Polito was described as a university professor who previously worked at schools in Georgia and North Carolina and who, apparently, applied for a job at UNLV, and perhaps was not accepted, police sources quoted in the media said.
The shooter died at the scene after a confrontation with police outside a university building, Greater Las Vegas Sheriff Kevin McMahill said.
Yesterday’s shooting sparked panic on the institution’s campus, when the attacker opened fire shortly before noon on December 6 on the fourth floor of a university building, where students and professors were preparing for their final exams next week.
The sheriff explained that the gunman managed to cross several floors before the collision with law enforcement officers.
The university canceled all classes through Sunday but is still considering how the center will operate next week, UNLV President Keith Whitfield wrote in a post on the center’s official website.
“Today is a tragic day for UNLV,” Whitfield said. “We are all still in shock as we process the unfathomable event,” he said.
The shooting occurred in the same city that suffered the worst mass shooting in modern US history on October 1, 2017.
UNLV is located just a few miles from Route 91 Harvest, where seven years ago a country music festival turned into a tragedy that left at least 58 people dead and hundreds more injured.
The day before, President Joe Biden lamented the shootings in Austin and San Antonio (Texas) on Tuesday and at UNLV, which “became the latest university campus terrorized by a horrible act of gun violence.”
“This year alone, our nation has experienced more than 600 mass shootings (632 according to the Gun Violence Archive) and approximately 40,000 deaths due to gun violence. “This is not normal and we can never allow it to become normal,” Biden said.
Despite all the measures we have taken since I have been president, he added, the epidemic of gun violence we face demands that we do even more.
But the Democratic president warned that “we can’t do more without Congress” and urged Republican lawmakers to join his party “to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines,” among other “common sense” measures that help to stop” this tide of weapons.
Together, we must do more to prevent more families and more communities like Austin, San Antonio and Las Vegas from being torn apart by gun violence, Biden concluded.
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