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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.
I have never seen a pump action shotgun in Europe. AI has the following to say:
The majority of EU citizens are not going to legally own something like the 88, ever. Nor even a single barrel break-action shotgun, for that matter.
If that kid had started a shooting spree with a crossbow, then your argument would hold -- crossbows are freely sold Germany (if you are 18). Though I suspect that we would take a dim view on a parent gifting their special needs child a deadly weapon.
The main problem is in many cases there are no warnings. The recurring theme is a putatively normal person suddenly becomes homicidal. In hindsight, people may recall a shooter being "odd" or "weird" but this seems more like hindsight bias, and is hardly useful when trying to predict future shooters.
Yes, and most European countries use a Swiss cheese model to avoid mass shootings:
This won't stop all shooters, but will stop lots of them.
Czechia is a very interesting outlier, though, as it's both gun-friendly and gun-safe at the same time. I would look at them specifically if the goal is reducing gun deaths in the US.
If Europe’s gun control laws are that stringent I’d imagine it’s just easier to buy an illegal firearm on the underground market, obliterate the serial number and take the usual measures to hide it. The continuous bureaucracy behind owning a legitimate one almost seems not worth the hassle.
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The US had none of this in the 1940s. You could mail order a carbine and yet people didn't snap and shoot up places at anywhere near the same rate.
Why?
The deadliest mass killing at a school continues to be the Bath School Disaster, which was a bombing in in 1927 that killed 40.
I think it's possible that our relatively easy access to guns may increase the frequency but lessen the scale of each individual event. Guns aren't the most effective way to kill large numbers of people, explosives are. A killer may reach for a gun because it's eaiser than constructing a bomb, and not all killers are capable of bomb construction.
The Columbine killers constructed something like a hundred bombs, but are only remembered for their mass shooting "backup plan" because their bombs mostly failed to detonate. It's hard to call anything about a massacre "lucky", but although the mass shooting had dozens of victims (including 13 deaths), their biggest bombs could have had hundreds.
There's also killers who are too capable of making a bomb detonate. Bombing victims are often immediately bombing suspects, because even murderers who can make working bombs have a tendency to bomb themselves with one sooner or later.
As far as I know, those 'hundreds of bombs' were actually 8 standard propane tanks bought from a store. It appears that they, being more or less average teenagers except for their murderous urges, just assumed that detonating those is a rather easy thing to do when in reality such tanks are manufactured with safe usage in mind for heating purposes. Are you referring to the pipe bombs they made earlier but did not eventually bring with them? I think those are only marginally useful.
Wiki claims 99 bombs, including 15 converted propane tanks, but apparently only 4 of those were full standard 20-pound tanks.
Yeah, that's the "not all killers are capable of bomb construction" category. The strength of the tanks wasn't even a big deal until the second time the murderers tried to set them off (with other bombs and/or guns); the initial failures on those were just bad timers.
Digging into the details does make me have to retract the claim that "their biggest bombs could have had hundreds" of deaths. There were nearly 500 kids in the cafeteria when the bombs there were supposed to detonate, and there was a Sheriff's report claiming that "Computer modeling substantiated by field testing indicated that had those two large 20-lb. propane bombs detonated with a cafeteria full of students, most would have been killed or severely injured by the resulting blasts and subsequent fireballs." ... but that claim seems to be depending pretty decisively on "detonated". Even if the cafeteria bombs had gone off it seems to me that it would have been a conflagration but not a detonation ... at most! One of their other big propane bombs was supposed to be a "car bomb", but (when the bomb squad finally set it off; its timer also failed) it didn't do much more than blow out the car windows.
Some were left around as diversions, but Wiki claims they brought enough with them to be "throwing pipe bombs in several directions, including onto the roof" while outside, along with multiple separate pipe-bomb throwing incidents in the hallways.
As far as I can tell that's correct and even "marginally useful" is an overstatement. Their distraction bombs caused "a small fire", their first pipe bomb outside the school "only partially detonated, causing it to give off smoke" that was interpreted as a prank, and most of the bombs didn't detonate at all. I can't find any sources unequivocally identifying a single wound from a bomb! Even the few reports of "shrapnel" I find seem to be talking about a teacher and two students who took indirect impacts from debris like splintered wood kicked up by near-miss gun shots. The bombs were just distraction and delay in the end; they could have brought a ton of smoke bombs and just called in a phony threat of real bombs and the consequences would have been the same.
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Well, in the early 1940s, the US government would just straight up pay violent men who wanted to shoot people. This was also the case in the early 1950s, and the late 1960s to early 1970s, and from late 2001 until about 2006 or so (I know that war went on for a bit longer but the enemy had been more or less completely defeated by then).
In the later half of the 1940s up until about October 1973, there was an unprecedented economic boom that meant you could quit school right at the cusp of biological adulthood (14-16) and have an easy middle-class existence until you retired at 55.
There were things to do and a future. Not so much now.
I think a big part of it is that disturbed, weird loners just dropped out of school and lived live as relatively poor people- when their urges surfaced, school wasn’t at the top of their mind.
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I burst out laughing reading this after your first sentence. I said to myself, “Yeah. keep going…”, and you did not disappoint. I thought you were going to try and break with the pattern much earlier. This has always been the way the US does this shit.
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Are you familiar with the book Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion in America by any chance? Here's a review from the Guardian.
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Someone did an analysis a few years back on this type of thing. I don’t recall who it was but one thing they showed was that the occurrence of such incidents ebbed and flowed, but that pattern of activity although it waxes and wanes hasn’t profoundly changed all that much for a long time. What has changed a lot was the frequency of news reporting around the issue, which had a very perceptible shift in the public consciousness about how they view things.
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More rigid social norms? High-trust society?
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