Oregon School Shooting at Silver Rail Elementary Results in Multiple Casualties

The takes

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  Adam Smith

  1723–1790, Scotland (the Scottish Enlightenment: Kirkcaldy, Glasgow, Edinburgh)

  School Shootings, Self-Love, and the Duties of the State

  When a father with a pistol must defend a classroom of five-year-olds, the problem is not courage but institutions and incentives gone awry.

  A man walking past a primary school should expect, at worst, a noisy playground; in Bend, Oregon, he met a sixteen-year-old with a gun. He entered Silver Rail Elementary after seeing the youth go in, and by all accounts acted with great resolution. Teachers in their classrooms fought to shield children. Yet three children and a teacher were killed before the attack was stopped. The public properly praises such fortitude; but as one observer remarked, we should not have to have that. When the ordinary business of sending a five-year-old to school presupposes the possible intervention of a heroic stranger, the constitution of society itself is in question.

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  John Locke

  1632–1704, England (writing amid the Exclusion Crisis and the Glorious Revolution)

  When the Law Arms a Child, It Breaks Its Trust

  A government that lets minors bear lethal weapons into schools has ceased to protect life and has begun to play at force under the name of law.

  A boy of sixteen walks into an elementary school in Oregon with a firearm, and children and a teacher lie dead. I read also of a man, a father, who rushed in to stop the attack, and of teachers who fought to shield their pupils. These are acts of courage; but that such courage is needed within a place of learning tells us something has gone wrong in the first principles of your polity. For courage is the remedy when law has failed, and when danger that ought never to have been permitted has already breached the doors.

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  Niccolò Machiavelli

  1469–1527, Florence (republican secretary and diplomat, then exile, amid the Italian Wars)

  School Shootings Expose a State That Has Lost Its Arms

  When a 16-year-old enters a school and a ‘hero dad’ must do what the laws and magistrates should have done, the republic has trusted fortune where it needed virtù and force of its own.

  A 16-year-old walks into Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend, Oregon. Three children and a teacher are killed; others, including a 7‑year‑old, are critically injured. A man from the community — the “hero dad” — confronts and fatally shoots the attacker. Teachers fight to shield their pupils. The governor calls these acts heroic and says, rightly, that one should not have to rely on such heroism. I begin always from the effectual truth. The effect is that a child with a gun entered a school, killed innocents, and was stopped not by ordered force of the state, but by fortune placing a brave armed bystander on the scene.

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