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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8579 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026

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On October 17th, a 16 year-old killed 4 in Bend, Oregon, a town of ~100k people.

FACTS KNOWN SO FAR

The shooter was a special needs child. His mother hoped, in 2020 when he was 10 years old, that a return to in-person learning would help him. The weapon he used was a Maverick 88, which is a cheap 12 gauge pump-action shotgun. He got it from his mother, who bought it legally and gifted it to him in August. He looks kind of like a school shooter. The shooter approached the school from the south from an undeveloped lot, evidently on foot. He first shot at a bystander:

The first 911 call came at 12:59 p.m., after the driver of a red pickup truck saw a man approach the school, throw his long gun over the fence and climb over after it, police said Friday. When the pickup driver confronted him, the suspect opened fire, striking the truck at least three times.

At this time, a father of a daughter in the school and concealed carry weapon holder, noticed this shooting and drove into the parking lot and followed the shooter as he took his next actions.

The shooter gained entry by shooting the doors (from the first link):

The suspect then forced his way into the school by firing into the glass panes of an external set of double doors, police said.

He then made his way to the special education classroom just to the left of the entrance and fired as many as 15 rounds. He killed a 5 year old, an 8 year old, and an 11 year old, as well as a 25 year old teacher, and he injured a 7 year old and a 54 year old teacher. A teacher, who remained uninjured during and after this incident, threw his cell phone at the shooter and engaged him physically to try to get the gun away from him; it was during this time that the concealed carry father shot and killed the shooter with a pistol chambered in .40 S&W.

Despite the facts not being as much in favor as it was for the prosecution of Jennifer and James Crumbley in Michigan…

Decades ago, Oregon lawmakers made an exception to gun laws that allow parents to give rifles and shotguns to minors. In many areas of the state, as in other parts of the American West and South, it’s a rite of passage for a young person to receive a weapon for hunting or target practice.

…it is likely that a method to prosecute the mother will be found anyway, though I’m not sure what the point of that is. Most parents don’t suspect their kid will shoot up a school. At the time of writing, I haven’t heard anything about motivations or any potential red flags the shooter had. I think he may have been a child of a single parent; I only ever hear anything about the mom, not the dad.

ANALYSIS

Similar to previous shootings, this shooting seems to invalidate certain gun control arguments. There are no proposed bans that target manual action firearms, as far as I know, and the mother was legally clear to buy firearms in most states that don’t add hoops to jump through before purchasing firearms. I would have expected any obvious red flags from the shooter to come out by now. I forgot about this article about the shooter's apparent connection to "764". I saw a post a month or so ago about that same group. The doors didn’t stand up to a shotgun blast. There was apparently no resource officer nearby to forcibly stop the shooting. There would likely have been more casualties, had there not been a concealed carry holder nearby. Schools are de-facto gun-free zones under Oregon state law, which would reduce the likelihood that a concealed carry holder could stop the shooting.

On the other hand, I’m not sure how you really stop something like this.

  • Uvalde and Parkland show that police officers can fail quite easily.

  • There would have to be a lot of new legislation in place to be able to spy on someone enough to track their pre-crime enough to involuntarily commit them if they’re planning something crazy like this. And obviously, someone like this isn’t going to be interested in committing themselves.

  • I see people say that shootings like these are examples of why America needs more mental healthcare. Okay. How are they supposed to stop this, exactly? Do they think he wouldn’t have done this if he just had the right chemicals in his brain or the right therapist to talk to? But I see people say all the time that they had to try a bunch of different therapists and a bunch of different SSRIs to find the one right for them. Trying multiple therapists and drugs? But I want to shoot kids now! And even with a therapist, I’ve heard it said that the therapist, in the end, can’t really help you directly; you have to want to be helped and you have to do the work yourself.

  • Allowing teachers to concealed carry if they choose to do so could be very beneficial for basically free, but since most teachers and school staff are women, I can’t imagine this would have a very big effect, since women are not very likely to concealed carry, and even when they do, anecdotally, they don't seem very serious about training with them.

  • Along similar lines to the last bullet point: I assume the teacher that threw the phone and tackled the shooter was probably a male. Confirmed female by one of the CNN articles, but I still hold this point because a man could have done it better. We could probably use more male teachers. If men go for careers and you can't make a career out of being a teacher, maybe we really should have paid teachers more?

  • It was a pump shotgun, meaning this shooting could have happened even in the majority of Europe.

Restricting firearms might have stopped this one. If the shotgun was bought from an FFL, a gun ban might have dissuaded the mother enough to not find one in a private sale. Of course, that is a very fraught issue, with a lot of collateral damage (such as making millions of felons overnight…) and constitutional challenges.

Which leads me to my next point…

Are we serious about gun control still?

From the New York Times article linked earlier:

Legislators updated gun laws five years ago after a deadly attack during the holiday season at a suburban Portland mall that began when a man stole his roommate’s unsecured AR-15. They stiffened requirements for storage and made it easier to sue parents whose children misuse weapons if they failed to lock up the guns or supervise their use.

Lawmakers opted not to impose criminal penalties in part because similar statutes in other states disproportionately affected parents of color, said Amie Wexler, executive director of the Alliance for a Safe Oregon, a gun safety advocacy group.

Apparently, gun murders are not as important as being antiracist! That dovetails nicely with this other incident where a mass shooter was released to home detention. I wonder if the Moms Demand Action demographic would vote differently if they knew about this particular tendency of Democrat politicians.

Malcolm Gladwell released a book recently on gun violence. He argues that pistols are a bigger source of gun violence, that assault weapon bans don’t really do anything, that we need far more cops, and that black people are wrong in thinking that they’re overpoliced. I think I agree with all that, but he also slips in some things that I don’t agree with, like that the Second Amendment has its roots in slavery, or that drugs and robberies and organized crime aren’t the cause as much as “young men getting mad at each other” is.

Personally, I doubt any politicians listen to him. Regardless of the efficacy of gun control, it will be passed in blue states because that’s “in” right now. Finding some new way to restrict firearms earns you status points on the left. But it’s hard not to notice there’s some friction in blue voters on this issue.

As long as school shootings happen, there will be a pretty sizeable contingent that will want to ban all guns, Australia style (though you can still get shotguns in Australia…). Tradeoffs really do exist, but it’s a tough sell to say that the country is built off of some amount of murdered kids every year. Seems there aren't any perfect answers to this problem.

was a special needs child.

Very unclear what this means. Was he like a tard or something else, because usually those classes are for tards. I'm all for guns for everyone but the mom buying this kid a guy as a gift seems like one of the decisions of all time.

Do they think he wouldn’t have done this if he just had the right chemicals in his brain or the right therapist to talk to?

... yes?

The use of the word 'tards here is pointlessly adolescent. If you mean Down syndrome? Thats not hard to write. It could just as easily be Asperger's or even some type of autism. If your point is specificity of language, perhaps begin by being specific yourself.

As someone who constantly bemoans the inevitable loss of precision once a word becomes a slur, I implore you to at least get this easy one right. A child with Down's syndrome is a mong, not a 'tard.

What if they are an ethnicity from Laos?

British schoolyard slang has no shortage of terms for people who can't tell the difference between a mong and a Hmong.

For non-Brits, the joke is that initial letter h is normally pronounced in Received Pronunciation (not heir, hour or honour) but is dropped in most (but not all) working-class regional dialects, and is therefore a class signifier. An RP speaker seeing the unfamiliar word Hmong would default to pronouncing it H@mong with a schwa inserted to separate the h and m sounds. I have no idea what the standard American English pronunciation is, let lone the local language pronunciation.

I mean it could be all of those things, or something entirely different. I think tards is the easiest word that gets across what I mean. If you got a better one that means what I mean, then I'm all ears.

I have no idea how the mods would view it, but for what it's worth, "special needs" is pretty much a code word for "retarded". You can make it sound prettier with words like "mentally deficient" or "developmentally disabled" or something, but everyone knows what you mean. But you wouldn't normally expect an imbecile to be able to do anything like this. That's why it's something to note.

In the UK, "special needs" would include (both denotationally and connotationally) a child of normal intelligence with sufficiently severe autism to cause problems in the classroom and (denotationally but not connotationally) a child of normal intelligence with a physical disability which affected their ability to learn. I am a parent of both types. (Now home-educated because even a good school struggled to deal with it)

It also includes otherwise normal children who completely lack discipline.

But you wouldn't normally expect an imbecile to be able to do anything like this. That's why it's something to note.

Martin Bryant of Port Arthur massacre fame was in special education and was estimated to have IQ 66 as an adult.

"Special needs" can also mean "has an IEP", which often just means the parents are engaged but unscrupulous enough to try and get their kid a fake diagnosis to buy them extra time in exams.

In this case, the shooter is reported as having attended a "special needs classroom". This usually means "developmentally disabled", but in more affluent/white areas, it can also refer to kids who are so prone to violent rage that the school tries to quarantine them from the general population for that reason.

CNN makes it sound like the shooter was in the latter kind of program:

The program is described as being for kids with “intensive behavioral and social skills challenges.”

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