Kaylub Giamanco did something almost no one can say they would have done. He was on his lunch break, saw an armed teenager on a school campus where his own children were, and ran toward the danger. His two children are alive. Nobody on the Left should smirk at that or hedge it. Honor him plainly.
Then look at what the story has already become, because the script writes itself. A good guy with a gun stopped a bad guy with a gun. The governor praised him. By the weekend, the shooting will be offered as proof that the system works.
It doesn't. Three children and a teacher were dead before Giamanco fired. The gunman reportedly fired up to 15 rounds, and the killing happened in the minutes it took a father to drive home, notice something wrong, retrieve a weapon and return. Giamanco stopped the shooting from going on. He did not prevent the massacre. Calling that a success measures American safety by how fast the next person with a gun can arrive.
The question this story is built to bury is the earlier one: how does a 16-year-old get a firearm and walk into an elementary school? We don't yet know whose gun it was or how he got it, and anyone claiming certainty is selling something. But we know the possible answers, and all of them are indictments. Either an adult left a weapon where a child could take it, or a gun moved through some channel that a functioning system would have caught, or someone ignored warnings that so often precede these attacks. Each is a failure we could have designed against.
Oregon's own record shows how hard that is. Voters passed Measure 114 in 2022, with a permit-to-purchase requirement and a limit on magazine capacity. It has been tied up in courts and implementation fights ever since. Democrats own part of that. They wrote a law that voters approved and then let years pass while its rollout stalled. We shouldn't claim it would have saved these children, because no one can know that. But a party that says it treats gun violence as a emergency should act like it, instead of treating each massacre as a messaging opportunity and each court delay as bad luck.
The Right will say that only an armed citizen stopped the killing, and that this proves we need more guns near schools. Take that seriously, because it contains something true. Giamanco's act saved lives, and I won't pretend otherwise. But a policy built on the hope that a brave parent happens to be driving by is not a policy. It is a lottery. Most schools will not have a Giamanco on a lunch break. Most of the time the only people present are teachers, who are asked to throw their bodies in front of children, and who sometimes do. One did here.
This is the part that should make us angry. We have turned elementary school into a place where adults rehearse for death, where children learn to hide silently under desks, and where a parent's legal handgun is counted as a safety feature. Other wealthy countries do not live like this. They have teenagers, mental illness and rage as we do. What they lack is the easy access to guns that turns a bad day into a funeral for three children.
Honor the father. Mourn the teacher and the children. Then demand to know whose gun it was, how it reached a 16-year-old, and what every adult and institution that could have intervened did not do. Praise for heroism is deserved, but it must not stand in for the harder work of making sure no one needs a hero.
How it may affect me
If you keep a firearm at home, Oregon law requires it be secured against access by children and other unauthorized people. Locking it and storing ammunition separately is the most direct step any household can take. Parents can also ask other families whether guns in their homes are locked before play dates.
