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On Thursday, a 16-year-old armed with a pump-action 12-gauge shotgun that his mother allegedly bought him for his birthday and a backpack full of ammunition opened fire at Silver Rail Elementary School, in Bend, Oregon, killing three children and a teacher. A 7-year-old student and another teacher were critically injured. The tragedy could have been worse if not for the heroic actions of an unarmed teacher who threw her cellphone at the gunman before tackling him, and a father of two students at the school, who heard the commotion and used his pistol to kill the shooter.
While both people who intervened to stop the shooter deserve high praise for their selfless heroism, some commentators—including President Donald Trump and the National Rifle Association—are celebrating the “good guy with a gun” while ignoring the unarmed teacher who intervened first.
Video from Slate
This “good guy with a gun” myth is a seductive marketing tool for the gun industry. Many find comfort in the promise that the solution to our most urgent insecurities is readily available at the nearest gun shop. If we are afraid, we need only purchase a firearm to ensure we are ready when a “bad guy” breaches our cherished boundaries.
But there are critical problems with the armed “good guy” trope. One is that the most reliable empirical research on defensive gun use demonstrates that incidents in which a “good guy with a gun” stops a “bad guy” are vanishingly rare. The overwhelming majority of fact-based, peer-reviewed research shows definitively that more guns are associated with more gun-related deaths and injuries.
Consistent scientific evidence demonstrates that the net effect of greater intrusion of guns into public life increases homicide, so any benefits from the relatively rare cases of defensive gun use can’t alter the calculus that more innocent lives will be lost as guns become easier to acquire and carry.
Another problem is that our cultural assumptions about “good guys” are laden with biases, particularly racist assumptions that undermine the safety and self-defensive rights of people of color. We have witnessed the exclusionary effects of the “good guy” narrative when law-abiding Black gun owners, like Philando Castile, are shot and killed by police who see them as a threat in spite of their lawful comportment. Armed Black “good guys,” like security guard Jemel Roberson and U.S. Army veteran E.J. Bradford—who responded to public shootings in November 2018 with armed heroism—have been shot and killed by police, who misidentified them as armed “bad guys.”
Similarly, states with so-called “stand your ground” laws, enforce them in ways that disproportionately favor leniency toward white people who have killed Black people. Women who “stand their ground” against men they know, meanwhile, are more likely to be punished than to be exonerated or celebrated as “good guys.” “Stand your ground” laws have spread to a significant majority of the states in spite of these biases and studies demonstrating their connection to increased rates of firearm homicide.
Despite data showing that true incidents of self-defensive gun use are rare, the “gun rights” lobby has continued to promote the “good guy with a gun” narrative in the service of deregulatory firearm policies. Recently, it succeeded in persuading the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to post faulty and misleading data on the agency’s website. The site currently presents a vastly overblown estimate of 500,000 to 2.5 million defensive gun-use incidents annually. These figures are based on suspect “research” by a small handful of people whose work has been soundly discredited. Much of this research depends on surveys, which are inaccurate metrics for determining whether someone was actually defending themself when they pulled a gun on another person. Reliable scholarship—including a 1997 study by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health scholar David Hemenway—reveals a significant confirmation bias in such surveys: A person who pulls their gun is more likely to depict their actions in a positive and even heroic light.
Even though multiple reliable studies show that self-reported defensive gun-use incidents are significantly exaggerated, the propaganda of armed self-defense remains influential, informing policies that continue to deregulate firearm ownership and carry. Twenty-nine states allow people to carry firearms into public spaces without a license or training, and approximately two-thirds of the states have adopted some version of a “stand your ground” law. There are deadly consequences to the mass distribution of this misinformation. The most respected peer-reviewed data show that guns are not reliable tools of self-defense. To the contrary, guns in the home significantly raise the risk of intimate partner homicide, and guns are the leading cause of death for American children. Instead of protecting ourselves and each other, Americans are using guns to kill each other, and—more frequently—to kill ourselves.
While we await the details of the final struggle to end the bloodshed at Silver Rail Elementary School, the fact remains that three young children and a teacher were murdered. “It could have been worse” is cold comfort to the grieving families, the school, and community members whose lives and sense of safety are shattered. We might also reflect on the senselessness of the incident itself, the tragedy of recurring violence that might have been prevented if firearms were a little less readily available. According to the K–12 School Shooting Database, 2025 saw 235 shooting incidents at K–12 schools across the U.S. In 2026, we have witnessed approximately 150 school shootings thus far. Perhaps, instead of promoting more guns as the solution to this ongoing nightmare, we might focus on prevention. The data reveal a very clear picture: Over the past 20 years, the 10 states with the highest levels of gun regulation enjoyed a substantial 45.3 percent drop in the murder rate, while the 20 states with the lowest levels of gun regulation showed only an 11.9 percent decline.
The Trump administration is merely exacerbating the “good guy with a gun” myth with the CDC’s new database. When our nation’s primary source for public health information has been captured by the purveyors of “gun rights,” we have capitulated to a defeatist fantasy of armed safety, ultimately placing profit for the firearms industry over public health.