The New Yorker:

A gunman carrying an assault rifle killed four people in a Manhattan skyscraper yesterday, before taking his own life. He was reportedly targeting offices of the National Football League, and left behind a note asking that his brain be studied for signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E.—a brain disease that can develop after repeated hits to the head.

Why are incidents like this still so hard to prevent? “We’re in that phase after every mass shooting when a portrait of the shooter starts to cohere and the assigning of blame begins,” Michael Luo, an executive editor at The New Yorker, told us. He pointed to reporting by ABC News and the Wall Street Journal which suggested that the suspect had, in recent years, been the subject of at least one “mental-health crisis hold” in Nevada.

Luo has written about how difficult it is to keep guns away from people with serious mental-health issues. “Under federal law, someone who has been involuntarily committed to a psychiatric facility, or designated as mentally ill or incompetent by a legal authority, is prohibited from possessing firearms,” he explained. “Very few people, including people who are profoundly troubled, ever cross this threshold.” Temporary hospitalizations, like the hold reportedly placed on the alleged shooter, “typically do not disqualify someone from being able to purchase a gun.” (A new law in Nevada does allow the police to confiscate firearms from such patients while they’re being held.)

Luo added that gun-control advocates, in recent years, have successfully pressed state legislatures across the country to pass “red-flag laws,” which offer a mechanism for judges to order that guns be temporarily taken away from someone who might be a risk to others or themselves. “The problem,” he said, “is these laws are only effective if they’re actually being used.” He noted that Nevada—where, in 2017, the deadliest mass shooting by a lone gunman in modern U.S. history took place—enacted a red-flag law in 2020, but its adoption has been slow. (In 2024, just twenty-seven orders were filed.)

“A generation of young people has now grown up with active-shooter drills in their schools,” Luo said. “Many of them are now adults and in the working world. The sad reality is, those lessons are still essential.”

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