By Douglas V. Gibbs
With the news of a recent shooting at an elementary school in Bend, Oregon, those who seek to violate our right to keep and bear arms are shouting their foul ideas of gun confiscation once again. This recent shooting reminds me of another recent event in Idaho, where a good guy with a gun stopped the damage being inflicted by the bad-guy gunman from being worse. Be it Bend, Oregon, or the In-N-Out Burger in Twin Falls, Idaho, what we have in those cases are two shootings, two good-guy civilians, and an acknowledgement of the importance of the right to keep and bear arms that predates the government that pretends to grant it
In December 2012, days after a madman murdered twenty children and six adults at Sandy Hook, Wayne LaPierre said something that got sneered at for a decade: the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. It was treated as a bumper sticker. In 2026, twice in one summer and one autumn, it was proved again as a fact of physics. Both times the “good guy” was not a badge, not a department, and not a policy. He was a private man with a pistol he chose to carry.
Bend, Oregon – October 15, 2026: At 12:59 p.m., a 16-year-old named Griffin J. John II walked up to Silver Rail Elementary School carrying a 12-gauge pump shotgun. He’d already fired at a man in the parking lot, putting six rounds into the man’s truck. He threw the gun over the fence, jumped after it, and shot his way through the locked doors.
Inside, he found a special education classroom. He killed three children, ages five, eight, and eleven, and a teacher, 25-year-old Megan Lambert. A seven-year-old and a 54-year-old teacher were critically wounded. He fired fifteen shells and had forty-four more in a backpack.
Bend police arrived three minutes after the first call. Three minutes is a superb response time. It was still too slow. The killing was over before the sirens got there.
What ended it was a 36-year-old father of two named Kaylub Giamanco, standing in the parking lot with a .40-caliber pistol under his shirt. He watched the kid go in. He followed him in. He shot him dead in a classroom.
The detail that ought to be framed and hung on a wall is the fact that the Bend-La Pine School District had banned firearms from its campuses. By district policy, Giamanco’s pistol was contraband. The man who saved the children was, on paper, a rule-breaker inside a “gun-free zone.”
Have you ever noticed that mass shootings typically happen in places that are designated as gun-free zones?
Earlier this year, in Twin Falls, Idaho, August 1, 2026, at a brand-new In-N-Out Burger, open one week, a similar scene played out. At 2:29 p.m., 24-year-old Chad Williams pulled up to the drive-thru payment window and shot a manager named Ashley Garibay, 23, in the face. He parked, got out, and killed Christopher Claunch, 59. Then he traded a jammed handgun for a rifle and kept going; killing Dale Schultz, 66, at a Tesla charger, wounding seven people in all, shooting into traffic at a red light.
Three men went at him. Steve McClain, an off-duty Idaho state trooper eating inside, moved past the fleeing employees toward the window and returned fire. Austin Scott James, a former Twin Falls cop and state trooper, charged the gunman with his pistol still holstered so arriving officers wouldn’t mistake him for the shooter, and got shot for it. The round shattered his arm and severed an artery; he was treated by his wife, a nurse, in an emergency room.
And then there was Jordan Salinas, 35, of Kimberly, Idaho., He’s not a cop, and not a soldier. He fired a suppressed FN Five-seven pistol at Williams and drove him off the restaurant. The police chief’s words: their actions “helped drive the suspect away from the scene, preventing further casualties.”
Salinas, the final good-guy with a gun, had started training seriously with a handgun after the 2021 Boise Towne Square mall shooting. He’d been a bystander once before. He decided never to be a helpless one again. His silhouette shooting at the gunman ended up on stickers and shirts reading “Idaho Shoots Back.”
The natural right to keep and bear arms does not come from ink and paper. I want that to sink in. The Second Amendment did not create the right. It does not ensure anything. It is an enumeration of the right, and an order by the Constitution to the federal government that it may not, for any reason, infringe upon any part of that natural, God-given, right.
And it is not about hunting, or even being a good guy when a shooting occurs. The Second Amendment goes much deeper than that. Read the operative clause as a lawyer reads a negative command: “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” It doesn’t get much clearer than that. And notice, it doesn’t say that our right to keep and bear arms “is hereby granted.” It doesn’t say your right to keep and bear arms “may be exercised subject to reasonable regulation.” Shall not be infringed. A profound and complete restriction on any federal government legislation regarding a natural right that already exists. The Amendment is a fence built around a pre-existing field.
James Madison grumbled about a bill of rights in the first place. Considering the Enumeration Doctrine, he viewed what became the first Ten Amendments as redundant. Rights already existed, and no place in the text of the Constitution was the federal government given any authority to have anything to do with our God-given rights. A clue to all of that is the fact that the Ninth Amendment sits near the end of the Bill of Rights. It is a nod at the fact that our rights are enumerated. Government, nor enumeration, is not the source. The Constitution is merely listed a handful of rights, the Ninth Amendment then adds any rights not enumerated, and the instructions are clear: hands off. The federal government has no authority to make any law of any kind regarding Natural Rights. It is not their responsibility to protect or guarantee our rights. The language is clear: Congress shall make no law, shall not be infringed, no soldier shall, shall not be violated (to borrow language from the first four amendments) – that is not language giving the federal government one iota of authority over our rights… it is language that restricts the federal government from making or taking any legislation or action regarding our rights.
When it comes to “arms,” in particular, Blackstone, writing in 1765, called the right of “having and using arms for self-preservation and defence” an auxiliary right… auxiliary to the three absolute rights of personal security, personal liberty, and private property. Understand the architecture. Life and liberty are secured by nothing but somebody’s promise unless you can defend them. The gun is not a hobby. It is the enforcement mechanism for the other rights.
The pedigree runs further back than Philadelphia. The English Bill of Rights of 1689 answered a king who had disarmed his political enemies: “That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence.” George Mason, drafting Virginia’s declaration, said plainly what the aim was with written constitutions. He understood the danger. He wrote, “to disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them.”
The men who ratified the documents that founded America and her States knew exactly who “the people” were. Mason, at the Virginia ratifying convention, when asked, “Who are the militia?” responded, “They consist now of the whole people, except a few public officers.” Richard Henry Lee said of the issue, “the whole body of the people always possess arms.” Tench Coxe said, “the militia are the people, with their own private arms.” Father of the Constitution, James Madison, in Federalist #46, bragged about “the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation.”
We are not talking about a standing army. This goes way beyond a police force. These Founding Fathers I mentioned were talking about “The People.” That is the original public meaning of the militia, and it is not subtle.
“Well regulated” means well-equipped and well-practiced. The word “regulated” meant “to put in good order.” Therefore, as per the language of the Second Amendment, a “well-regulated militia” is a militia that is in good order.
“Keep” means to have, hold, possess. “Bear” means to carry on the person, in the street, out in the world. Look up bear in the 1828 Webster’s Dictionary. One of the examples given is a “gun under one’s coat.” To keep and bear. Two verbs, two activities. A right you hold, a right you inherited.
The objection? Untrained civilians creating chaos? It is true. A stranger with a gun can shoot a bystander. He can be shot by the police who arrive and don’t know who the shooter is. Austin James didn’t draw his weapon for precisely that reason, and got shot for it. These are real costs.
Now weigh them against the alternative: a man with a rifle, forty-four spare rounds, and nobody shooting back. The costs of the armed citizen are contingent. The cost of the disarmed citizen is certain.
And the defenders who entered the picture and took care of business were “well regulated.” There weren’t necessarily trained because of some licensing regime, though. It was because of a personal discipline. Salinas trained. Giamanco trained. The permit is not the skill. The skill is the skill.
As for the “gun-free zone” problem I mentioned, let’s understand that every “gun-free zone” sign is a claim about other people’s future behavior. It is not a wall. It is a promise that nobody inside will be armed, which is only ever true until a bad-guy with a gun decides otherwise. To be honest, I don’t think bad guys are walking up to buildings, seeing the gun-free-zone sticker on the glass, and saying to themselves, “Shucks, can’t go in there, this says guns are not allowed.” Chances are, the gun-free label is exactly the reason they chose that environment to fire upon. In gun-free-zones, shooters have the best opportunity for the greatest number of unarmed mass casualties, and a pretty good chance to get out alive because chances are, nobody’s going to be firing back.
Silver Rail had done everything a modern school is told to do. Secure vestibules with background checks. Cameras inside and out. An armed school resource officer. New door-locking hardware approved after Uvalde. Every box ticked.
But. the thing that ended the shooting was a man in the parking lot with a pistol under his shirt.
The district had optimized everything except presence.
The fashionable argument is: we have police, so we don’t need citizen arms. But a monopoly on force held at a distance is a delayed response. Three minutes is excellent. Three minutes is also a hundred and eighty seconds of uninterrupted murder.
Rights are immediate. Police are eventual. In the gap between them, we are the militia.
The Founding Fathers did not see an armed people as a standing obligation discharged by government. It was a duty discharged by you. Which means the honest gun owner’s business is not a holster and a permit in a drawer. It is proficiency, and it is willingness to run toward the sound.
Salinas ran toward it. Giamanco ran toward it. James ran toward it unarmed, effectively, and paid in blood and bone for the privilege. With freedom comes responsibility.
Bend and Twin Falls are not stories about a nice thing called “a good guy with a gun.” They are stories about a good man who was already there: a father, an ex-cop, a guy from Kimberly with a girlfriend and a suppressed pistol – while the institutions that had promised to protect everyone were still en route.
And in Bend, the man who saved the children was there technically in violation of the rules. The rules were wrong.
That is what it means for a right to precede the government. The school board wrote a policy. The school board’s policy was falsified by a shotgun at 12:59 and corrected by a pistol at 1:01. Reality has a way of enforcing rights that paper forgot.
The gun-free zone is the last refuge of the man who thinks rights are granted by signage. They aren’t. They’re prior. Governments are posterior. And the right to have and use arms in your own defense, and in defense of the child in the next room, is the one natural right that underwrites all the others, because it is the only one that is presented as a duty that can be enforced in the three minutes before anybody official shows up.
— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
