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Notes -
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:
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):
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…
…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:
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.
Even that failed to curb violent crime much. Made a post in 2017 about that , https://greyenlightenment.com/2017/10/12/the-over-hyped-purported-efficacy-of-australias-gun-laws/
From that Gladwell interview:
It can be both. It also explains why gun bans are not that effective. A criminal enterprise will find ways to procure guns even if there are bans.
He goes on:
In the usual sloppy Gladwell logic, he compares apple and oranges. European police are basically like the equivalent of an American private security guard. Uk police is some out of shape middle-aged guy with a reflector vest and a walkie talkie that can't do shit. American police are armed, more aggressive, and have much better technology at their disposal, and when combined with longer sentencing and higher incarceration rate, especially for repeat offenders, American policing gets much more milage per cop compared to Europe.
It only seems worse here, or America seem underpoliced, because our demographics are so bad, and Americans may have less tolerance for crime, whereas Europeans are much more habituated muggings and shoplifting.
As usual, statements like that don't generalize well for the continent. Pretty much only the north-westerners (UK, Ireland, Island) do the unarmed beat cop shtick. All the other hundreds of millions Euros are policed by cops with the ordinary Glock/H&K/Walther load-out. Those just don't get used all that much. Stats are hard to find for the entire EU, but e.g. German police officers use their side arms against around 60 suspects. In total, per year. Policing 84M people. And around 80% of those suspects end up surviving, supposedly because the officers aren't mag-dumping when they shoot. Those are the numbers of a particularly bad weekend in the US.
Maybe, but to a lesser extend, and not where it counts. German patrol cars carry at least an MP5/MP7, and often G36C or HK416. But yes, they don't get to ride around in de-milled MRAPs or BearCats as much. The biggest difference for the civilian on the street is that German (and EU in general) cops seem much more chill during traffic stops. Probably a combination of more training (3 years full time), more filtering/culling during training, and less fear (almost no driver is ever armed). I've been in a traffic stop in the US where the officer very deliberately kept a hand on his gun as he approached the car. Not a... great feeling, and unimaginable in the EU.
Again, to lazy to aggregate numbers from different sources for the EU, but Germany likes stats. It has a 50% higher "cop density", and this results in the US having pretty much exactly 50% higher robberies and assaults (per capita). Burglaries 3x more frequent in the US, car theft/jacking is 5x more frequent, and (of course) homicides are 6x more frequent (all per capita). Only petty theft is more than 2x higher in Germany, my instinct is that's its mostly bike thefts (everybody reports those because of the insurance payout).
In the end, it's all pretty pointless, since the societies are so different. Transferring any insights from one to the other won't work anyway (also, all those stats come with huge asterisk).
There's a bit of rhetorical sleight of hand there since European nations don't draw a distinction between police and military (the UK does but they have both running around anyway; the fact the US intentionally divides them is a reaction to the problems that inherently creates, because when criminals are also inherently military targets, illegal speech is logically equivalent to waging civil war, and the US [being an extremely progressive nation] is obsessed with stacking the deck against itself so that if a civil war must be waged, it can be won).
[Such a civil war is why the police in North Ireland actually are armed, of course. I'm informed freedom of religion has a lot to do with why.]
Anyway, this permits an attitude of "the cops aren't as militarized" when talking to New Worlders (and it not be a lie), but at the same time conveniently ignores all the soldiers who are also patrolling. I've never seen a New World police officer with a rifle out, so the culture shock of "these people are armed to the fucking teeth, you can't even walk down the street without running into someone carrying an assault rifle- wonder what they're supposed to be protecting against? [Should I be taking cover right now?]" was quite apparent to me when I visited the Old World.
(Honestly, I don't want to go back to visit there partially for that reason, but at least it yields some perspective when understanding Outgroupers who are terrified that guns exist in the first place. Difference is that if I don't see their gun, they won't see mine, which is... also very much an attitude unique to New World nations, as I understand it.)
I'm surprised; I'd figure they'd go UMP9/G36 like the French seem to have just because they're cheap if you buy in bulk and the main thing they need to do is look scary.
Or they're missing, or not actually getting good hits, or medical assistance is far closer at hand in Germany. Maybe all 3?
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