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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.
The problem with gun control is that it really only reliably disarms people who obey laws. It doesn’t really work on people who break the law. No gang member, spree shooter, or assassin is bothered by the illegality of their weapon or signs prohibiting guns from some venue. In fact, they very likely love seeing those no guns signs because no one else is likely to be armed. So passing more no guns in school laws or whatever other gun control laws aren’t going to work.
Furthermore, the chances that Americans will ever go for the type of gun control that happens in Europe or Australia is precisely zero. It’s a nonstarter, and thus it’s kind of a waste of time. If the debate is bans or restrictions on gun ownership it’s going to be the same debate we have had for decades, and will for decades to come. It’s not going anywhere and honestly I feel like it’s a distraction and a waste of time that could be spent on ideas that Theres a chance of getting done in the next couple of years. The kids getting shot at school in the 2020s don’t have twenty or thirty years to wait.
Mental health seems a similar dead end. The help available is only available if you actually go and get it, and only if you happen to somehow mention the symptoms that would unlock the diagnosis. If the person isn’t willing to be brutally honest and tell the doctor everything even someone who is seeking help isn’t getting it. But most people are reluctant to get help. Men especially feel that going to see a psychiatrist is weak. Add in the red flag laws, and you make it very likely that a troubled young male will clam up instead of even trying. And if he does, he’s likely to be careful to downplay his problems so that he doesn’t trip any triggers and get himself into trouble.
As terrible as the idea sounds, the only thing we can probably do to is to in some form or fashion make sure that the places where shootings are likely to happen have at least someone who is armed. Nothing else will work today and it’s not something we can wait for.
The US didn't have mass shootings back in the past. Schools and public life could be much healthier.
The suicide rate of 15–19 year olds tripled between 1950 and 1990. It wasn't that mental health professionals were really good back in 1950, there just doesn't seem to have been such severe stress and suffering among young people back in the day.
Obviously 'fix society' or 'fix education' is not something the US is very good at, probably been going in the wrong direction for ages. Nevertheless, it's possible in principle.
Mental health treatment was much worse back then, and consisted heavily of involuntary confinement, surgery, or just enough benign neglect to let nature take its course. But it did have the effect of keeping it away from the rest of society to a higher degree.
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