Records released this week by Las Vegas Metropolitan Police confirm they had several contacts in recent years with Shane Tamura, the 27-year-old man who drove to New York and killed four people on July 28. The records show he was known to suffer from mental illness, had been the subject of two emergency psychiatric evaluations, and yet was still allowed to buy firearms legally — including the AR-15-style rifle used in New York.
The information includes 911 calls from Tamura's mother, who reported that her son was suicidal, and that he'd been diagnosed with anxiety, depression and bipolar disorder. She also told dispatchers her son had owned a gun in the past, and might still have one.
The incidents, in 2022 and 2024, both resulted in police filing paperwork to commit Tamura to emergency psychiatric care, often referred to as a "mental health hold."
Tamura was still allowed to buy firearms because Nevada doesn't automatically upload information about temporary mental health holds to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), according to Jeff Swanson, a Duke University professor who studies the intersection of law and public safety, and has written about the firearms background check system.
"About half the states do have a law that would render one of those short-term holds — a 72-hour hold — a gun-disqualifying record," Swanson says. But not Nevada.
"Under Nevada law, a law enforcement officer or health care professional can initiate a 72-hour emergency mental health [hold] for a person deemed [a] danger to [him or herself] or others. This does not automatically trigger a firearm prohibition under federal or state law, unless it progresses to a court-ordered involuntary commitment," he wrote to NPR in an email. "These emergency holds by themselves are not reported to NICS and wouldn't show up in a background check."
Swanson adds that when it comes to identifying people who pose a risk, the criteria for inclusion in the NICS federal background check system for mental incapacity "tend to be too broad and too narrow at the same time."
Under federal law, a person must be "adjudicated" as a "mental defective" by a court or other authority before being included in the national list of people prohibited from buying guns. NICS currently has more than eight million names in that category.
"They identify lots of people who are never going to be violent, but they might have had a civil commitment 20 years ago. And then there are a lot of other people who might have really impulsive anger traits and a really short fuse and they're not prohibited, necessarily, because they don't have one of these records," Swanson says.
Swanson puts more stock in "red flag" laws, which allow police and sometimes family members to ask courts to issue emergency risk protection orders, or ERPOs, for someone in a mental health crisis who's deemed a threat to self or others.
Twenty-one states have red flag laws, including Nevada. Its law allows a court to confiscate a person's guns, and block that person's right to buy new ones, for up to one year.
If a year-long ERPO had been issued for Tamura after his last mental health hold, last August, he would not have been allowed to buy the rifle he used in New York last month — at least, not legally. But there's no record the police tried to get an order for him.
April Zeoli, a gun violence researcher at the University of Michigan, says there's great variation in how often ERPOs are requested, from one place to another.
"Mainly, this is on law enforcement, and how much they know about it," she says. "If a jurisdiction, a state, a locality isn't actively training law enforcement officers on how to use this, it won't be used."
She says officers should be given step-by-step instructions for how to ask a court to intervene when a gun owner appears to have become a danger. In 2022, the Nevada attorney general's office announced a program to pay for some red flag law training for police and affected family members.
But Nevada continues to lag far behind other states in the number of ERPOs issued by courts: only 28 in 2024, compared to thousands per year in states such as California and Florida. Politics may also play a role. The state's red flag law passed in 2019 with no Republican support, and some sheriffs in other parts of the west have resisted using the laws, calling them a threat to gun rights.
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