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UNLV School Shooting: 67-Year-Old Gunman Kills 3, Injures 1 at University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Ryan Brennan
UNLV School Shooting: 67-Year-Old Gunman Kills 3, Injures 1 at University of Nevada, Las Vegas

via Shutterstock (Ken Wolter)

The UNLV school shooting that occurred on Wednesday (Dec. 6) was the 80th school shooting of 2023 – one more than the 79 we witnessed in 2022. The most recent attack was executed by Anthony Polito, a 67-year-old college professor who recently applied for employment at UNLV, but allegedly wasn’t hired. 

The shooting commenced at around noon. Polito was on the fourth floor of Beam Hall – home of UNLV’s Lee Business School – when he started firing shots. The building was occupied by professors and students, while plenty more students and faculty were gathered outside the building for a fun event. 

Polito ended up killing three people and injuring one more (their condition has since been stabilized) – names of the victims have yet to be released – as he made his way through the building. He was met by law enforcement outside the building, where he was taken down – though it’s unclear how Polito died. 

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Investigators are still searching for a motive, but Las Vegas Metro Sheriff Kevin McMahill believes the gunman grew angry when he was passed over for a job as a professor at the school. Anthony Polito was most recently a business professor at East Carolina University, but hasn’t worked in more than six years. 

“I heard three loud booms, and I was like, ‘Oh, what was that?’ Police showed up, then I ran inside,” said one student, who was eating breakfast outside of Beam Hall when the shooting began. “After two minutes, more shots. I ran into the basements, and I was there for 20. I was just hearing a lot of shots.”

Another student, who was attending a class inside Beam Hall, said his professor stopped the lecture when the UNLV school shooting started, but continued the lecture because it didn’t sound like a gunshot. It wasn’t until alarms went off that they knew what it was – and that’s when the horror and panic settled in. 

“Then an alarm came on. I’ve never heard an alarm like that before, it didn’t sound like a fire alarm. When we began to walk out of the class, that’s when things got real,” said Brett Johnsen – adding that they were ‘basically sitting ducks’ inside the classroom. “It looked like every single cop in Las Vegas was at UNLV.”

UNLV School Shooting is the 80th School Shooting of 2023

In 2019, the United States witnessed 52 school shootings – which was the most school shootings in a single year in modern-day history (one more than the 51 such shootings in 2016). That number dropped down to 22 in 2020 (the least since 2012), but that drop was largely because of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The past three years, however, have been brutal. 73 school shootings in 2021. A record 79 shootings in 2022. And now, through 340 days of 2023, the United States has witnessed a record 80 school shootings – four more than this same time last year. That’s almost one school shooting every four days in America. 

The UNLV school shooting was the latest, and our hearts go out to the four victims (three of whom were killed), but let’s also tip our hats to the incredible work of the many law enforcement officers and other first responders – if it weren’t for their tremendous amount of courage, the scene would’ve been much worse. 

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“After [the Route 1 Harvest shooting on Oct. 1] and all the time and effort and energy that we’ve put in together – in training with the men and women of law enforcement, the fire service and EMS – watching how seamlessly they worked together today made me very, very proud to be their sheriff,” said McMahill. 

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