LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — It's a list that no state ever wants to be a part of, though Nevada is squarely in that position.
The state was among the Top 10 in the nation last year for active shooter events, according to the FBI, which are defined by the agency as when a person is "actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a confined and populated area."
There were 48 such events registered by the FBI last year, two of them taking place in Las Vegas — the UNLV campus shooting from Dec. 6 and the Turnberry Towers shooting about six months before that.
With the two shootings, Nevada ended last year in a tie with several states for sixth in the country in active shooting events. California had the most with eight while Texas and Washington were next with four.
Thanks to some quick work by a Turnberry employee on June 23, 2023, that incident didn't result in any loss of life. The same couldn't be said of the UNLV shooting, where a disgruntled professor, who had tried to get hired at the school, opened fire in a campus building, killing three and wounding one.
Thanks to some bravery on the part of responding police officers, the UNLV shooter was confronted and died in a shootout with police about 10 minutes after he opened fire on three UNLV faculty members.
"I think there's more of these (shootings) simply because more folks have access to guns because of the sheer number of them being manufactured in the United States," said Tom Roberts, a former Metro Police assistant sheriff who also served in the Nevada Assembly for a time.
Roberts says law enforcement has steadily improved in how it prepares and responds to active shooter situations.
"Here in Las Vegas, we learned from 1 October," Roberts said, referencing the tragic shooting from 2017 when a gunman opened fire on festival-goers near the Mandalay Bay resort on the Strip. "For most of our special events, we prepare for open-air venues. We have countermeasures in place. We have people in place so that if there is an active shooter, we have a position of strength and we have people who can respond."
As far as where the active shooters in 2023, the FBI report showed that 28 of the 48 happened in "open spaces." The next most popular location for shooters was businesses, listed as places of "commerce" in the report.
Along with Florida, Arizona, Ohio and Tennessee, Nevada was tied for the sixth-most active shooter incidents last year.
And while there are positive signs, these types of shootings have been on the rise overall in recent years.
From the start of 2019 through the end of 2023, the FBI recorded 229 active shooter situations, an 89% increase from the five-year period from 2014 through 2018.
