A 16-year-old who massacred three children and a teacher at a Bend, Oregon elementary school was given the murder weapon by his own mother as a birthday present — and the only thing that stopped him was an armed father with a legally carried pistol.
The real scandal isn't the gun. It's that Shauntai Nickerson bought a Maverick 88 pump-action 12-gauge shotgun for her special-needs son and handed it over for what sources described as "recreational use." CBS News reported the weapon was purchased legally in August 2026. Nickerson had previously told local station KTVZ in 2020 that her son, Griffin J. John II, had special needs and was struggling during pandemic remote learning. She said at the time: "It'll be great for my son to get back in there and get the help that he needs with the skilled teachers that he needs to get it from." Instead of getting him help, she gave him a shotgun.
John opened fire on a passing pickup truck outside Silver Rail Elementary School last week, then shot through locked glass doors to force his way inside, according to police. He walked straight to his former special education classroom. Inside, he killed 5-year-old Rhoam Summer, an 8-year-old, an 11-year-old, and 25-year-old teacher Megan Lambert. A wheelchair-bound 7-year-old girl, Saylor Graham, remained in the hospital receiving lifesaving care, and 54-year-old teacher Becky Drury was seriously injured. Police said nine people were in that room.
Before John could fire his 44 remaining rounds, a teacher threw her cellphone at him and tried to wrestle the shotgun away. Then Kaylub Giamanco — a 36-year-old carpenter with two daughters at the school — entered the picture. Giamanco had been driving back from lunch, heard gunfire, parked, grabbed his legally registered .40-caliber pistol, and went in after the killer. He army-crawled through a classroom window and shot John at point-blank range.
The Guardian noted that Giamanco wrote in a 2018 Facebook post about going through "military shooting drills" with Iraq combat veterans. Whether that training mattered is an open question. What isn't: a good guy with a gun ended this.
Giamanco called his mother, Kenda Freeman, afterward. "He said, 'Mom, I just shot and killed somebody.' And I said, 'Kaylub, tell me about it,'" Freeman told KOVR. He told her: "A man went into my daughter's school and shot kids. And I looked at him point blank, and I shot and killed him, mom." His brother told the New York Post the family isn't comfortable with the word "hero."
"There are babies that are not," Freeman said. "And that's hard to swallow 'cause my heart goes out to those families. They didn't get to bring their babies home."
No motive has been released. Investigators are still combing through John's devices and online activity. The school will be permanently closed.
The cable anchors will spend the week demanding new restrictions on the tool. None of them will ask why a mother thought a 12-gauge was an appropriate gift for a troubled boy. That question — about parental responsibility, about a culture that arms its disturbed children and then acts shocked at the result — is the one that actually matters.
