Senior Legal Fellow @AmericanFreedom. Always technically as advertised, but never quite what you expected. All views and cat pictures are my own.
Washington, DC
Joined August 2009
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Sarah is a dear friend and former colleague of mine, whose 17-year-old son was just diagnosed with an aggressive and rare form of leukemia.
Your prayers and support for this wonderful family would be greatly appreciated.
givesendgo.com/supporting-je…
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This is grossly dishonest framing about the locks, as well.
All the locks in the world won't make ordinary glass panes shatter-resistant, especially against a shotgun. This wasn't a lock failure. It was a catastrophically stupid design failure that make the locks worthless.
Second, the physical security measures slowed the gunman down, probably saving dozens of lives when combined with the incredibly fast armed response.
4 dead is tragic.
But how did measures that prevented 14 more deaths "fail"?
I thought the whole schtick of gun control was "if it saves even one life, why wouldn't we do it?"
Finally, ya'll there are studies on this. Including a very recent one by Texas State University.
Secured doors save lives.
Barriers to external entry are particularly vital in the context of elementary school active shooters, who universally aren't students.
alerrtresearch.org/resources…
(1) Sharing an SRO with "6 or 7" other schools basically means no school has an SRO.
(2) Why train a lock down drill with 4 SROs, when you normally have no SROs?
(3) 4 SROs on scene *the day of the shooting* would've completely changed the outcome.
cnn.com/2026/10/19/us/bend-o…
At any moment, civil society is just a toilet paper shortage away from collapsing into anarchy and chaos. A not insignificant portion of humanity will, actually, exploit any opportunity to violate your rights in the worst possible ways.
Never, ever give up your right to arms.
Amy Swearer retweeted
The same number of minors have died in school shootings in Canada this year as in the US (8), even though we have about 8x the population.
And that's using an expansive definition of "school shooting" for us that counts things like gang-related violence after hours in the parking lot of a school. If you only counted situations of killers breaking in to try and murder innocent children and teachers, which is what people actually mean when they say "school shooting," Canada is ahead of us this year.
We should better secure our schools for sure, but people absolutely overstate how common school shootings are here, and pretend other countries don't have them too. Part of our frequency is also due to our very large population.
According to WaPo, from 1999 (Columbine) through 2025, a total of 218 people have been killed in school shootings in the US, or about 8 per year. Obviously, we want it to be zero, not one child should be harmed in schools (or anywhere else). But statistically, it's pretty close to zero. Lightning strikes in the US kill about 3x that number annually.
Update: he didn't blow the lock out with the shotgun.
Seems like he found a side door that was either mostly glass or had windows positioned in a way that allowed him to reach in and push it open from inside.
Legitimately also a heroic woman who probably saved lives and should be praised for her courage.
Wow. A lot to digest here.
Worth highlighting the lock situation. Quite unfortunate that he had a shotgun and managed to blow out locks without breaching rounds while avoiding injury to himself.
Very unlikely to have gotten in with a different gun...yes, including an AR.
NY Post: Oregon school shooter "tried to enter through the school’s front door but was blocked by two bystanders, including a dad of two little girls at the school...The man opened fire on Griffin with a concealed weapon he was carrying, thwarting the teen’s attempt to go in the front, sources said. Refusing to give up, Griffin ran around to the school’s back door and blew off its lock — which was designed to prevent such tragedies, sources said. He entered the school and headed straight for his former special-needs classroom and opened fire, killing three students, ages 5, 8 and 11, and a teacher, while also injuring a 7-year-old in a wheelchair and a 54-year-old teacher before being gunned down by the gun-toting dad who had spotted him out front."
nypost.com/2026/10/16/us-new…
Is the 16-year-old gunman's mom likely to be prosecuted for buying his shotgun, like Colin Gray and the Crumbleys?
Did a little bit deeper of a dive into Oregon laws regulating guns and minors. And honestly it's not at all clear at this point.
On the one hand, ORS 166.395 is essentially a safe storage law requiring gun owners to keep their guns on their person or locked away. It's a class A violation (fineable infraction) if the gun owner fails to do this and, as a result, a minor accesses the gun. It also constitutes negligence per se in civil suits against the owner.
At the same time, the key phrase is that the "owner or possessor" of the firearm is responsible.
It's not actually clear to me right now who the "owner or possessor" of the shotgun actually was - the mother or the teen.
ORS 166.470 prohibits transferring firearms to anyone under 18, but specifically does not apply to parents who transfer long guns to their kids.
And ORS 166.250 prohibits minors under 18 from possessing firearms, but specifically exempts minors without disqualifying mental health or juvenile histories who possess long guns transferred to them by a parent. It also indicates that the owner in that circumstance is the minor, not the parent: "and, as a result of the transfer, the minor is the owner of the firearm."
Still a lot facts not made public yet about the precise circumstances of how the kid got the shotgun. We just know that (1) the mom bought the gun (2) around the time of the kid's 16th birthday.
It would seem that if the kid didn't have a disqualifying history, the mom was absolutely within her rights under Oregon law to gift him a shotgun. At that point, whatever her moral or ethical obligations might be as a parent, the legal obligation to control his access to the gun ceased. It would have been *the kid's* legal obligation to secure the gun, because he was the owner.
Could get murkier if the gun arguably wasn't fully transferred to his possession or if this ends up being a situation where he gets the shotgun despite the parents knowing he was suicidal/disposed to violence, etc. But again, we don't have those facts at the moment.
I don't see any other laws outlining circumstances where the parent would be criminally liable here. The child endangerment laws are focused on permitting/inducing minors to drug use or gambling, not gun access.
Whether or not there's potential civil liability under standard negligence theories would be very specific to facts we don't yet have.
Two things can be true:
(1) These deaths were heartbreaking and you should absolutely go hug your kids.
(2) Guns are not and have never been the leading cause of death for 5, 8, and 11-year-olds. Ever. This claim was only briefly true when including "kids" as old as 19.
Suspect identified. I won't repeat his name - he doesn't deserve the notoriety.
But it appears his mom bought the shotgun "around the time of his birthday in August."
A teen accused of killing three children and a teacher at an Oregon elementary school has been identified, three senior law enforcement sources tell NBC News. nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ore…
This dad is a hero.
I hate that he carries the unbearably heavy burden of questioning "could I have done more and done it faster."
It's a burden only cowards deserve to carry.
Whatever his other inevitable human frailties may be, he was anything but a coward yesterday.
OREGON: We met the man who stopped the Silver Rail Elementary shooter in Bend. He is a dad of two students at the school. His family tells me he was driving home on his break for lunch when his vehicle was shot. They say he’s struggling with what happened and traumatized by the fact he couldn’t save more people. He’s grateful for those he did save, but wishes he could have done more.
Amy Swearer retweeted
The killer had a shotgun in a district that chose to be a “g*n free” zone. An armed bystander had to break the law to stop the body count from climbing. So you would punish the hero bystander? Ban shotguns? You people just vomit basic platitudes but don’t really want solutions.
I'm still waiting for gun control advocates to name any measure short of total confiscation that:
(1) Oregon didn't already have in place, and
(2) Might even remotely have mattered in this specific instance.
Stop conflating "meaningful efforts to stop school shootings" with "the completely ineffective and largely unconstitutional gun control measures I personally want imposed."
They're not the same thing.
Meanwhile, what's actually happening is that news outlets and gun control activists make posts that:
(1) completely fail to mention *why* the gunman suddenly stopped killing kids and
(2) act like the shooting didn't happen in a state with an A- gun control ranking.
I repeat:
Even lunatic nutjobs generally retain a semblance of rationality in planning to carry out irrational acts like mass murder.
Make it substantially more likely that any attempt to slaughter kids ends with 3 to the chest and 2 to the head within 30-60 seconds, and they'll stop targeting kids.
Gun free zones are deadly.
“Only 25 of the 197 school districts in Oregon ban staff from carrying guns, and the attack occurred in one of those 25 school districts.”
“The suspect… was shot and killed by a bystander, law enforcement sources said.”
crimeresearch.org/2026/10/sc…
