NYTimes Pushes for Gun Control Response to Oregon Shooting

Within minutes of the news about the shooting at Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend, Oregon, gun control advocates were already issuing vague demands for more restrictions on lawful gun ownership. The New York Times helped to amplify that messaging with a story titled “Oregon Has Approved Tight Gun Laws, but They Have Been Held Up in Courts,” suggesting that one or more of those laws might have made a difference. 

The subheading was no better, claiming the “state has passed restrictive measures popular among gun safety activists,” and that the “Silver Rail Elementary School shooting seemed poised to set off conversations about gun control.”

Times reporter Orlando Mayorquin had a slightly different framing in the article itself, opining that the shooting is “likely to reignite debates about the effectiveness of gun laws meant to prevent deadly attacks” before laying out some of the laws already in place and offering a roadmap for where anti-gun lawmakers might go next. 

Its toughest restrictions — which voters narrowly approved in a ballot measure in 2022 — include a ban on high-capacity magazines and require stricter background checks and permitting. But legal challenges have slowed implementation of the measure, and lawmakers have voted to delay its effective date pending a ruling from the state’s Supreme Court. 

Oregon still does not have some of the tightest restrictions favored by gun safety activists. It does not have, for example, a ban on certain kinds of assault or military-style firearms that can be found in California, New York and other states.

Hint, hint. 

Never mind that the 16-year-old who committed this cowardly attack wasn’t old enough to legally possess a firearm in Oregon, or the fact that he used a pump-action shotgun purchased by his mother. Oregon doesn’t ban so-called assault weapons, so of course this tragedy should be exploited to put that prohibition in place. 

Of course, the Times could have focused on something other than the gun control laws Oregon doesn’t have. Like the community member who reportedly saw the killer enter Silver Rail Elementary, followed him inside, and shot him before police could arrive.

Shouldn’t we be talking about how to give other schools the ability to respond just as quickly? Whether that’s armed school resource officers, trained and vetted staff members, or other security measures, the question deserves far more attention than an unrelated ban on semi-automatic rifles.

I know that conversation will be an uncomfortable one for many Times staffers and their readers. After all, acknowledging that an armed citizen saved lives at Silver Rail Elementary means confronting the possibility that more guns in the right hands, rather than fewer guns in anyone’s hands, might actually make our schools safer. That’s not a conclusion gun control activists and their allies in the media want to make, but after the tragic events in Bend on Thursday, it also seems self-evident. 

The families grieving in Bend deserve more than another round of political talking points and recycled demands for gun bans that wouldn’t have prevented this attack. They deserve an honest examination of what happened, including what went wrong and what went right. If an armed citizen’s willingness to confront a killer prevented an even greater loss of life, we should be asking how to make that kind of immediate response possible at other schools, instead of pretending that the only meaningful response to this tragedy is another restriction on the right to keep and bear arms.

Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their extreme gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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