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At his school safety summit, Laxalt focuses on more officers, 'hardening' schools over gun control

Michelle Rindels
Michelle Rindels
Election 2018Government
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Republican Attorney General Adam Laxalt didn’t commit to supporting a ban on assault weapons following a law enforcement summit he hosted on Wednesday, but did float the ideas of putting a uniformed officer in every school in the state and looking for a solution to the revolving door of care for the mentally ill.

Attorney General Adam Laxalt talks to a group of state wide law enforcement and school officials during his Special Law Enforcement Summit on School Safety in Las Vegas on Wednesday, March 14, 2018. (Jeff Scheid/The Nevada Independent)

Laxalt had invited law enforcement officials from all 17 Nevada counties to the summit, which was held in both Las Vegas and Carson City and focused on school safety. He observed that there were plenty of “bright spots” in the state and that local agencies were already taking action in the wake of mass shootings like the one a month ago in Parkland, FL.

“As far as particular gun legislation, I think that the thing we need to focus on right now are the things we focused on today at the summit,” he said when asked by reporters about gun control measures that have been proposed following the shooting. “The ways we can harden the schools, do we have adequate law enforcement protection in schools? These are the concrete things we can look at today to try to make our schools safer.”

The summit comes two days after Gov. Brian Sandoval convened superintendents to discuss school safety and about two weeks after Sandoval announced intentions for a committee that would develop policy recommendations for the 2019 Legislature. Sandoval initially raised the prospect that the summit would be redundant, but Laxalt said he and Sandoval had staff members coordinating on the details of the events and that the law enforcement summit would yield a report on its discussion.

Members of the press were invited to the final hour of the four-hour summit, when Laxalt summarized some of the group’s discussions.

Attorney General Adam Laxalt during his Special Law Enforcement Summit on School Safety in Las Vegas on Wednesday, March 14, 2018. (Jeff Scheid/The Nevada Independent)

He noted that the FBI is available to help with schools’ active shooter responses, and suggested bringing schools and the construction industry together to come up with solutions that could reinforce campuses and consolidate entry points.

One suggestion was beefing up the police presence at Nevada’s nearly 700 public schools.

“We did discuss whether or not there should be a uniformed officer in every single school in this state,” he said.

It wasn’t immediately clear how close Nevada is to having one officer per school. In the Clark County School District, the state’s largest, there are 132 officers, which translates to one police officer dedicated to each high school (but that doesn’t necessarily include magnet or career and technical schools). It also includes a patrol division that visits middle and elementary schools.

“And whether or not it has to be an officer in every school or a roving situation, but you see very different approaches across the state of Nevada,” Laxalt said. “And so we do plan on trying to analyze that and get a grip on what’s working, what’s not working in the state of Nevada.”

Asked about President Donald Trump’s suggestion of arming teachers, Laxalt said he didn’t want to make teachers carry around weapons if they didn’t feel comfortable doing so.

“If you’re asking whether the government should mandate that all teachers should be armed, my answer is absolutely not,” he said. “I do think we should look at whether jurisdiction to jurisdiction, or rather school to school, if you have a retired military or retired law enforcement that’s also a teacher and that person wants to try to add resources to that school and that school’s comfortable with it, you know, I think that’s probably a pretty common sense solution.”

Laxalt said law enforcement attendees were primarily focused on mental health. He said the Legal 2000 process for temporarily institutionalizing a person who is a danger to themselves or others isn’t working and is not applied consistently across the state.

“To the extent that we can find a consistent approach, that is a start,” he said, “but ultimately, unless we have law enforcement have ... mobile response teams, mental health folks embedded with them — we’re going to see the cycle continue and continue and continue.”

Attorney General Adam Laxalt during his Special Law Enforcement Summit on School Safety in Las Vegas on Wednesday, March 14, 2018. (Jeff Scheid/The Nevada Independent)

One idea was to create a state database with information about mental health that police officers could access so they would have forewarning when arriving on a scene, Laxalt said.

He also said the state needs to ensure that information is properly and promptly entered into a database used for gun background checks.

“We also need to make sure that our background check system is getting all of the information fed into it and that wasn’t particularly conclusive today,” he said. “That’s something that we want to follow up on. But we need to make sure that the wrong people that are not supposed to have guns don’t have guns.”

Laxalt, however, opposed a 2016 ballot measure that would have required those checks cover more private-party gun sales and transfers, and his office authored a legal opinion saying the ballot measure was unenforceable. The matter is caught up in courts.

Asked how the state would budget for the improvements the summit attendees discussed, Laxalt, considered the leading Republican gubernatorial candidate, said “this has to be a priority for the state."

“One thing we’re going to look at is what resource gaps there are,” he said.

Attorney General Adam Laxalt, center, addresses a group of state wide law enforcement and school officials during his Special Law Enforcement Summit on School Safety in Las Vegas on Wednesday, March 14, 2018. (Jeff Scheid/The Nevada Independent)

In the wake of the Parkland shooting, Laxalt was listed as a featured speaker at the National Rifle Association’s meeting in Dallas in May before his name was removed from the website a few days later. Asked whether he was ever confirmed or whether he still planned to speak, Laxalt said he wouldn’t answer the question because it wasn’t related to his official duties as attorney general and referred the matter to his campaign.

The campaign said he was never confirmed with the NRA meeting, and that he still hasn’t solidified his schedule enough to say he’ll attend.

Asked about the school walkouts happening across the country, also prompted by the one month anniversary of Parkland, Laxalt said he shared their fundamental goal of school safety.

“Of course I applaud students that want to be active,” he said. “You know, their intentions are what all of our intentions are — I’m a father, I have three little kids. And we want to make school safe. They’re entitled to that. They should have that as a baseline.”

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