Earlier this month, a mass shooting at Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend, Oregon appears to have been cut short by Kaylub Giamanco, a father of two students at the school. Giamanco, using a handgun in contravention of gun-free school zone law, killed the murderer.
Brady Leonard provided in a Wednesday Independent Institute article some details regarding Giamanco’s heroic intervention. That intervention, wrote Leonard, depended on Giamanco breaching legal restriction on the exercise of his right to bear arms:
Here lies the policy paradox: under Oregon state law (Senate Bill 554) and district rules, Silver Rail is a designated “gun-free zone.” By carrying a firearm onto school grounds in order to stop an active shooter, Giamanco technically broke the law. Had he complied with the state’s mandate to ensure schools are soft targets for killers, he would have been forced to wait helplessly outside as more students were targeted.
Luckily there was a lawbreaker around to protect people from a murderer.
State and school district gun-free school zone measures applied at Silver Rail Elementary School.
There is also a layer of gun-free school zone law that has been imposed by the US government since 1990.
Enacting United States House of Representatives member Thomas Massie’s bill the Safe Students Act (HR 5066) would result in the repeal of US criminal law provisions that prohibit the possession of a gun in a school zone. In short, it would eliminate the US government’s role in imposing gun-free school zones. It is legislation Massie has reintroduced each Congress and that former House member Ron Paul (R-TX) had sponsored before.
Massie, who is an Advisory Board member for the Ron Paul Institute as well as a US House member, has already offered a simple legislative fix that costs nothing and expands respect for individual rights to boot. Yet, it is a fix that congressional leadership year after year has not moved forward.
