New Details on the Bend School Shooting and the Law That Allowed It to Happen

A lot more information about the Silver Rail Elementary shooting in Bend, Oregon, has been made public since my last post about it. Police and school officials have now identified the shooter, the victims, and the bystander who ended it. Here’s what we know so far, with the usual caveat that these details could change as the days progress.

The shooter has been identified as 16-year-old Griffin J. John II of Bend. At 12:59 p.m. local time on Thursday, someone in a vehicle outside of the school called 911 to report being shot at, and Police Chief Mike Krantz says John fired at that vehicle several times before tossing his shotgun over a property fence and climbing over after it.

From there he shot his way through a set of locked doors, and within a minute dispatchers were fielding a flood of calls about a gunman inside. The school went into lockdown at 1:01 p.m., and the first officers pulled up at 1:02. Somewhere in those same few minutes, a teacher and a parent put an end to the shooting, but I’ll get to them in a moment.

John had once been a student at Silver Rail, and Superintendent Steven Cook says he had been in the school’s special needs program. Cook also says all of the victims were in a special needs classroom, which means the children who died were students in that room, along with a teacher.

The dead were three boys, ages 5, 8, and 11, and 25-year-old teacher Megan Lambert, a volleyball coach who subbed at Silver Rail for years before it became her first teaching job. Five-year-old Rhoam Summer has been named, and the families of the other two boys asked that their names be withheld. A 7-year-old girl and a 54-year-old teacher were also shot, with the girl in serious but stable condition and the teacher’s family saying she’ll be okay after surgery.

Police have confirmed that the gun used in the attack was a Mossberg Maverick 88 pump-action shotgun. (Are you happy now, ammosexuals?) Officials say he fired as many as 15 rounds using three different types of ammunition, and he still had 44 more rounds on him when it was over.

Chief Krantz says a teacher fought John for the gun, and the Guardian reports she threw her phone at him before tackling him. She wasn’t hurt, and Krantz said she almost certainly prevented more bloodshed. A parent who happened to be nearby, 36-year-old Kaylub Giamanco, then went into the school and shot John dead.

Giamanco’s mother named him in a statement read to reporters, saying he isn’t seeking recognition and wants only to thank first responders, school staff, and the community. Police haven’t officially named him, and he is said to be a parent to two students at the school.

Two senior law enforcement officials, on the condition of anonymity, told NBC News that John’s mother bought the shotgun around John’s birthday in August. That matches what a law enforcement official told the Associated Press earlier.

If that reporting holds up, again, I’ll have to ask whether this is another Crumbley case, another Colin Gray, or another Jeffrey Rupnow. James and Jennifer Crumbley and Colin Gray were all convicted, and Rupnow’s jury trial is set for March, so there’s real precedent for holding parents accountable when the gun came from them. And if this one turns out to be another entry in what I’ve been calling the Christmas Gun Club, now with a possible birthday twist, that could be one more family on the list.

According to the Associated Press, a minor in Oregon can legally possess a shotgun as long as a parent or someone else with the parent’s consent provides it. Read that again, because that’s a candidate for one of the dumbest gun laws in the country.

It means a 16-year-old can be handed a pump-action shotgun, and as far as that statute goes, nobody has done anything wrong. So if Mom did buy the shotgun for her son’s birthday, there’s a decent chance she never gets charged, because buying it and handing it over may well have been legal.

Whether any other law applies, like rules on storage or the sort of negligence theory that got the Crumbleys convicted, depends on facts we don’t have yet, such as where the gun was kept and what she knew about her son.

Officials still haven’t offered a motive. Superintendent Cook did say John wasn’t enrolled in the district at the time, which raises the question of when and why he left, and records from before and after he left the school may eventually shed some light, though that’s my speculation and not anything officials have said.

The Guardian, meanwhile, pointed to the shooter’s age and a pattern of teenage attackers, many of whom came out of nihilistic online communities that glorify earlier shooters. Regular readers will know that’s what I call the TCC, short for the so-called True Crime Community. The TCC is a subculture of gore forums, Discord servers, TikTok accounts, and chat groups where its ‘members’ obsess over mass shooters and treat them like celebrities. It’s also believed the TCC may have egged on some school shooters to commit their crimes.

I wouldn’t be surprised if John turns out to have been involved with the TCC, but I haven’t seen any reporting that indicates as much.

Another detail worth noting is that Silver Rail’s assigned school resource officer wasn’t at the school Thursday. KOIN reports the officer assigned to Silver Rail was at a different school. A security expert with the National Association of School Resource Officers, a group whose whole mission is putting officers in schools, says having one inside could have turned three minutes into seconds.

Maybe so. But as I wrote back in 2023, whether armed officers on campus prevent school shootings is closer to a coin flip, since an officer exchanged fire at Columbine and 13 people still died, while armed officers at Parkland and Uvalde refused to engage.

Now it’s time to get the gun nerds’ attention again. James Densley, who co-founded the Violence Prevention Project, and his colleagues tracked every homicide at K-12 schools in the U.S. since 2000, roughly 400 incidents, and found no case where a civilian shot an attacker to stop him. That makes Bend apparently the first they know of, and I certainly can’t recall another one.

What Densley’s research usually shows is that when an attack is stopped before police arrive, it’s almost always somebody without a gun, like a teacher, a custodian, a coach, or even a fellow student, which is exactly what the teacher in Bend did.

Experts also stress this isn’t something civilians should try. James Keith of the ALERRT center at Texas State says the advice is to get away, then hide and block the doors, and to fight only when there’s no other choice, which means nobody should read Bend as a how-to guide for confronting a school shooter on your own.

And right on cue, the NRA is out there pushing the good guy with a gun myth, just like I predicted. The group put out a statement saying the shooting shows the importance of ‘law-abiding gun owners’ and that it still stands by Wayne LaPierre’s old line about a good guy with a gun stopping a bad guy with a gun.

LaPierre may be gone from the organization, but his slogan apparently isn’t. Again, you finally got one, and it only took you 27 years. And still it came after four people had already been fatally shot and after an unarmed teacher had already thrown herself at the shooter. None of that is a knock on Giamanco, but the situation could have been much worse.

Now, in the aftermath of the shooting, here’s how it’s going to go. In a few days, the conversation around Bend will turn to bigger and more expensive security measures, from bullet-resistant window film to more officers to whatever the vendors are pitching this month. Even though Silver Rail already had secure vestibules, cameras, and a fresh lockdown drill.

That money would be better spent on education instead of militarizing our schools, but nobody with a microphone is going to say so. And almost no one will talk about the real problem, which is any kind of legislation that will help keep guns out of the hands of children.

Once again, the Second Amendment remains their First Commandment.

(Sources)