Four people are dead in Bend. One was Megan Lambert, a special education teacher, a job that asks for patience, pay cuts and love in roughly equal measure. Three were children. Another child, 7 years old, and an educational assistant are recovering. A parent shot the gunman dead. A teacher and a learning specialist ran toward the attacker rather than away from him.
Honor all of it. Then don't let the honoring become the whole response, because that is how this country has handled these massacres for a generation. We turn the worst day of a community's life into a story about individual courage, and courage is real. But it is also a way to avoid asking why courage is the plan.
The Right will say the parent proves its case: a good guy with a gun stopped a bad guy with a gun. I take that argument seriously, and I don't dismiss what that parent did. But look at the sequence. The attack began. Children and a teacher were killed. Only then did someone stop it. Whatever stopped the killing, it did not prevent the killing. A system that works is one in which a parent never has to decide, in seconds and in a hallway full of screaming kids, whether to become a killer to save someone else's child. We are praising the fire brigade for a fire we could have kept from starting.
We don't yet know how this gunman got his weapon, or what warning signs were missed. Those facts matter, and anyone claiming certainty about what would have stopped this is selling something. But the answer is not to wait for the flowers to wilt and then move on. The instruction to "not politicize a tragedy" has only ever worked in one direction. It has never stopped anyone from politicizing the case for arming teachers, hardening doors or posting more guards. It has only ever been invoked against doing something about the guns.
Oregon is a useful place to ask the question. Voters here passed Measure 114 in 2022, with its permit-to-purchase requirement and limits on high-capacity magazines. It has since spent years in court and in implementation limbo. Democrats have held the governor's office and the legislature through all of it. Liberals should be honest about that. We are very good at passing the ballot measure, issuing the statement, lowering the flags and announcing the vigil. We are far worse at making the policy real, funded, enforced and resistant to delay. A law that exists on paper while children are buried is not a victory. It is a press release.
The human cost also has a labor dimension that rarely makes the headlines. We ask teachers and classroom aides, often underpaid and overstretched, to be counselors, nurses, social workers and now human shields. The educational assistant who was wounded earns a wage that wouldn't cover rent in Bend, where housing costs have been punishing for years. Nobody put "may be shot" in that job description, yet we have quietly made it an unwritten term of employment. Meanwhile the same politicians who salute their sacrifice resist funding the mental health staff and school support that might notice a troubled kid or a threatening adult before they arrive with a weapon.
The most grotesque feature of the American gun debate is how it asks the bereaved to be reasonable. Parents in Bend are being asked to accept that this is the weather, that sorrow is the price of a certain idea of freedom. But what about the freedom of a seven-year-old to attend school without a lockdown drill, or of a teacher to work without rehearsing her own death? Their freedom counts too.
Governor Kotek and her party should say plainly what they will do, by when, and who will be held accountable if it doesn't happen. The people of Bend have already provided the courage. What they are owed now is the policy.
