CBS Reports Shotgun Used at Silver Rail Bought for Shooter’s Birthday

I hate using three tabloids as sources, but the latest details on the Bend school shooting have come from the NY Post, TMZ, and CBS, so here we are. Just kidding, CBS. Mostly.

But before we get started, let’s recap. 16-year-old Griffin J. John II showed up at Silver Rail Elementary last Thursday afternoon, fired at a vehicle outside, and then blasted through a set of locked double doors with a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun. He went straight into a special needs classroom, killing three boys—ages 5, 8, and 11—and 25-year-old teacher Megan Lambert, while critically wounding a 7-year-old girl and a 54-year-old teacher. A heroic teacher tackled him and threw her phone at him before a parent, Kaylub Giamanco, rushed into the building with a handgun and shot John dead, putting an end to the three-minute nightmare.

But getting back to the subject of tabloids and the NY Post, fuck them. They ran a piece digging into the shooter’s father and his alleged criminal record, which I’m not going to get into here because it doesn’t add anything to the story. As best I can tell from the article, the father wasn’t really in his son’s life anyway, so the whole thing reads like a detour. The Post also describes the shooter as “twisted,” which I can kind of get behind. Then, a few paragraphs later, they describe the civilian who killed John as a “heroic armed parent,” and that’s where I start to have a problem.

We have to be careful about celebrating this guy too much, because the more he gets lionized, the more likely it becomes that other “heroic armed parents” will go leaping into a school with guns drawn when the situation doesn’t call for it. Or others will charge into a real school shooting and end up adding to the body count instead of subtracting from it. Experts who study this stress that civilians shouldn’t try to take on a shooter alone, and one outcome doesn’t change that advice. As for the Post’s article, it does nothing but pull the conversation away from gun control and toward a feel-good story about a ‘good guy with a gun.’

However, the main event of this story is what CBS is reporting. Sources told the network that the pump-action shotgun used in the attack was a birthday gift from the shooter’s mother, who bought it legally in August and gave it to him for ‘recreational’ use. That would make it his 16th birthday present, which is a sentence I never thought I’d have to write. CBS is relying on anonymous sources, and police haven’t confirmed who bought the gun on the record, but that’s what’s being reported.

TMZ, meanwhile, reports that the shooter was part of his school district’s NEST program, which TMZ describes as a program for students with serious behavioral and social challenges. That’s TMZ’s description, so take it with a grain of salt. If it’s accurate, though, it means the shooter’s own school district considered him a kid who needed extra support, and his mother, allegedly, responded by buying him a shotgun. I’m not knocking special education kids here, the vast majority of whom pose no danger to anyone, but I am knocking the decision to hand a firearm to a teenager who was struggling enough to need that support.

And let me remind you it’s legal under Oregon law for a parent to provide a minor with a shotgun. The recreational use detail has me wondering whether this is another case like Natalie Rupnow’s, where I suspect the kid talked a parent into getting the gun so she could go through with a school shooting.

John’s mother told the New York Times that her son was “a good boy, he really was,” and that she’s sorry and would have prevented this if she could. She also wouldn’t say how he got the shotgun. I’m sure she’s heartbroken, but I don’t care how good he was, because you don’t buy a shotgun for a teenager. Four people are dead, and two more were wounded, with a birthday present sitting at the center of it.

So, parents, for the love of all that is good and holy, STOP BUYING GUNS FOR YOUR KIDS AS PRESENTS.

It teaches them to see guns as toys instead of the weapons of death they actually are. A gun has one sole purpose, and that’s to kill.

Buy your kids a fucking video game instead.

(Sources)