As most of us are aware, 16-year-old former student Griffin J. John II entered the Silver Rail Elementary campus in Bend, Oregon on Thursday, October 15th, armed with a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun. After shooting through a locked glass entrance, he entered a special needs classroom, killing 25-year-old teacher Megan Lambert and three boys, ages 5, 8, and 11, and critically wounding two other people. The attack was stopped after a teacher attempted to wrestle the weapon away from the shooter, and an armed parent pursued him into the building, who shot John dead.
In my initial post about this tragedy, I called out Governor Tina Kotek for offering up the standard political script of thoughts and prayers, and gratitude for first responders while completely sidestepping any meaningful conversation about guns. Recently, the governor declared a state of emergency for Bend schools and rolled out a sweeping, all-hands administrative response from the state government. Her directive speeds up background checks for substitute teachers, fast-tracks paid family leave for traumatized community members, waives rigid instructional time requirements, and opens up state emergency funding while local districts wait on federal aid.
However, during her press conference, Kotek explicitly admitted that Silver Rail had already done everything by the book when it came to security, from installing upgraded locks to holding regular lockdown drills, yet a shooter still managed to blast his way inside. As I like to say, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.
Shifting her focus away from campus hardening, she actually addressed the firearm issue by ordering school districts statewide to educate parents on Oregon’s safe storage laws and distribute information about cable locks and lockboxes. In many communities, you can get a free gun lock from the local police department.
While it is somewhat refreshing to see a politician acknowledge that school security upgrades are just expensive band-aids, encouraging safe storage feels like it’s not enough.
The ‘responsible gun owners’™ who desperately need to lock up their weapons are usually the very same people who refuse to do so because they are convinced they need a loaded gun sitting on their nightstand at all times. They live in a constant fantasy world, waiting for an imaginary home invader to burst through the front door so they can play the hero, leaving dangerous weapons easily accessible to anyone else in the household, including kids.
Meanwhile, the media conversation has inevitably taken another familiar turn as reports of bullying have entered the picture. And let me remind you, the trope of the bullied school shooter is largely a myth.
Newly published police and dispatch records show that John was the victim of two separate assault investigations during his childhood, including a 2022 incident where his sister’s friend slapped and punched him. According to that police report, the 11-year-old John was upset about being bullied at school but explicitly begged officers not to tell his mother because he was terrified of how she would react.
Given what we now know about John’s volatile upbringing, including court records detailing domestic violence and 52 separate police dispatches to the family’s apartment, it would not surprise me at all if he faced severe punishment at home just for being a victim.
But even if we entertain the narrative that he was retaliating for past mistreatment, the timeline makes zero sense. Why on earth would a teenager wait four long years to exact revenge for middle school bullying, unless he was simply biding his time until he turned 16 and could legally get his hands on a shotgun?
My money is still on external influences like online radicalization playing the primary role in driving him toward mass murder, even if law enforcement hasn’t officially confirmed a motive.
Regardless of what pushed him over the edge, there is no denying the absolute cowardice of his actions. Instead of confronting any former bullies who would be in high school by now, he chose to storm an elementary school and slaughter helpless children in a special needs classroom, with the youngest victim being just five years old.
If his reported obsession with Nazism was already taking root back when he was younger, it is easy to see why other kids might have shunned him, but nothing on earth excuses taking a shotgun to a room full of vulnerable kids.
(Sources)
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