UNC School Shooter Ruled Insane; Could Still Buy a Gun

Before we get started, I am aware of the ICE shooting in Austin, Texas. That story is next on the schedule, but I was in the middle of writing this story before the Texas news broke.

Anyway, back in August of 2023, a 34-year-old doctoral student named Tailei Qi shot and killed his professor, Zijie Yan, in an office on the campus of the University of North Carolina. Police picked Qi up on the streets of Chapel Hill about an hour and a half later. The 9mm handgun used in the attack hadn’t been recovered.

Nobody announced a motive, but Qi had left a trail of social media posts griping about being bullied, watched, and tattled on by people he believed were running to his boss about his work habits. That looked an awful lot like a revenge shooting to me, and I said as much at the time.

The part that really nagged at me was, of course, the gun. Qi was a Chinese national on a student visa, which under federal law meant he had no business owning a firearm. The local sheriff’s office said he had never applied for a handgun permit. So where did it come from? In my 2023 follow-up post, I ran through the usual North Carolina suspects, including a gun show, a living room seller, and maybe even a ghost gun, and then the case crawled off into the courts. Unfortunately, not too long after that, I took one of my mental health sabbaticals and fell off the story.

However, I have caught up since then. In 2024, federal search warrants laid out exactly how Qi got his hands on the gun. Investigators found a note in Qi’s apartment pointing to a username on an online marketplace where private sellers list guns in the Carolinas. A seller told them he had sold Qi a Glock 43X a few days before the shooting, and he identified Qi from a photo.

No licensed dealer was involved, and no background check was required. Qi had also visited a gun range on August 17th and again on August 27th, the day before the shooting, where an employee said he rented a pistol similar to the one he bought and picked up 9mm ammunition.

A man who was barred from possessing a gun by his visa status and who was deep in the grip of severe mental illness found a private seller online and walked away with a Glock. That’s how easy it is for someone who is dangerously mentally ill to buy a gun for any reason, whether it’s a good one or one that only exists inside his own head.

On this past Friday, a judge in Orange County found Qi not guilty by reason of insanity. Defense attorneys never disputed that he pulled the trigger, so the hearing was about his state of mind. Forensic experts testified that Qi suffers from schizophrenia and that in the months before the shooting he believed a woman he could not see was always with him and in terrible danger. He believed it was his job to save her, that Yan was hurting her, and that Yan planned to kill him.

Qi told experts he could hear Yan’s voice outside his window, talking to assassins. Before the shooting, he confronted Yan about all of it, telling him this was a last chance to resolve things or they would both regret it. Yan, quite reasonably, felt threatened, told staff that Qi should no longer work in his lab, and asked for help. After the shooting, Qi reportedly had no interest in his own arrest and only wanted help finding the woman.

Normally, I wouldn’t put much weight on an insanity finding when the defendant had already been publicly complaining about the professor in question, because that’s the kind of history that leads people to conclude they’re looking at a revenge shooting. But both the state and the defense have concluded that Qi has schizophrenia, and when the prosecution and the defense agree on something, I don’t have much room to argue. So I have no choice but to accept the outcome.

Qi has been remanded to a state psychiatric facility, and there’s a good chance he never sets foot in the free world again. As I understand it, release depends on doctors and a judge deciding he’s no longer a danger, and with an illness like this, that day may never come.

Professor Yan saw trouble coming and asked for help. North Carolina, meanwhile, had already made it easier for someone like Qi to get a gun. I called it just another day in America back then, and North Carolina seems determined to keep it that way.

(Sources)