On a quiet Easter Sunday at the UNLV student union, sophomore Imer Cespedes-Alvarado stood just outside the entryway to meeting room 208B and took a deep breath. While the room appears innocuous, he remembers it as the place where he hid from an active shooter that entered campus on December 6, 2023, and took the lives of three faculty members. The tragedy left him “marked for life.”
“We were hosting a small workshop with 80 students. At around 11:30 a.m., one of the organizers came into the room screaming that there was an active shooter,” Cespedes-Alvarado recalls. “I called my parents to express what I thought would be my last words and told them I loved them. They told me to trust God and that we were going to make it out of this.”
In the wake of that tragedy and the Route 91 Harvest Festival shooting known as America’s deadliest mass shooting, survivors like Cespedes-Alvarado are now urging Nevada’s state legislators to pass a set of four gun control bills before the session ends on June 2.
While the bills appear to be favorable to the Nevada Legislature’s Democratic majority, their fate ultimately lies in the hands of Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo, who vetoed similar legislation in 2023. That was before the UNLV shooting took place.
According to the gun violence prevention organization Everytown For Gun Safety, an average of 581 Nevadans lose their lives to firearms each year, while an additional 481 are injured by one. Cespedes-Alvarado, 22, is specifically using his platform as the founder of liberal advocacy group Youth Voice of Nevada to push for Senate Bill 156, which would establish a state-funded Office for the Prevention of Gun Violence under the attorney general’s jurisdiction.
He went to Carson City on April 4 to help present the bill alongside some of his peers, including UNLV senior Allister Dias, 21, another campus shooting survivor who serves as president of the Consolidated Students of UNLV (CSUN).
“What’s different about this bill is that you’re creating an office that gives us some level of oversight, while still allowing space for both voices to sound off on where a line can be drawn,” Dias says, noting that he, too, owns firearms.
“We wanted this bill to be a bridge from both sides,” Cespedes-Alvarado adds. “Now, it’s time for both Democrat and Republican elected officials—including the governor—to stop sending thoughts and prayers and take action.”
Lombardo’s office did not respond to a Weekly email asking if he intends to veto any of the four bills if they arrive at his desk. The other three are essentially revised descendants of versions he struck down in the 2023 session.
Two of those are sponsored by Democratic Assemblymember and 2017 Strip shooting survivor Sandra Jauregui. Assembly Bill 245, which already passed through the lower chamber on April 22, would make it illegal for anyone under the age of 21 to own semiautomatic shotguns and rifles. Assembly Bill 105, which is still awaiting an initial vote, would ban guns within 100 feet of an election site, with some exceptions for law enforcement officers and security.
Legislators also have yet to vote on Senate Bill 89, which seeks to prohibit anyone who has been convicted of a hate crime within the last 10 years from owning a firearm.
SB89, AB105 and A245 have garnered support from progressive groups like Battle Born Progress and Moms Demand Action, while the Clark County Republican Party and dozens of individual residents have spoken out against them. Voting rights organization Campaign Legal Center has also testified in favor of AB105, while the Nevada Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics issued support for SB156.
Diane Goldstein, a Las Vegas-based retired police lieutenant of 21 years who now serves as the executive director of Law Enforcement Action Partnership, believes these discussions have room for more nuance.
“We can support the Second Amendment and still recognize that it’s our duty and moral responsibility to prevent gun violence in our communities,” Goldstein says. “The government is never going to come for people’s guns. It’s disingenuous to say that because it would never happen in America. We just have to strike a balance.”
Of the four bills, Goldstein says she thought the bill that has already passed one chamber—the semiautomatic ban for those under 21—would face the most opposition.
“The data is clear that 18 to 20-year-olds commit gun homicides at triple the rate of adults who are 21 and older. But the difficulty for this issue is that we let 18-year-olds join the military, even though they aren’t necessarily all cognitively mature enough,” she says.
The others, she adds, “are no-brainers.”
“It’s common sense to me that we shouldn’t allow guns into places where people vote, and it’s very difficult to get convicted of a hate crime,” Goldstein says of AB105 and SB89, respectively.
Citing a “massive cognitive dissonance” between Lombardo’s preference for “tough on crime” policies and his staunch defense of Second Amendment rights, Goldstein urges him and the bills’ critics to view the situation from the lens of existing “product safety” measures.
“We’ve regulated cars, but we’ve never taken people’s cars away. When we mandated seatbelts, we educated the public before we started citing people,” Goldstein says. “We can apply the same logic and understand that prohibitions don’t work. Sensible regulations do.”
Nevada’s effort to curb the violence also extends to the federal level, where Rep. Dina Titus and Sen. Jacky Rosen are working to push a ban on bump stocks through Congress. The gunman in the 2017 Strip shooting utilized this firearm modification when he killed 60 people at the Route 91 Harvest Festival in 2017.
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