After the Bend school shooting, keeping guns from young people in crisis

What happened

NBC News reported on Oct. 16 that, with three weeks left before the midterm elections, some Democratic lawmakers are renewing calls for gun control after Thursday’s shooting at Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend, Oregon. Correspondent Yamiche Alcindor reported that Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, an Oregon Democrat running for reelection, called for an end to the “epidemic of gun violence in schools,” while President Trump, who did not mention the shooting directly, was “taking a different position.”

Police say a 16-year-old fired through the school’s locked doors and opened fire in a special needs classroom, killing three children and a teacher, according to NBC News and ABC News. KPTV reported that the children were 5, 8 and 11, and that a 7-year-old and a 54-year-old teacher were critically injured. ABC News reported that another teacher tackled the teen and tried to take the gun, and a community member who followed him inside shot and killed him. Multiple officials told NBC News his mother bought the pump-action shotgun around his birthday in August. Police Chief Mike Krantz said, “How the suspect got the weapon and ammunition remains part of the active criminal investigation,” ABC reported. No motive has been given.

Under Oregon law, a 16-year-old cannot legally buy a shotgun but may have one given by a parent, KPTV reported. Fox News reported that Sen. Ron Wyden urged Congress to “at long last pass common-sense gun laws,” and Rep. Janelle Bynum, whose district includes Bend, told KTVZ at a vigil that “we need to make sure that people who should not have firearms don’t have them.” Sen. Jeff Merkley and Gov. Tina Kotek stopped short of calling for new regulation, Fox reported.

Gun-rights advocates say the facts point the other way, according to Fox News: the district bans firearms on campus, and an armed bystander ended the attack. The NRA told Fox that Oregon “already has nearly every gun-control measure on the anti-gun wish list” and still could not prevent it.

Our reflection

Three families in Bend have lost children who were 5, 8 and 11. Another family lost a teacher. Two more people are in critical condition. And the family of a 16-year-old is carrying a grief nobody will light a candle for. All of it happened in a room set aside for children who needed extra care.

Within a day the country picked teams. One side counts laws. The other counts armed citizens. I’m not going to referee that here. I will say that arguing is easier than grieving. It also lets us skip the question nobody wants to sit with: what a teenager’s life looked like in the months before he picked up a gun.

Matthew does not hurry past dead children. When Herod’s soldiers came to Bethlehem, Matthew reached back to Jeremiah and let Rachel weep and refuse to be comforted. Jesus was born into that story, a refugee child whose neighbors’ sons were killed. God did not explain the grief away. He came and stood inside it, and at the cross he took the world’s violence into his own body. The empty tomb means Rachel’s tears are not the last word. It does not give us permission to skip them.

Then there is us. Jesus said what defiles a person comes from inside (Mark 7:20 to 23). I have watched that be true in the young men I sit with in detention, and I have watched it be true in me. Police have not said what drove this young man, and I won’t guess. But in the young people I know, a crisis almost always announces itself first: a post, a closed bedroom door, a kid who stopped talking, a joke that wasn’t one. Most of us have seen a young person going dark and decided it was somebody else’s business. That numbness is sin too, and it is ours to repent of.

Change here is practical, and much of it does not have to wait on Congress. A gun locked where a teenager in crisis cannot reach it buys time, and time saves lives. Where a state offers extreme risk orders, a family member or police can ask a judge to set guns aside for a while when someone is a danger. Both of those depend on something older: an adult who notices. In a pressing crowd Jesus stopped everything to ask, “Who touched my clothes?” (Mark 5:30). One person, seen. That is what our Juvenile Community Violence Intervention work is built on: reaching a young person early, before a record exists, and staying.

Pray for Silver Rail by name this weekend. Then look at the young people within arm’s reach of you, and use the steps below to start.

A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great weeping, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.

Jeremiah 31:15

Source: NBC News, “Democrats renew push for gun control after deadly Oregon school shooting”