Do Nevada’s Red Flag Laws Do Enough to Prevent Shootings?

Malcolm X had the future belongs to those who prepare for it today. So are you prepared for your next big leadership move? That's the mission of the 19th annual Women's Leadership Conference on August 31st and September 1st at the MGM Grand Conference Center. Unite with a community of women and men, all professionals committed to growing their skills, their influence, and their impact. So they're ready to step into new horizons in their careers. Because great leaders never stop thinking, learning, and evolving. They're made not born. To attend this year's Women's Leadership Conference, visit fwle.org today. After Las Vegas, Shane Tamara was identified as the gunmen who killed four recently in New York City, New York Governor Kathy Hochul blamed Nevada's allegedly lacks gun laws. But what is working or not about our... red flag laws, the ones that are designed to identify and stop potential shooters like this from having access to firearms. Today on CityCast, Las Vegas, we talk with assembly member Sandra Hadeghie, one of the architects behind Nevada's red flag laws about how they're supposed to work and if they do. Oh, and after the interview, stick around for a conversation sponsored by Aid for AIDS, Nevada about their annual Black and White Party and the uncertainty nonprofits are facing in Las Vegas right now. It's Wednesday, September 10th. I'm David Figgler, and here's what Las Vegas is talking about.

Assembly member, Hadeghi, gun control has long been a hot topic of debate in our country. So what do the so-called red flag laws that you've championed in the Nevada legislature bring that's new or different to the table? I don't think they're new. In Nevada, we call them high-risk protection orders. And high-risk protection orders were part of a larger comprehensive gun violence prevention package that I passed in 2019. Assembly Bill 291 banned bumpstocks, which was the technology used in the horrific, you know, October 1, Route 91 mass shooting here in Las Vegas. But we didn't want to stop there. Well, I didn't want to stop there. to make sure that we were passing gun violence prevention laws that would actually make a difference in keeping our communities safe. And so the policies that we packaged together were banning bump stock technology, which I'm so happy that we did because. there was regulations on a federal level that banned them. And everyone was telling me, we don't need this state law. There's federal regulations. And lo and behold, those federal regulations were scaled back. And now Nevada is one of the few states who has a ban on bump stocks. We also implemented child safe storage loss in that bill. We reduced the blood alcohol content that. you could have, well, in possession of a firearm because it exceeded that of the DUI. And we also implemented high risk protection orders. And high risk protection orders. work in two different ways. You can file for a temporary or an extended. A temporary removes firearms from a house for seven days. An extended high-risk protection order can remove firearms from a house for up to a year. And law enforcement officers can apply for a high-risk protection order. Family members could apply for one or household members. They could file these petitions essentially somewhere in the courts, I'd imagine, or elsewhere get these types. of protective orders, and then that person would have a much more difficult time, if not an impossible time, trying to get a hold of a new firearm or be in possession of one if they're stopped. Is that a good summary? Correct. They can go and file them with the courts. They show the application, then it's either granted or not granted. And again, law enforcement can go back if a petition is granted and then remove any firearms from the household. And unfortunately, we've just, you know, the... high risk protection orders became effective January 1st, 2020. And we just haven't seen them as widely used as I would have liked here in Nevada. In other states, they're, I mean, they're so popular. And I think about, you know, maybe just.

needing to do more education. So that's something that I'm working on over the next year, doing more education on what high risk protection orders are because I'm assuming people just don't know they exist. And when they hear high risk protection order, if you are just a family member, you do not know that that means, you know, a removal of firearms from the household. Yeah, I think people are far more aware of restraining orders or protective orders, but this is definitely a very specialty. you know, pinpoint type of a protective order. You know, I'm looking up some stats here. It says in 2024, there were just 27 orders that wound up getting filed. So that does seem like it's a relatively small number. I'd imagine who would be otherwise eligible for that type of restraining. Yeah. And the reality is that's one of the years with the highest numbers of high-risk protection orders. applied for in Nevada. So I pulled, there's varying numbers. So if you, if you go and search, I know that the Nevada dependent had reported 27 to 28, but, um, I had just been in contact with the attorney general's office and the attorney general's, um, chief of staff sent me some numbers over. And in 2024, they had, they had showed only 22 high risk protection orders. And, and that's a huge jump. So, but what, what gives me hope is that. I think we just need to run a robust education campaign and that will increase the numbers because in 2022, Attorney General Ford came to the interim finance committee and asked for a $400,000 grant from ARPA dollars to create this. high risk protection order education campaign. So if you look at the numbers, in 2020, according to the attorney general's office, there was four orders issued. In 2021, there was four orders issued. In 2022, eight, in 23, 15, and in 24, 22. So he received money in 22 and then started conducting trainings. And the training they're doing is to actual law enforcement agencies. I believe from the conversation we had last week, they have one more training left and then they're out of money. But we see an uptakes. Once the training started, the number of protection orders that were issued increased. And so I'm hopeful that if we can continue doing these education campaigns to law enforcement and then also to constituency groups like. to members of the public. Let's go work with our domestic violence coalition groups. Let's go work with, you know, other groups to make sure that we're getting the word out. You know, maybe the Nevada children's advocacy. alliance because, you know, for me, when I first introduced high risk protection orders, I was like, hey, you know, firearms are the number one cause of death for children in Nevada and across the country, to be honest, but in Nevada. And the majority of that is by suicide. So, you know, hey, this is a good way to get the word out there about can we save some lives? And so I want to create robust education over the next year on these.

Yeah, I appreciate that it's more people that are filing what they feel to be a very important measure to save lives. But it does seem to be a modest increase, even with all that education to law enforcement. I mean, to go from four, you know, four protection orders issued in one year to over 20. I think it's a pretty big, it's a pretty big jump. And I'm hoping that it continues to grow. But I think we need to continue to do education. That was with money, you know, the. Attorney General had requested a grant. And I'm grateful that he did because had he not taken the initiative to even bring education, we might be living in a world where we're still issuing only four, right? But the good news is I had a Zoom with Johns Hopkins University. They actually have an extreme risk protection order resource center. And I'm going to be connecting them with the Attorney General's office because they actually come out to states and do trainings for free. So we're definitely going to get good things. for your buck there. You know, free is the right price. Free is always the right price tag. Yeah. No, I'll get that. So let's go to the big question. Do they work and how do we know? Well, I think that all gun violence prevention laws work, you know, in conglomeration together, you know, high risk protection orders alone aren't going to stop every crime with a firearm. But here in Nevada, we implemented high risk protection orders and then also banned ghost guns, which was a workaround for high risk protection orders, right? So if a prohibited person could not walk into a gun dealer and buy a firearm. they could then go online and order a ghost gun kit, which is an uncerealized frame or receiver. It's a kit that you can build at your table in 30 minutes and now you have a fully functioning firearm, right? Those two. I mean, so if you can't buy a gun, you go and you buy a ghost gun kit, now you build a firearm and now you have a gun, right? So no law is going to work 100%, but it doesn't mean we stop trying. Every year we are chipping away at the problem and our laws together. are going to make our community safer. Now, you've undoubtedly heard the old pushback that if you do continue to make these laws restricting access to guns, that only criminals are going to be getting the guns because they never follow the rules. So you're just kind of wasting time and you're probably keeping guns out of good law-abiding citizens' hands who maybe are overreacting. I don't know. But I have heard that pushback, and I'm sure you have two, including, you know, Shades of the Second Amendment. How do you respond to those? No, law-abiding citizens can walk into any dealer or any private teller, you know, enter... a contract with any private seller and purchase a firearm, there is nothing prohibiting anybody from purchasing a firearm. They can easily walk into a dealer, buy it from a private seller, right? All they have to do is pass a background check. We have not in any way restricted access to the Second Amendment. I am a firm believer that all, like, we can, we can do this. We can, you know, pass policies that protect the Second Amendment and protect second graders. Like, we can do this. So,

Do you think personally that there are people out there who should never own a gun ever? I think we have laws that say if you have been convicted of a felon, right, or if you are a danger to yourself or to others, then you are restricted from purchasing a firearm. And that's what we're trying to do. I am not trying to restrict it. And I am not here to say that, like, hey, you know, nobody should own firearms. No, we're here to balance the policies that we pass to make sure that the policies that we're passing are keeping our community safe while still protecting the Second Amendment. Yeah, I guess just to wrap that one up with a little bit of a bow, the argument is, well, you know, what you're not doing with any of the laws that you're creating is stopping, you know, people who are on the street with a bunch of unregistered guns in the back of their trunk, selling them to people who are going to use those to rob people or hurt people. So what is really the point? Yeah, well, but. Yeah, but laws 100% of the time don't stop all criminals, right? We have DUI laws. We have seatbelt laws and we still have people who drive without seatbells or drive while under the influence. We can't expect every law to work 100%, but what we do expect the laws to do is to be effective in making our communities safer.

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Do you think would be the, sorry. I don't want to say, hey, I think you use the word that, you know, things are hard and people don't want to use, people don't want to do hard things. But I don't think it's hard because you have states like Florida where these have been used thousands of time, right? Thousands. I think the last time I had checked, I think it had been like over 15,000, but they're not that hard. Like, people use them. Like, and. And actually, I just did a quick search, and it looks like Florida has used them over 20,000 times they've issued. And that's because there's huge law enforcement buy-in. So I think educating law enforcement about how easy these can be, right? I know a lot of what you've proposed stems from your very personal experience being present at the horrifying Route 91 Harvest Festival, which sadly has the distinction of being the largest mass shooting in modern history. Did 1 October change the conversation on guns in Nevada, do you think? I think Route 91, you know, the 1 October tragedy was a tragedy that impacted our entire community, not just the people who were there. You felt it throughout the state. You saw it in the number of people who turned out to help, to donate blood, to do everything they could to help the community heal. And so, you know, I think. A lot of things happened that allowed us to pass the comprehensive gun violence prevention package and universal background checks in 2019, to be completely honest with you. I think having, you know, Governors to select in the executive branch and signing the policy was what made that happen. You know, having me there to champion the issue and share my personal story helped, you know, would we have done as much if I hadn't been there? I don't know. I know that other legislators have talked about banning bum stocks. But I, you know, I wanted to do more because I never wanted a family to have to go through what I went through. So I came up with a package that was, you know, the blood alcohol content, high risk protection orders. You know, we ended up incorporating child safe storage laws. And then we had, we banned bump stops. And at one point, I also had preemption in there. But we ended up having to take that out in order to move the policy. What's preemption? Oh, I'll get to that right now because it's very important. But, you know, I passed that policy because we had a Democratic Assembly, a Democratic Senate, and a Democratic executive branch. Had there been a different governor, I don't know if we would have signed that because over my last, the last two sessions, we've had a Republican governor. And I haven't been able to get one gun violence prevention bill signed. But preemption. So unfortunately, one October happened on one October 2017. The state of Nevada or our community wasn't able to do a single thing to keep our community safe. We could not take action until the first day of the legislative session, which is the first Monday in February of the year we go into session, which happened to be 2019. So we had to wait over one year and two and a half months before we could even talk about. laws that would keep our communities safe because in 2015, when Republicans controlled the executive branch, the Senate, and the assembly, they passed a law called preemption, which preempted any local government from regulating firearms. They said that the state was the sole regulator of firearms. And when that bill was signed and passed, every single city and every single county.

in Nevada had to destroy every single law relating to firearms. And so think about it. After when October happened, you know, the city, well, that happened in Clark County, Clark County couldn't take any steps, any steps whatsoever to keep their community safe because of what had happened during the 2015 session. and the Republican control. And I believe that cities and counties, because they are closer to the constituency that they represent in the state legislature, they should be able to enact laws that are stricter than the floor. Use the state as the floor. Use the state law as the floor. But if they want to act, if they want to pass ordinances that make their community safer by passing gun. violence prevention ordinances that are potentially more restrictive to keep guns out of people's hands who yeah anything that would that would apply right there they're closer they still have to answer to voters just like we do right but they should be able to take steps that keeps their community safe because what clark county might need for gun violence prevention because of our population might be very different than what esmeralda county needs because of population or what washoe county needs or what you know or what any other, you know, Lyon County needs or Nye County. What practical advice? I mean, what do you want our listeners to know about how to make the red flags work for them? I think, you know, familiarize yourself with, you know, the high risk protection orders or extreme risk protection orders or red flag laws, right? We have to, we have to let people know that they're out there. And if you, if the process feels to daunting, contact law enforcement, right? for help, but you petition the district court. You can find the, you can find the applications online, but I don't necessarily want to say, you know, what can we do to make them easier? Because right now we can't do anything. We are, our hands are locked because we just wrapped up our legislative session this year. And we will not be able to go back into. to fix if we need to fix anything, if we want to change them to make them, you know, easier for law enforcement officers until 2027. So think about that. We cannot make any changes to our high risk protection order laws until February 2027 when we can start the discussion on them. So in the meantime, I think we just, we need to, we need to talk about it, right? We need to. Talk about that there are high risk protection order that you can apply to your district court, that you can have firearms temporarily removed for seven days. It's not forever. It's for seven days or you can have them removed for up to one year. And also, you know, if you do know someone, maybe that who isn't a household member of yours, that maybe you can't, maybe you can't file. a high-rise protection order because you don't live there, you can talk to them about the other law that we pass, the voluntary self-surrender. You know, talk to that person and say, hey, if you are experiencing a crisis, you know, you yourself can go and self-surrender your firearms for any time period, you know, to any law enforcement agency or any gun dealer with no questions asked. So.

I think getting the word out there about the laws that exist is a great start. So thank you, David, for having this discussion because I think it's really important that we talk to people and that people know that these laws exist. In your heart of hearts, and I know a lot of different motivators come to you, do you think that of some of these common sense laws as you described them and some of the laws that you've passed since 1 October were in effect what we know about the shooter there that this might have. either prevented the tragedy or done something? I don't know. And there's no way to ever know, David, right? You know, anything that we say is just a guess because we don't know. But what I care most about is that even if we prevent one death going forward, that is enough. Yeah. Well, you know, last thing, you're not going to be the advocate in the legislature for these type of, you know, laws and red flag laws, et cetera, because you have announced that you're not returning to the Nevada legislature. So what is next for you? That I don't know yet. I'm still having, you know, still. I'm still enjoying taking a break. So I am elected until November 26. So my work here isn't done. I have until November 26 to make sure that I'm doing as much as I can around high-risk protection orders. I want my legacy to be that when I left the assembly, when I left the Nevada state legislature, I did everything I can to make our community safer. You know, that work around gun violence prevention to me has been one of the most. meaningful and personal things I have done. So what's next? I don't know. I'm really enjoying spending time with my family and friends and going back to work. Those are the things that you kind of neglect over the time of being elected and running every two years. So I'm going to give myself to the fall until I make any major decisions. Is it safe to say that you're still going to be involved in gun violence prevention no matter what you end up doing? Always, always. I appreciate it. I appreciate your time. Thank you so much for joining us today here on CityCast, Las Vegas. Thank you for having me. And listener, don't go anywhere. In just a second, we've got a segment sponsored by A-FAN about how the Black and White Party will benefit their mission to provide support for adults and children affected by HIV-AIDS in Southern Nevada. Oh!

Hey, it's David here with Antioca Carrillo, Executive Director and Andrew Ryan, the marketing and events director of AFAN. So, Antioco, we have been hearing a lot about uncertainty around nonprofit funding and research. How is that impacting organizations like AFAN and the people you serve? Hi, David. Thank you for having us. You know, it has been very challenging over the last six months, several months, because... uncertainty always creates anxiety. And anxiety is not only felt within the organization, it's also felt with the clients. So the clients have a tendency to just think twice before they access services. So for us, knowing that there may be some changes in funding, it's problematic because it stops us from planning for the future, the way we planned before, and from continuing the provision of services that we had. plan in the past. Why? Because clients may not feel comfortable coming and accessing services, or we may not be able to have the services available as a result of changes in funding. And if we don't have resources available, then clients are going to fall through the cracks. Yeah. So are you saying that a lot of the community that you serve is feeling a little intimidated right now by some of the policies of the government and the uncertainty of whether or not, you know, medicine or care or services are even going to be available when they go to AFAN? Absolutely, because part of the challenge is that if there's any changes in funding, any modification in how the funds are distributed to the community, that has rippled effect down to the client. That effect affects. you know, the bottom line. People are feeling very uncomfortable. Many times, people feel that there is no more services available, and as a result, they neglect their health, and we will have a problem again with HIV. So the other concern that I have is that if there's any changes on at any level of HIV prevention funding, the infections will continue to rise. Right now, we have an average of 500. people that are newly diagnosed with HIV in Clark County, 500 a year. And I am concerned that if there's an uncertainty of funding, those numbers are going to really grow tremendously. And it's going to be a challenge for us to contain it. Yeah. I mean, A-FAN has been a long time in our community. They don't just help the LGBTQ community, but, you know, anyone who is impacted. So for anyone, listening who wants to help, what are some of the most impactful ways that people can really step up and support AFAN?

They can go to our website and they can visit our website and donate whatever amount it's always welcome. That will keep the level of services we have and that'll keep the ability for us to continue expanding some of the services we have in light of all this uncertainty. Also, they can certainly attend our events. They can certainly attend our events and purchase tickets and make sure that they are actively involved and pay attention to our social media. to see all the events that we have. When they support our events, inevitably, they support our programming. Yeah, and one of the biggest events, really, of the year for all of Las Vegas is the Big Black and White Gala. I've been in the past. It's always an incredible time. Andrew, I want to bring you in. How would you describe the experience and what guests can expect this year at the Big Black and White Gala? Well, the black and white party is the most anticipated charity event of the year in Las Vegas, mostly because it's so different. It's not a plate of dinner. It's not a sit-down event. It's a party. And it's a costume party as well. This party started out of the need to fill the food pantry for AFAN, and people were encouraged to bring generic black and white cans of food. So that's what started the dress code. And now that we've evolved, the dress code has become where as much black and white as you want or as little as you can get away with. Yeah, you know, it's funny you say it's not a sit-down event. I think if you sit down, you're really missing out. It's really a fluid event where people are dancing their butts off. And everyone really does look fabulous. I think the worst... outfit is still amazing. And, you know, we encourage people to move around, like you said, because there's photo activations, there's liquor sponsors that do liquor samplings. We have food activations, so many things to do when you can move around the party, see your friends, it's inside outside. So there's really something for everyone. Yeah, and where is it being held this year? At the Palms, which we've done several times over the years. They're sort of one of our home away from homes. Yeah, no, I used to go way back when it was at the Hard Rock. So many, many years ago. So where can listeners grab their tickets? And are there any insider tips like VIP perks or can't miss moments for those who are planning to attend? Definitely. So a fanlv.org is our website. That's where you can pick up tickets. We still have a few VIP tables left where you can get bottle service. Very limited. Those always sell out. But what I would encourage people to do if you're interested in giving a little bit more this year is look at the VIP tickets and the VIP plus tickets because we have an hour open bar during the VIP reception. So you can really start off the night right with an open bar for the first hour. And then once the main event starts at 9 o'clock, you're ready to party. have back-to-back entertainment from shows up and down the strip, special entertainment coming in from out of town. So a lot of fun, something new and exciting every 15 minutes is going to be on that stage from 9 p.m. until midnight.

Yeah, no, the entertainment is top-notch. People, like I said, dancing their butts off to the best music and just the visuals alone, absolutely worth it. Antioch and Andrew, thank you so much for being here. And again, check out afanlv.org to learn more. We'll have that link for you in our show notes as well, so you're just a click away. Thanks for listening. And that's all for today here on CityCast, Las Vegas. If you enjoyed the show, please go tell a friend. You could also rate our show, leave us a review, and subscribe to our morning newsletter. Don't forget, you could support this show and get some great perks by becoming a Citicast, Las Vegas neighbor at membership.citycass.fm. We'll be back tomorrow morning with more news from around the city. Till then, stay lucky.