Well, there has just been another school shooting, this time in Bend, Oregon, where a 16-year-old shot and killed three children and an adult teacher before he was shot and killed by an armed private citizen. Predictably, all the partisans have retreated to their battlements to lob their usual talking points at each other.
Here, the 16-year-old was using a pump-action shotgun, a gun typically used for bird hunting, which had been legally purchased by his mother, and was not one of the loathed semi-automatic so-called “assault rifles” liberals rant about. This is the type of weapon that Joe Biden famously recommended for home defense.
Oregon gun laws are pretty restrictive. Although one must be 18 or older in Oregon to purchase any gun, a minor is allowed to possess a rifle or shotgun for hunting. The shooter was a former student at the school that he attacked and apparently had attended special needs classes there—although it’s unclear if it was in the classroom he targeted.
Providing more grist for the debate was the fact that the heroic citizen who stopped any further killing was a private citizen legally carrying his own concealed pistol—the classic “good guy with a gun” situation that supposedly never occurs.
Obtaining a permit to carry a concealed firearm has been controversial. The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in New York Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen struck down a New York law allowing officials complete discretion to determine whether an applicant had “good reason” to carry. In practice, this resulted in almost all applications being denied. SCOTUS held that it is a right and that the burden is on officials to show sufficient cause if they want to deny an application.
More recently, in Wolford v. Lopez, SCOTUS struck down a statute in Hawaii prohibiting carrying guns in the public areas of privately owned property, finding that only the property owners could make such a prohibition.
We all know hotheads and morons who lack either the temperament or the judgment to carry a gun.
Admittedly, an unlimited right to carry a gun in public is a bit scary. We all know hotheads and morons who lack either the temperament or the judgment to carry a gun. Unfortunately, the efforts to ban guns have forced the courts to expressly delineate the unavoidably wide parameters of Second Amendment rights, which makes it difficult to limit who can carry a gun.
This illustrates one of the great ironies of the gun control debate: The more that liberals try and outlaw or restrict guns, the broader the legally recognized gun rights become.
Historically, the Supreme Court tended to ignore the Second Amendment, which left government a lot of room to craft limited restrictions that most people found reasonable, such as age requirements, barring criminals or lunatics, or requiring permits for concealed carry.
But then gun-hating liberals started trying to ban or further restrict firearms, forcing the courts to define the extent of gun rights. At the moment, cases involving “assault rifles,” high capacity magazines, and sales to felons are pending on the SCOTUS docket. Liberals may be unhappy with the outcomes.
The problem that the gun-controllers have is that the Second Amendment is pretty unambiguous and creates a broad right. The claim that it merely authorizes a militia requires an especially myopic and strained reading of the Constitution and a disregard for the era in which it was written. The militia language is merely a preface that explains the need for the private ownership of guns, insofar as a “militia” of that time was an ad hoc group of citizens organized to address a particular threat, and members were required to furnish their own weapons. There were no armories, and a militia could not exist without privately owned guns. The Framers were pretty articulate. If they merely wanted to authorize states to form militias, they would have just said so.
It is true that modern firearms are now more deadly than they were at the time the Constitution was drafted, just as the telephone, internet, TV, etc., have greatly changed the scope and application of the First and Fourth Amendments. Still, the original rights in those amendments have been retained.
If you believe that times have sufficiently changed, and that we no longer need guns, your remedy is to amend the Constitution, at least if you can gain enough public support. But that is unlikely. The more that you endanger the public by weakening law enforcement, and easing criminal penalties, the more that the public will find a need for guns to protect themselves.
So what conclusions can we draw from this tragedy? We’ve learned that all guns can kill, that guns shouldn’t be accessible to the mentally disturbed, and that “good guys with guns” can sometimes save lives. And we have also seen that gun rights are guaranteed in the Constitution, and can only be eliminated by a constitutional amendment, something that is unlikely to occur so long as Americans live in fear of criminal victimization. ∆
John Donegan is a retired attorney in Pismo Beach who would pack except that his geezer slacks don’t have a belt to put a holster on. Send a response for publication to letters@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Pets 2026.
