Shooting at Nebraska Target highlights gaps in gun laws
OMAHA, NEB. >> In the last three years of his life, Joseph Jones was repeatedly sent to psychiatric hospitals because of his schizophrenia and delusions that a drug cartel was after him. The Nebraska man once lay down on a highway in Kansas because he wanted to be run over by a truck, but officers tackled him as he ran in front of vehicles. Time and time again, his family and the police took away his guns.
But Jones was able to keep legally buying firearms and law enforcement could do little. Once a deputy returned a Glock pistol to him, while another time a sheriff’s department confiscated his gun, although keeping it raised questions. Last month, Jones opened fire in an Omaha Target store using a legally purchased AR-15 rifle. No one was hit by Jones’ gunfire, but police shot and killed the 32-year-old as shoppers fled in panic.
The episode demonstrates how gun laws fail to keep firearms out of the hands of deeply troubled people, despite a national effort to pass red-flag laws in recent years.
Mental health experts say most people with mental illness are not violent and that they are far more likely to be victims of violent crime. Access to firearms is a big part of the problem.
“For him to be allowed to buy a firearm, there’s no excuse for it,” Jones’ uncle, Larry Derksen Jr., said. “It was just inevitable that something was going to happen.”
In August 2021, a deputy was called because Derksen didn’t want to return a gun to his nephew, who had just been released from a psychiatric hospital. Derksen said Jones was paranoid, had been hearing voices, and had traveled through several states fearing a cartel was chasing him, according to a Sarpy County Sheriff’s Office incident report.
But Jones told the deputy that he was taking medication, he felt fine and had no plans to hurt anyone. The gun was clean, and the only conviction Jones had was for a DUI after he collided with another vehicle on his way home from a bar years earlier.
“I had no reason,” the deputy wrote in the report, “to believe Joseph could not possess a firearm.”
Nebraska isn’t among the 19 states with a redflag law. Also known as extreme risk protection orders, they’re intended to restrict the purchase of guns or temporarily remove them from people who may hurt themselves or someone else.
A red-flag law has been proposed for Nebraska this year, but it hasn’t received a legislative hearing yet.
“This is a kind of example screaming out for an extreme risk protection order,” said Kris Brown, the president of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. “It actually breaks my heart that that did not happen here.”
Federal law has banned some mentally ill people from buying guns since 1968, including those deemed a danger to themselves or others, who have been involuntarily committed, or judged not guilty by reason of insanity or incompetent to stand trial.
But it sets what Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives spokesman John Ham described as a “very high bar.” In order for someone’s name to be submitted to the FBI for inclusion in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, they must undergo a hearing in which they are deemed unable to take care of their personal business because of mental illness.