LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — Sandra Jauregui still remembers the night of 1 October 2017, the day she had to flee for her life as bullets rained down on the Route 91 Harvest music festival.
She remembers dropping her phone, unable to call her family to tell them she’d survived the carnage. She remembers being unable to talk about it with anyone, even long after the echoes of the high-powered rifle faded.
Jauregui, a Democratic Nevada assemblywoman, remained silent about her experience for a long time.
“Until Parkland happened,” she said, referring to the Feb. 14, 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in a Miami suburb.
“And then Parkland happened and I couldn’t believe that teenage students, high school students, would have to experience the same trauma that I was still dealing with. It was months after, and I was just like, I have to do something.”
That something was to author or co-sponsor several bills aimed at controlling firearms and preventing more mass shootings in Nevada. Those include a red-flag law in 2019 that allows a judge to take a person’s guns away if a family member or police officer makes a case showing the person is a danger to themselves or others.
In 2021, she passed a law that regulated so-called ghost guns, firearms kits that can be quickly assembled into working firearms. A lawsuit filed by the Nevada-based Polymer80 — the nation’s largest ghost gun maker — tied the measure up in court for years, until the Nevada Supreme Court recently upheld the law.
And in 2023, she passed a law trying to raise the age to buy a semi-automatic rifle from 18 years old to 21, to match the age limit for handguns. That law was vetoed by Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo, who was elected in 2022.
Lombardo explained that he thought the law would not have survived constitutional scrutiny.
Despite his veto of the age bill — and other measures to prohibit firearms to people convicted under hate-crime enhancements and to ban firearms at polling places in Nevada — Lombardo says he’s not opposed to all gun laws.
He says he supports the state’s ban on bump stocks, accessories that allow semi-automatic firearms to operate at a higher rate of fire. And he opposes so-called constitutional carry, the notion that people are authorized to carry concealed weapons without getting a permit and the training that comes with it.
Asked if there was any law that could be passed that would make people safer, however, Lombardo answered simply, “top of mind? No.”
“And I’ve always said this publicly and I’ll say it to you today is, there’s a lot of existing laws that the prosecutors have been soft on,” added Lombardo, a former two-term Clark County sheriff.
“In other words, anything associated with the use of a weapon in the commission of a crime should be prosecuted robustly. And I think that will have a definitive influence on the criminal mindset and the ability to use a weapon for ill will."
Lombardo said he would “evaluate” a bill dealing only with banning firearms at polling places, the way they’re currently banned in government buildings, schools, secure areas of airports and other “sensitive places.” He said he vetoed the polling-place measure in 2023 because it also contained language pertaining to ghost guns, language that proved to be unnecessary because of the state Supreme Court’s subsequent ruling.
The ghost gun issue is a sensitive one for Lombardo. While he was still sheriff, he was asked if ghost guns posed a crime problem, and he said no, saying just six had been used in crimes. An investigation conducted by APM Reports and KUNR based on police records, however, put the number much higher; more than 200 were seized by officers.
“The governor went on record and lied and said that ghost guns weren’t an issue. Those were his words,” Jauregui said. “‘Ghost guns are not an issue in Nevada. We had just six incidents of ghost guns.’ And that was a lie. That was a lie that put the lives of Nevadans at risk.”
Lombardo says he questions the numbers, but admits that the department didn’t track ghost guns or “privately manufactured firearms” using the same terms on every report. The six incidents he cited are what he was told by the Metro Police department at the time, he said.
“Words matter, right?” Lombardo said. “So you say crimes versus whether they were seized as part of normal police practice or an encounter by police with an individual in possession of” a ghost gun.
“And then there’s people out there calling me a liar associated with that number and it’s important for people to understand that’s the number I knew at the time. And I question the accuracy of the 200-plus number,” he added.
“So there’s a lot of nuances with it and it’s hard for people to wrap their minds around it, but for somebody to allege that I have a lack of integrity and I’m a liar is absolutely false.”
For Jauregui, the gun issue isn’t going away.
“And so I’m going to champion these issues,” she says.
“I’m going to bring those [vetoed bills] back. I’m going to bring other laws that I think are going to make a difference and actually make our community safer. And I’m going to hope that we have a governor who believes in common sense approaches to keep our community safe and signs these bills.”
Among the laws she pledges to bring is one that would allow local governments to pass stricter gun controls than the state.
But those laws will come up against Lombardo again in 2025, and he showed in 2023 that he wasn’t afraid to use his veto pen, rejecting a record 75 bills in a single session. If Democrats failed to muster a two-thirds supermajority in the Legislature — an outcome Lombardo is working hard to prevent — Democrats, including Jauregui, will have to achieve consensus in order to get their measures passed.
Still, Jauregui is undeterred.
“We’re never going to pass all of them at once, right? But I think it’s something we have to work on every single legislative session until we end this epidemic that’s plaguing our generation,” she says.
“Not every law is going to stop every crime. You know, we instituted seat-belt laws and that’s not going to save every life. But that means we have to try, because if we save one life, I think that’s enough."
If you have questions about gun laws or what's being done in the legislature — or if you just want to share your thoughts after watching our panel discussion — you can do that at ktnv.com/asksteve.
