “In recent years, Nevada enacted an extreme risk protection order law, trigger activator ban, and child access prevention law as part of a bill introduced by Assemblywoman Sandra Jauregui, a survivor of the Las Vegas Route 91 shooting. In 2024, Nevada had the 17th highest gun death rate among the states. In an average year, 599 people die from gun violence in the state. That means someone dies from gun violence every 15 hours. Sixty-eight percent of those deaths are gun suicides, and 29% are gun homicides. In Nevada, the rate of gun deaths increased 16% from 2015 to 2024, compared to a 15% increase nationwide.”
Meanwhile, gun violence nationwide continues at a staggering rate. Dennis wrote: “These incidents may not be omnipresent, but it sometimes seems so.” Alas, in 2026, they seem pretty omnipresent.
I wrote all of the above on Sunday, Oct. 18. Before sending this morning (Monday the 19th), I refreshed the Gun Violence Archive page, and the October mass shootings listed increased from 21 to 27. Within the last day, four shootings—in Philadelphia, Chicago, Baltimore and Humble, Texas—combined have killed four victims, and injured 14 others.
—Jimmy Boegle
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