This weekend’s mass shooting in Southport highlights the need for stronger mental health care, Gov. Josh Stein said Monday at a press conference with local police and community leaders, as well as potentially new gun laws.

The alleged shooter, 40-year-old Nigel Edge, is a Marine Corps veteran who twice deployed to Iraq before leaving the military in 2009. He later moved to Oak Island, a beach town not far from where he’s accused of killing three people and injuring five others Saturday night.

Earlier this year, Edge was barred from filing any more lawsuits in Brunswick County without permission, after suing various local individuals, government agencies, a church and a hospital with allegations that included mentions of assassination plots, child trafficking, LGBTQ people, the Ku Klux Klan, Jeffrey Epstein, the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and a threatening code he said was hidden in his Social Security number.

Stein said the alleged shooter’s history underscores the need for changes to the state’s mental health system, the level of funding it receives and the level of interaction between mental health professionals and local law enforcement.

“There are too many people who are profoundly troubled, who are obsessed, whose paranoia gets stoked by what they read on the internet everyday,” Stein said Monday. “And we’ve got to figure out ways so that those folks don’t pose risks to the community.”

Red flag laws

Nationwide, 21 states have laws known as extreme risk protective orders — commonly called “red flag” laws — which allow authorities to temporarily order people to turn over their guns if deemed a threat to themselves or others.

North Carolina is not among the states with a red flag law, but Stein said it should be.

“It’s a good idea,” Stein said. “There are people, in our community, who people know are a risk. A risk to others, a risk to themselves, and they should not have access to firearms. And that’s what a red flag law allows: For a judge, through due process, to temporarily remove dangerous weapons from people who are a risk.”

In 2022 Congress passed a bill, signed into law by then-President Joe Biden, to incentivize states to pass red flag laws. At the time, Democrats in North Carolina had been trying unsuccessfully, for years, to have the state’s Republican-led legislature consider red flag laws.

Some hoped that the new federal law would be a changing point since one of its main authors was U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican who previously served as the state Speaker of the House. But GOP state legislative leaders have continued blocked efforts to bring red flag law proposals up for a vote.

A 2022 WRAL News Poll found that 87% of North Carolinians supported red flag laws, including 65% of gun owners. But the idea remains strongly opposed by the gun industry and gun rights activists, who say the rules infringe on people’s Second Amendment rights. Those groups are also heavily influential in GOP primary elections.

Tillis himself is one of the largest beneficiaries in Congress of political spending by the National Rifle Association, a powerful gun lobby. But his work in 2022 writing the law that incentivized states to pass red flag laws was part of what led to the North Carolina Republican Party censuring Tillis in 2023. He has since announced he won’t seek reelection next year, facing mounting criticism from conservative activists.

Will Stein sign crime bill?

Republican state lawmakers recently wrote and passed a crime bill, inspired by a different act of random violence: The Charlotte stabbing of Iryna Zarutska, whose alleged killer also appeared to have a history of mental health issues.

That new crime bill didn’t include red flag provisions, despite Democrats requesting that. Republican leaders haven’t said why that was, or whether Stein’s renewed call for red flag laws on Monday could lead to future legislations. Spokespeople for Senate leader Phil Berger and House Speaker Destin Hall didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Hall did criticize Stein Monday for not yet having signed the crime bill into law, however.

“It’s been six days since we sent Iryna’s Law to [Stein] to sign,” Hall wrote on social media just prior to Stein’s press conference in Southport Monday. “This should be a no-brainer. If he really cared about public safety, he would’ve signed the bill into law immediately.”

Most Democrats in the legislature either voted against it or walked out of the votes in protest — largely in reaction to a provision that would essentially require Stein to suggest restarting executions of North Carolina death row prisoners using either firing squads or the electric chair, instead of lethal injection. Stein has previously said he supports the death penalty but hasn’t weighed in publicly on this new proposal, saying he’s still reviewing the bill. He has until later this week to decide whether to sign or veto it.

While Stein has said the state needs to provide better mental health care to people before they commit acts of violence, the crime bill passed by state lawmakers last week proposes no such changes — which would require more state spending — and instead focuses primarily on making it more likely for people to be held either in jail or in a mental hospital after being accused of a crime.

Hall previously said the bill proposed “some of the strongest tough-on-crime reforms” in the state’s history, and that “for too long, activist judges and magistrates have turned dangerous criminals loose, endangering lives and spreading chaos in our communities. That ends now.”