After the Bend school shooting, the harder work of keeping guns out of young hands

What happened

On October 15, a 16-year-old boy opened fire at Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend, Oregon. Three children and a teacher were killed and two others were critically wounded, The Trace reported. According to The Trace, it is the deadliest school shooting since the 2024 shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia, which also left four people dead.

The Trace’s report, published the next day, takes up the policy question the shooting raises: why mass shootings still happen in states with strict gun laws, and what those laws, including rules on young people’s access to guns and how guns are stored at home, can and cannot prevent.

Important questions were still open as The Trace published, including how the young person got the gun and what investigators have found about why. This brief does not speculate on either; readers can find The Trace’s full analysis at the link above.

Our reflection

Somewhere in Bend this weekend there are bedrooms nobody can bring themselves to walk into. A teacher’s family is facing a house that has gone quiet. Two more families are keeping watch over children who were critically wounded. And the family of a 16-year-old, who is also somebody’s child, is living through a collapse none of them will ever be able to explain.

I want to be honest about what happens in me when a story like this breaks, because I suspect it happens in you too. Part of me goes numb. Apalachee was two years ago, and I had already filed it away. Another part of me reaches for an argument before I have grieved, because an argument feels like control and grief feels like drowning. In Mark 3, Jesus looks at a room of religious men more interested in winning a point than in a man’s withered hand, and the text says he was grieved at the hardness of their hearts. I have been that room.

Matthew does not let the Christmas story stay sweet. Within a chapter of Jesus’s birth, soldiers kill the little boys of Bethlehem, and Matthew reaches back to Jeremiah: Rachel weeping for her children, refusing to be comforted. The Bible lets her refuse. Nobody hands her a verse and tells her to move on. Jesus grew up a survivor of that massacre, a refugee in Egypt because of it.

The same Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus, though he knew full well what he was about to do. He was indignant when his disciples kept children away, and he took them in his arms (Mark 10:14 to 16). Then he went to a cross, where God did not explain evil from a safe distance. He took it into his own body. The empty tomb is why we can grieve without despair. It has never been a reason to stop guarding the living.

I think about Deuteronomy 22:8 every time one of these stories breaks. If you built a house with a flat roof, you had to put a railing around it, so your household would not carry the guilt of blood when someone fell. God held a homeowner responsible for a danger he could see coming. A gun in a home where a teenager lives is that roof. The railing is a locked safe, ammunition stored apart, a key or code the young person does not have. It is one parent asking another, before a sleepover, whether there is a gun in the house and how it is kept. Every one of us can build that railing this week, before any legislature acts.

Storage is the last line, though. We do not know what was happening in this young man’s life, and we will not guess. Our Juvenile Community Violence Intervention work is built on reaching young people at first contact, before a record exists, with an adult close enough to notice when something is wrong and stubborn enough to stay.

So grieve first, and pray for Bend by name. Then go home and look at your own roof. The steps below are small, and they are meant for this week.

When you build a new house, make a parapet around your roof so that you may not bring the guilt of bloodshed on your house if someone falls from the roof.

Deuteronomy 22:8

Source: The Trace, “Why Mass Shootings Happen Even in States With Strict Gun Laws”