On the Anniversary of the Safeway Shooting, a Status Quo in Addressing Gun Safety

This week, Bendites are marking the one-year anniversary of the day when a gunman entered the east side Safeway and shot two people before shooting himself. Thanks to the quick actions of one of the victims, Donald Surrett, Jr., the body count may have been far less than what it could have been, police said.

And yet, we shouldn’t have to rely on the quick actions of an average citizen in order to reduce the death toll from firearms – an effort that the majority of Oregonians voted in support of when they approved Measure 114 in 2022. Gun safety measures like that one, which place a 10-round limit on magazines and require firearms training and permitting, are aimed at preventing the types of tragedies that we saw on Aug. 28, 2022, at the east side Safeway.

The thing is, we just don’t buy the “bad guys will get guns anyway” argument.

The 20-year-old who shot and killed Surrett and Glen Bennett purchased his firearms – which included a semi-automatic rifle – legally. He didn’t “mow down” a group of people within seconds, like we saw during the shooting at the school in Uvalde, Texas, in May 2022, but he could have, were it not for the military veteran in the produce aisle of the Safeway that day. The shooter was carrying four magazines, each with 30 rounds in them. The outcome could have been so much worse.

In the wake of the tragedy, friends and acquaintances of the Bend Safeway shooter described a young person who struggled with mental health issues, who fantasized about killing people and who had signaled his intent to those around him. It’s possible, even with all of that, that even the limits set forth by Measure 114 would have still not triggered a stoppage of any permit that young man may have ultimately gotten, but it would have added time to the process, which gun-safety advocates maintain can and does prevent deadly encounters.

When it comes to suicides and homicides, we can look to gun-safety initiatives in other states for statistics about harm reduction. In Connecticut, homicides went down by 40% when that state enacted its gun-permitting system, according to research from the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research.

In July, a federal judge in Oregon ruled that Measure 114 is constitutional – a ruling that gun rights groups have already appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Meanwhile, this month a state court will hear the case filed in Harney County against the measure. If the gun-rights lobby wins in either of these cases, the measure voted upon by a majority of Oregonians will be struck down.

Between the limbo of this measure, the debacle and slow rollout that has been the drug-treatment bill, Measure 110, and the quorum-denying walkouts of Republicans in the state legislature, it wouldn’t be at all strange to find yourself, an Oregon voter, feeling downright disenfranchised right about now. For the many victims of the Safeway shooting — both those who survived, and the friends and families of those who died — add onto that a lingering trauma that isn’t going away anytime soon.

This article appears in Source Weekly August 31, 2023.

Exactly, Polly F. If you diagram the Second Amendment, you’ll find that the part that supposedly gives unlimited rights to keep and bear arms is actually a dependent clause in the sentence and written in the context of protecting the right to a “regulated” militia–and nothing more.

James Madison and grammar and intended meaning–all presumably too “woke” for today’s crowd of Constitutional scholars.

Oh, and ironies abound. The U.S. District Judge that ruled 114 to be Constitutional is a Trump appointee. The Harney County judge who ruled otherwise is a Democrat and former public defender who married into a family that owns a gun store and shooting range.