How did shooter get his guns?
Man who killed five people was barred from having firearms; gun-law critics fault enforcement
The Tehama County mass shooter was barred from having firearms, and he once surrendered his rifle at the behest of a judge.
But Kevin Janson Neal still ended up with homemade and borrowed weapons he used to kill five people, it was learned Wednesday — reviving questions on whether strict laws and police can effectively keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people.
Neal, who was shot and killed by authorities after his Tuesday rampage, was known widely in his community as an unstable character who fired hundreds of rounds indiscriminately at his home. But a torrent of complaints from neighbors spurred noth-
ing more than passive doorknocking at Neal’s home, officials acknowledged.
Assistant Sheriff Phil Johnston said authorities responded to calls regarding Neal several times, but the 44-year-old Neal wouldn’t open the door, so they left.
“He was not law enforcement friendly. He would not come to the door,” Johnston said. “You have to understand we can’t anticipate what people are going to do. We don’t have a crystal ball.”
But legal experts say a more aggressive response was warranted given the reports of gunfire involving Neal, who according to a judge’s protective order was prohibited from having guns.
That prohibition was a condition of Neal’s release on bail after he was charged earlier this year with stabbing a female neighbor who would eventually become one of his murder victims. On Wednesday, the victims list grew when his wife’s bullet-riddled body was found underneath the floorboards of his home.
They believe her slaying was the start of the rampage. Neal then shot two of his neighbors in an apparent act of revenge over
their complaints to authorities before he went looking for random victims, ultimately killing five people, all adults, and wounding 10 at different locations that included the community’s elementary school.
Neal’s family said they worried for years about his mental state. His relatives had sought to get him treatment for what they believed was an apparent mental illness, according to his sister, Sheridan Orr. She described the tragedy of the past two days as her worst fear come to life.
“If you could’ve seen him in those rages,” Orr, 46, said in a telephone interview. “Anything was possible.”
“He never should have had guns, and he should’ve been able to get mental health care,” she said.
Records show that after the protective order was issued, Neal certified that he surrendered his weapons in February. But Johnston said Wednesday authorities had recovered two homemade assault rifles belonging to Neal, and two handguns in his possession that were registered to someone else.
That development incensed Craig DeLuz, a spokesman for the Sacramento-based Firearms Policy Coalition, who saw the tragedy as an example of gun-control laws being more intrusive than effective.
“If law enforcement had
the ability to do that, why didn’t they?” DeLuz said, referring to the confiscation of Neal’s weapons. “We have some of the strictest gun laws in the country, and this still occurs.”
He added: “This goes to show that the only people affected by these laws are the law-abiding. There was a failure of the government to enforce those laws, and yet the answer folks keep coming up with is that we need more gun laws.”
It was unclear Wednesday whether Neal was in the database for the state’s Armed and Prohibited Persons System, a one-of-akind program designed to automatically track firearm
owners and proactively disarm convicted criminals, people with certain mental illnesses, and others deemed dangerous.
If Neal was identified by the APPS program, agents from the state Department of Justice’s Bureau of Firearms would have sent agents to actively seize his weapons. However, the system has a sizable backlog, and it’s unknown whether Neal would have been a priority given that he surrendered his registered rifle. The weapons he purportedly used in the Tuesday shooting were not registered.
“It’s a big task because there are so many people
who are in possession of guns who should not be, that it takes a lot of time for the state to track them all down,” said John J. Donohue III, a law professor at Stanford University.
The California Department of Justice said because of privacy restrictions, information about whether Neal was in the APPS database could not be released.
In the absence of state efforts, the task for keeping guns away from Neal fell to local law enforcement. Donohue on Wednesday offered a measure of sympathy for the dangers of disarming a character like Neal.
“It’s not a happy situation for police to go to the house of somebody identified as someone violent, and try to take their guns away,” he said, “especially with the rhetoric of the NRA, telling them the government is coming to take their guns.”
Donohue said he believes Americans, faced with nonstop media exposure over the past month and a half of mass shootings in Las Vegas and Texas, should muster the political will to bolster gun-control programs like APPS rather than grouse about inconsistent enforcement.
“I do think that Americans are now starting to focus on gun violence with all of these recent shootings,” he said.
He even suggested the current atmosphere should cultivate synergy between gun-rights advocates and their counterparts.
“Pass a gun tax and use that money to fund programs to take away guns from people who become criminals, and that socalled good guy with a gun who went bad,” Donohue said. “These programs are underfunded, but people spend billions a year on guns, and we could stand to spend a little bit of that to take them away from criminals.”