States, stop letting districts ban guns

OPINION:

Another school shooting, another unarmed school.

The three children and one adult murdered Thursday afternoon in Bend, Oregon — reportedly by a 16-year-old gunman — were sitting ducks, thanks to backward policies allowed by their state.

Police say that just before 1 p.m., Bend resident Griffin J. John II tossed his 12-gauge pump-action shotgun over the fence behind Silver Rail Elementary School, then scaled it himself, fired through the glass panes of a set of double doors to gain entry, and made his way inside the building to a special education classroom.

There, he reportedly shot six people, four fatally. He was finally stopped when a teacher tackled him and an alert father with a concealed-carry permit fatally shot him with a .40-caliber pistol.

One of the victims, 5-year-old Rhoam Summer, is the youngest person ever killed in a school shooting since national tracking began.

That the carnage was not worse is thanks largely to that father, Kaylub Giamanco.

Still, his heroic actions were technically illegal.

That is because in Oregon’s Bend-La Pine School District, of which Silver Rail Elementary School is a part, weapons are banned on all district property, including on individuals — even teachers and staff — who have concealed-carry permits.

Disobeying the law is a misdemeanor that could result in up to a year in jail and thousands of dollars in fines. Here is betting that someone on the commonsense-bereft political left will, in the coming months, push to hold Mr. Giamanco criminally accountable for his actions.

Silver Rail has a designated school resources officer, who is armed, but this individual — responsible, according to The New York Times, for “a half dozen campuses” in total — was not in the building at the time of the shooting.

Let us do a bit of math here. Six schools and one officer mean that, in the best-case scenario — not accounting for sick days or lunch breaks — the likelihood of this person being present at any of the assigned institutions during a shooting is less than 17%.

That is hardly a comforting percentage. We wonder how many district parents are aware of it, or that — after a 2024 incident in which a junior high student brought a gun to school — a safety report recommended hiring more school resource officers and discontinuing the practice of sharing officers among multiple schools, according to Fox 12 Oregon.

Still, the Bend-La Pine School District is not alone in its asinine, upside-down policy. Thousands of other districts nationwide have similar laws in place.

This year alone in the U.S., there have been at least 99 incidents of gunfire on school grounds, resulting in at least 33 fatalities and 63 injuries, according to the nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety.

The U.S. should not have to reach 100 before the left acknowledges that gun-free zones effectively function as invitations to shooters.

We need full-time armed guards in every school in America, now. We also need states to stop allowing school districts to enact brainless firearm bans on school property. The lives and safety of tens of millions of children depend on it.