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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.
"Straight, white, male" was released immediately per media protocol.
Chilling effect on the tens of millions of citizens whose kids have access to the gun cabinet- again, standard protocol. Arresting mothers who let their kids out to play is standard protocol for the same reason.
Gun bans (and restrictions on liberty more generally) make far more sense if you consider them a form of involuntary commitment.
So he came with a full tube (Maverick 88s usually hold 9) and a few shells in his pocket. No need for stealth if you can't just walk in, I guess. An over/under (or a .22LR, for different reasons) is about as effective; indeed, there was a case in the UK where someone did that.
Shotguns (in anti-personnel loads) are not meaningfully distinguishable from taping together 9 handguns so they all fire at the same time. Now, handguns are generally poor at killing things and are hard to use as a tradeoff of being able to wear the gun everywhere, but that assessment goes out the window once you consider you can shoot more than one time. A good hit from a shotgun with 00 buckshot is ballistically equal to dumping 9 rounds from a handgun, and it's far easier to get all 9 pellets on target with the shotgun (in 1 trigger pull) than it is 9 rounds with the handgun. Worse with #4 buckshot, as equivalent to an entire 25-round magazine of .22LR.
Sometimes you really do just have to lock mental cases away. The alternative is death by gunshot.
More scattered thoughts:
We're only serious about affirmative action in one direction, and it's related both to why "straight, white, male" are red flags. One notes an inverse correlation between the number of male teachers and the increase in mass shooters; in my opinion this is not a coincidence.
Tends to happen with trans shooters for the same reason.
2A states "you have the right to retain the means to wage a civil war" (as does 1A; the pen is mightier, but without 2A it's only mightier on paper). Drugs and robberies and organized crime, as an extension of "young men getting mad they have less than other young men and taking it out on everyone else by waging private military action", are literally what 2A is for.
2A advocates, especially old men, tend to be really uncomfortable with that; that's why they compromised on gun control in the first place. Modern young men now see those old men as those who perpetrate the drugs and robberies and organized crime (but in a far more passive-aggressive way), which is why the Overton window has shifted [back?] towards military firearms.
Even under the current SCOTUS, this seems plainly false. You do not even have the right to keep the means to fight the ACW. And warfare changed a lot in the past 150 years. Automatic weapons are not the biggest deal. But what are you going to do about armored vehicles? Really hard to kill a tank with your AR-15.
Realistically, any Americans having a beef with the US military would resort to tactics of insurgency: hiding among the civilian population, striking from hiding and hoping that the feds will value the lives of civilians enough that they do not simply flatten your city block. In other words, war crimes.
The days of Washington when an armed, motivated local population could defeat a great power (though not on their home continent) in open battle are long over. If you want to update 2A for the last century, you would have to allow private citizens to engage in mutually assured destruction against the US, like the USSR did. I have heard few people argue that this would be a good idea.
Who would be mad enough to try open battle with small arms against the US Military when it's been consistently defeated by guerilla warfare for decades?
Nobody can defeat a GP on their own. It's all about staying alive long enough they either give up or you get support from their rival GPs.
The problem with guerrilla warfare in urban settings is that it generally involves war crimes, e.g. fighting out of uniform, relying on your opponent to have qualms about killing civilians by accident. Or getting your opponent to kill a lot of civilians in the process of fighting you, thereby earning a propaganda victory (like Hamas did).
From Mao's protracted war to Vietnam and GWB's adventures, the general rule seems to be that the winning strategy is to give less of a fuck about the civilian population than your opponent. This leads obviously to a race to the bottom.
Besides, the means to fight a modern insurgency against the US are IEDs, not guns. If the NRA were serious about killing the enforcers of a tyrannic US in the future, they would forgo small arms and focus on legalizing the ownership of C4.
Obviously blowing up US troops with your mobile along with civilians while you hide among the civilians is not exactly as glamorous as the Rambo fantasies some 2A proponents might have.
So when I say that almost all Americans do not have the stomach to effectively resist the US government, I mean that as a compliment. I know that I would not have the stomach for that either, and I am thankful for that.
That was one of the observations the US made when they invaded Russia. You can read some of the accounts of the Americans talking about how surprised they were, never before encountering anyone else who seemed to take life at a lesser price. It’s barbaric but it wins out and throughout multiple existential wars, Russia has proven this time and time again.
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They sell explosives in small town grocery stores here.
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If you think such a conflict would neatly contain itself to uniformed troops on one side and irregulars on the other, you are very high and should put the bong down. The military is not likely to break cleanly for one side or the other. The military cannot effectively police the north American continent. Everyone involved in such a war would understand it to be a tribal war from the start.
War is about inflicting harm and misery on the other side. There are many, many, many ways to do this that do not involve getting in a fight with a tank, especially given that there are not remotely enough tanks to go around, and you can't actually live in one if you have one.
Americans need electricity, and will experience its absence as harm and misery.
Ditto for food.
Ditto for water. American cities are not designed to survive sieges generally.
Most decisively, nobody has to go into this thinking they're ending the concept of peace nationwide for the indefinite future. There's lots of little steps people can take thinking they're just making a statement, that only in retrospect will be recognizable as striking matches in a dynamite factory. Some would argue that this has already happened. It only takes a few, and then a few more. It doesn't have to involve killing at all, though notably political killings with mass public support are something we've been seeing on the left for some time now, with no evidence of reversal. Moderate, reasonable steps can get us there just as well as mouth-foaming radicalism.
We have actually had a lot of examples of examples of confrontations between government forces and disgruntled civilians lately. A lot of these examples have not gone well for the Government forces, and some of the more extreme ones are notable for the public support the insurrectionists have received. You do not appear to have a conceptual linkage between these many, many examples of the exact sort of thing you're arguing can't happen and the scenario you're trying to describe. I think you should rectify that lack.
"It does not matter that the military outguns the civilian population by 1:50 (on money spent per year, order of magnitude), because they will fracture in a civil war." -- Yes, but then the civil war will be decided by US military fighting US military, with private gun owners watching from the sidelines.
The only way private gun ownership would dominate is if the US military (including national guards etc) made a decision to sit the war out. This is almost certainly not going to happen. If armed insurgents are fighting police for control of a city, everyone on any side will expect the US military to get involved.
I disagree. War is about achieving strategic objectives through military means. Attacking the will of the other side can be an instrumental goal, but it is not the only or even dominant strategy. Inflicting misery can sometimes be effective at eroding the will, but other times it can be counterproductive.
Populations do not simply have a morale bar and once you have killed enough kids it drops to zero and they surrender. World war one lasted for years for years despite tremendous costs in human misery. Germany only surrendered when the Hindenburg line was breached and the occupation of Germany would have been inevitable. The IDF leveled Gaza, and still Hamas is a dominant political force there. There is a lot of ruin in a nation.
In our enlightened times, we also do not generally consider inflicting misery on the civilian population supporting your opponent to be legitimate tactic of waging war. Typically, states ban tactics which are cruel but not very effective for them. This is why small arms are legal for warfare and chemical weapons are widely banned, for example.
Take the anti-ICE protests. To the degree that they are successful, they follow the playbook of non-violent resistance.
If instead they were aiming at maximizing the misery on their opponents, for example by bombing the families of ICE agents, they would be an utter failure. A vast majority of the US population is against bombing American kids, and they would quickly find themselves slightly more less popular than Al Qaida.
The winning strategy is not excessive violence, but baiting your opponent into using excessive violence. You do not need 2A for that. The only anti-ICE victory related to 2A rights is the Pretti shooting, which is very much not how 2A proponents would have imagined to influence policy.
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