Bend, OR- An Asshole With An AR-15 Walks Into A Grocery Store
Stop me if you've heard this before
Over this past weekend, Bend, OR, experienced its own “AN ASSHOLE WITH AN AR-15 DECIDED TO SHOOT UP A GROCERY STORE” moment. Bend is a beautiful, rustic town in central Oregon, well-known for its proximity to excellent skiing, hiking, mountain biking, and other outdoor activities. It’s also developing a reputation as a destination for craft beer enthusiasts. Erin and I have spent a great deal of time in Bend, and we saw Kenny Chesney in concert there just a few weeks ago. In addition, we have friends in Redmond, about 20 miles north of Bend on Hwy. 97, so we’re there at least a couple of times a year.
Bend is like most Colorado ski towns, minus the massive crowds and the ridiculous prices. Until this weekend, it was blessed with a low crime rate and a reputation for being a quiet and livable- if not inexpensive- place to live. Not much on the West Coast is cheap these days.
On Sunday evening, an asshole armed with an AR-15 walked into a Safeway on the east side of Bend and opened fire for no reason other than he could and because he carried a lot of unresolved anger. So why not take it out on a bunch of innocent folks who were in no way responsible for where he was in life? Sure, why not go out in a blaze of glory and take a few civilians with you?
Sunday, a gunman opened fire inside a Safeway supermarket in Bend, Oregon. Armed with a shotgun and an AR-15, he murdered two people, 84-year-old Glenn Edward Bennett and 64-year-old Safeway employee Donald Ray Surrett. He shot at least two other people, who fortunately survived, before he ended his rampage with a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Responding officers found two Molotov cocktails in his car, along with a sawed-off shotgun.
The gunman reportedly subjected the world to an unhinged, Taxi Driver-style 56-page manifesto that he probably thought distinguished him somehow but it’s actually tediously textbook: He blames his homicidal impulses on the government, technology, COVID-19 lockdowns that fully ended almost a year ago, and of course women, because misogyny is the standard gateway drug to violence. Like a message from Donald Trump, the manifesto was rambling, self-obsessed, and oddly punctuated.
I understand that alienation, anger, and misplaced rage might drive someone to do things that more well-adjusted people might not understand. That said, why must resolving one’s issues with the world involve the senseless destruction of innocent human life?
Why did the gunman, who will remain unnamed here because he doesn’t deserve to be identified/glorified, feel it necessary to take others with him if he planned to commit suicide?
“I can’t wait to just send a Bullet into someone’s Brain,” [xxxxxx] wrote in the first entry, on July 29. “This is going to be the Bloodiest and Most Gruesome Massacre in the History of Massacres! I want Blood, Guts, Brain Matter, and Pieces of Skull & Flesh to Paint the Walls and Floors. Then I wanna End my Life Here in the Most Violent Way Possible. By Eating the Barrel of My Shotgun then Blowing my Head Off & Evacuating my Brain with Buckshot.”….
“The Rage has become uncontrollable and It can’t wait 2 More Weeks. Tomorrow. Sunday. August 28th 2022. Doomsday.”
The 20-year-old had planned to conduct a mass shooting at his old school, Mountain View High School, but he couldn’t wait two more weeks until the first day of school- “It can’t wait 2 More Weeks.”
I shudder to think what the carnage might have been if he’d waited until the first day of school.
Even here in Oregon, it’s ridiculously effortless for virtually anyone to purchase a weapon of war. Even someone clearly as angry and severely mentally adrift as the Bend gunman could obtain an AR-15 and use it to destroy human life.
As a society, we’re failing to keep these types of weapons out of the hands of the severely mentally ill, resulting in innocent people dying so the National Rifle Association (NRA) can proclaim the holiness and primacy of the 2nd Amendment.
But what about the right of innocent Americans to live free from the threat of dying for no reason? What about their right to go to a Safeway on a Sunday evening and safely return home? Are their rights to live without being shredded by a weapon that belongs on a battlefield somehow less important than the gunman’s 2nd Amendment rights?
Bend, a previously peaceful and quiet town, is left to deal with the aftermath of a mass shooting that will garner the usual “thoughts and prayers” from Republicans and the NRA. And exactly nothing will change.
Krista Ratliff, 51, and her daughter, Camile Ratliff, 14, usually shop at the Safeway where the shooting occurred. “We need gun control,” Krista Ratliff said, “And there are sick people everywhere, even in our community.”
The aftermath of Sunday’s shooting gave way to a gun control debate among Bend residents. Some, like Ratliff, called for stricter gun control. Others, like Lee Gregory, 60, saw Sunday’s events as a reason to get a gun sooner than he had initially planned.
“This, to me, is an act of terror,” Bend Mayor Pro-Tem Anthony Broadman said to The Bulletin after a press conference Monday, during which the Bend Police Department identified the two victims as Donald Ray Surrett Jr., 66, a Safeway employee, and Glenn Edward Bennett, 84, a customer.
Bend represents yet another act of terror that will be mourned, reported on, and ultimately forgotten as America and the news cycle move on- at least until the next mass shooting occurs and the cycle repeats itself. Unfortunately, that’s what happens in a country whose leaders value the rights of guns and Proudly Closed-Minded Gun Control Foes over the lives of innocent, everyday Americans.
The deaths of those who found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time are of no concern to Proudly Closed-Minded Gun Control Foes, nor will they matter to those in Congress who are wholly-owned subsidiaries of the NRA. Such is the price of freedom, no? Besides, it’s not like they knew any of the victims.
Sunday, a gunman opened fire inside a Safeway in Bend, OR. Tomorrow or next week, it will be somewhere else because we don’t demand that our elected representatives DO SOMETHING to stop the carnage.
I wish we cared enough to do everything possible to staunch the bloodshed.
Enough of blood and tears.
I once had someone try to lecture me (on another person's newsfeed) on FB that there was no real difference between a .22 cal squirrel gun and a .223 AR15. To add insult to injury, the owner of the newsfeed thought the most important thing was to lecture *ME* because I was being too rough on the other person. (45 years after the fact, and I can still close my eyes and visualize field-stripping an M16.)