Under the Gun

October 16, 2026 (Vol.20 No. 38) - The classic definition of insanity is the expectation of a different outcome while doing the same thing over and over again. That sums up America’s gun policies. “Thoughts and prayers” will not stop gun violence. Tighter gun laws will.

Just yesterday, another small community experienced the horror of gun violence. This time, it was Bend, Oregon, where three children and a teacher were killed by a gun-wielding 16-year-old before citizen with a gun intervened and killed the shooter. While the police are to be commended for their rapid response, arriving within two minutes of the first reports of gunfire, as should the private citizen who quickly intervened, we need to ask ourselves why do we continue to tolerate having our schools resemble Dodge City in the 1880s?

As of today, there have been at least 46 school-shooting incidents at K-12 schools and college campuses this school year. And it is only October. My position on the matter of gun control is well-known. We can preserve Second Amendment rights to gun ownership while instituting reasonable safeguards against assault weapons with high volume ammunition magazines. Nobody’s rights are being violated by restricting access to assault military-style weapons. To be fair, I do not know very much about either the Oregon shooter or his weapon at the time of this writing. However, that doesn’t really matter in the face of yet another mass casualty shooting. How in hell does a 16 year-old have access to “long gun” and are we comforted by the prospect of gun-wielding well-intentioned individuals administrating frontier justice?

I wrote about the mindset of shooters in my book Thirteen Minutes: Death of an American High School. It is a fact-based story about the shooting at a fictional Midwestern high school. The people in my made-up story are no better off than the good people of Bend, Oregon, who had been satisfied with the delusional mindset that “It can’t happen here.” And yet it does, over and over and over and over again. And, as I note in my book, there is no single profile of a mass casualty shooter. The only common sense approach is to limit access to these weapons and ammunition. However, in the current political environment, that’s not going to happen.

I am frustrated and angry. And considering the current state of civil society in the United States, I am also scared.Remember, many of those red-neck bastards who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, were heavily armed. And what have we done to insure that such a travesty could not happen again? Not a damn thing, that’s what. Until we, as a civil society, are willing to take reasonable steps to protect the safety of our kids in their classrooms, we will, literally, remain under the gun. That's it for now. Fear the Turtle.