By now, the horrific outline of what happened at Silver Rail Elementary in Bend should be burned into everyone’s memory. A former student, 16-year-old Griffin J. John II, showed up at his old school on last Thursday afternoon armed with a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun, blasted his way past the locked glass entrance, and targeted a special needs classroom. Within moments, three young boys, ages 5, 8, and 11, and 25-year-old teacher Megan Lambert were dead, with a seven-year-old girl and another staff member critically wounded. A teacher fought John for the gun, throwing her phone and tackling him, before an armed parent rushed in and shot him dead.
Now, investigators are scrambling to figure out what was going on in the teenager’s head before he pulled off this atrocity. Reports from law enforcement sources indicate that the FBI and local police are looking into the shooter’s online activity, where he allegedly harbored an obsession with Nazism and may have been connected to extremist groups operating on platforms like Discord. Specifically, investigators have pointed toward network channels tied to what federal agencies classify as Nihilist Violent Extremism, highlighting a group known as 764.
For those unfamiliar with the term, a Nihilist Violent Extremist group, or NVE, is essentially an online network that operates without a coherent political or traditional ideological goal. Groups like 764 are less interested in overthrowing a government and far more interested in sowing raw chaos, destruction, and violence for its own sake. Their playbook relies heavily on extortion, blackmail, and severe psychological manipulation, targeting vulnerable minors online and coercing them into performing horrifying acts of self-harm, animal cruelty, and recorded abuse.
I hate to argue semantics when we are talking about four dead bodies in an elementary school, but if this kid was being radicalized online, I would bet money it was less about 764 and much more about the influence of the so-called True Crime Community.
The TCC is an infamous internet subculture spanning Discord servers, TikTok accounts, and fringe forums where members obsess over mass shooters, treat historical killers like celebrities, and actively egg each other on to build up a body count. While I am sure there is plenty of overlap between 764 and the TCC, given that both trade in violent chaos, target disaffected teens, and use similar grooming tactics, their actual targets are fundamentally different. 764 is primarily interested in torturing and extorting their victims behind closed doors into blood-soaked self-harm, whereas the TCC is hyper-focused on the spectacle of public mass slaughter and school shootings.
It is also pretty safe to assume there was zero adult supervision when it came to this kid’s internet habits. Based on everything we have learned about John’s home life and the fact that his mother allegedly bought him a 12-gauge shotgun for his 16th birthday, nobody was keeping an eye on what he was consuming online.
When you combine an unsupervised, vulnerable teenager scrolling through radicalizing gore forums with a parent who hands him a firearm, you do not need a federal investigation to figure out how this story was going to end.
(Sources)
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