A4 BAKER CITY HERALD • SATURDAY, JUNE 4, 2022
BAKER CITY
Opinion
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Baker City, Oregon
EDITORIAL
Governor’s race
and gun laws
L
ast month a gunman killed 19 children and two adults
at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. Two weeks
earlier a gunman killed 10 people in Buffalo, New York.
Gun laws were already going to be an issue in the Novem-
ber election for Oregon governor. Now, perhaps more so.
Three candidates for Oregon governor — Democrat Tina
Kotek, independent Betsy Johnson and Republican Christine
Drazan — have distinctly different positions.
If you want Congress to do more, you may have to wait.
In Congress, the recent debates over gun laws have mostly
ended in stalemate. Bills may pass the House. There have not
been 60 votes in the Senate to overcome the filibuster.
In Oregon, it’s been different. Gun control advocates will
argue the state could do more. But control of the governor’s
office and majorities in the Legislature mean Oregon does
have more recent laws that some other states do not.
One Oregon law in 2015 required a background check on
sales of private firearms. Kotek voted for it. Johnson voted
against it. Drazan was not in the Legislature. A second law
was passed in 2017. It’s termed “a red flag law,” enabling the
police to take away a person’s guns in certain circumstances.
Kotek voted for it. Johnson voted against it. Drazan was not
in the Legislature. The most recent example was in 2021. It
was a gun storage safety bill. Kotek voted for it. Johnson and
Drazan voted against it.
Kotek has already mentioned three more gun laws the state
could adopt. It could ban “ghost guns.” Those are ones people
can assemble at home. Oregon could raise the minimum age
to buy an assault-style weapon from 18 to 21. And it could
ban more people from owning guns, such as those convicted
of hate crimes.
Johnson, who is a gun owner, does not believe the solution
is passing more laws for law-abiding citizens. She wants more
enforcement of existing laws and more help to law enforce-
ment to accomplish that. Johnson recently tweeted: “First,
stronger mental health prevention and intervention. Second,
support for locally designed safety measures in schools across
the state.”
In the wake of Uvalde, Drazan has not called for new gun
laws. She has spoken about increasing school security mea-
sures that “...includes investing in school resource officers and
ensuring that individuals who should not have access to a
classroom do not gain access to a classroom. As governor, my
budget will provide dedicated funding to strengthen school
safety measures to prevent these kinds of heinous attacks
from occurring,” she said in a statement to KGW’s Channel
8. Her campaign website emphasizes her A rating from the
NRA for upholding the Second Amendment.
Gun control is not the only issue of the governor’s race. But
the three major candidates do bring different approaches.
Which one appeals to you?
Unsigned editorials are the opinion of the Baker City Herald.
Columns, letters and cartoons on this page express the opinions
of the authors and not necessarily that of the Baker City Herald.
COLUMN
Primary results show split in GOP
not among the candidates with quot-
able lines on abortion, stolen elections
and similar subjects.
Was this the candidate considered
by voters as best equipped to fare
well in November? Probably that was
part of it.
Remember though that she received
just 22.7% of the Republican primary
vote, a support level that looks better
only in the context of her 19-person
field. Her nearest competitor, former
state Republican Chair Bob Tiernan,
was not terribly far behind with 17.8%.
Seven candidates received more than
5% of the vote.
If there’s another contender who
might logically be called a Republican
establishment candidate — because of
service in elected office and as chair of
the state party — that would be Tier-
nan, who won six counties — Clatsop,
Coos, Columbia, Douglas, Lane, and
Tillamook. His second-place vote actu-
ally may owe to some of the same fac-
tors as Drazan’s.
Candidates who lost past major
races, like Bud Pierce and Bill Size-
more, underperformed.
So, there’s a good chance electabil-
ity was heavily on the minds of close
to half of the Republican electorate,
maybe reflecting both desire to win
and a sense that 2022 might not be a
good Democratic year.
But that still leaves a majority of the
Republican primary voters apparently
signaling other concerns.
What powered Sandy Mayor Stan Pul-
Careful messaging
liam to a third-place showing with 10.4%
She did not emphasize hard-edged
of the vote? There are a few possibilities,
messages. Her website’s tag lines called but a good bet might be abortion, high
out “lower taxes, safer neighborhoods, profile during the voting period. Though
brighter future, better schools” —
not endorsed by Oregon Right to Life,
something Democrat Tina Kotek could Pulliam got attention for the edgiest
use as easily (maybe with some tweak- abortion stance in the campaign, criticiz-
ing of the first one). She did offer some ing his competitors as being wimps on
specific policy proposals, but she was
the subject and saying without qualifica-
BY RANDY STAPILUS
With 19 distinctive — not to say
sometimes colorful — candidates for
governor, Oregon Republicans should
have told us something about them-
selves by their choices in the just-ended
primary election.
They did: They are split. Many seem
driven by abortion or other culture is-
sues, some are powerfully drawn by re-
gional preferences, but a plurality just
want to win in November.
No single overriding motivation ap-
peared to apply overwhelmingly to Or-
egon Republican voters.
Former legislator (and House Repub-
lican caucus chair) Christine Drazan
was the clear winner from early on, and
she won a majority of Oregon’s coun-
ties. She led (decisively) in the three
Portland metro counties, and her four
best counties (in order — Wallowa,
Curry, Klamath and Benton) were
widely scattered across the state. Her
win cannot be called narrow.
What drew Republican voters to her?
Likely not the media endorsements
(her website’s endorsement page didn’t
even link to them). But she was en-
dorsed by a slew of Republican elected
officials and a number of GOP-lean-
ing organizations. She had an extensive
county organization, and it seems fair
to say she was the closest thing to an
(informal) candidate of the statewide
Republican organization.
That helps a lot. And she was articu-
late and likable.
tion he would as governor sign any “pro-
life piece of legislation.”
Votes for him may be a reasonable
measure of the abortion-driven seg-
ment of the Republican vote.
Anti-masker fizzles
That seems a little bigger than the
climate change and anti-masking ap-
proach of Marc Thielman, the former
Alsea school superintendent who won
a straw poll at the Dorchester event. He
had backers statewide — he had more
than a few signs in Eastern Oregon —
but still managed just 7.8% of the vote.
If you’re looking for a candidate test-
ing the salience of rural and anti-metro
appeal, look at Baker City Mayor Kerry
McQuisten. She won seven counties,
more than anyone but Drazen, carrying
most of the land area of Eastern Ore-
gon with Baker, Grant, Harney, Mal-
heur, Sherman, Union and Wheeler
counties. No candidate got a higher
percentage in any single county than
McQuisten did in Grant (44.6%).
Of course, relatively few voters live in
those counties, and McQuisten wound
up just sixth in the results. But she left a
stronger mark of the east-west and ur-
ban-rural gap in the state.
Some messages seemed not to catch
on. Nick Hess, who pressed for a tra-
ditional conservative style (and was
nearly alone in the field to do so), got
only 1.1% of the vote.
And if there had been more “electable”
candidates and fewer “message” candi-
dates? This primary could easily have
seen different results. The instability of the
parties — Democrats too but especially
the Republicans, even in a time of polar-
ization — may be one of the primary les-
sons of this year’s Oregon primary.
█
Randy Stapilus has researched and written
about Northwest politics and issues since
1976 for a long list of newspapers and
other publications.
COLUMN
Widening the focus on school shooting scourge
T
he compulsion to try to ex-
plain disasters such as the
shooting at Robb Elementary
School in Uvalde, Texas, is all but
impossible to resist.
This is human nature.
Confronted with the incompre-
hensible — that someone would pur-
posely murder innocent children in
their school — we instinctively reject
the notion that we could be as pow-
erless against these tragedies as we
are to prevent natural disasters such
as the tornado that careens across
a town, or the bolt of lightning that
kills indiscriminately.
But as we refuse to concede our
impotence, we sometimes indulge in
oversimplification.
I don’t condone this, though I un-
derstand it.
There is comfort in being confi-
dent that these inexplicable events
can be blamed on one factor or an-
other. If we can pinpoint that culprit,
the thinking goes, then surely we can
deal with it.
The roster of villains, in the emo-
tional aftermath of this latest ca-
tastrophe, is predictable, each with
its acolytes.
Guns.
Mental health.
American cultural decadence.
The breakdown of the nuclear
family.
Lax school security.
Ineffectual police response.
The depressing reality, it seems
to me, is that each of those factors,
and no doubt others, is implicated to
some extent in this continuing na-
tional scourge.
Which is to say, school shootings
are complicated, indeed unique, de-
spite certain commonalities.
And I don’t believe that we can have
any reasonable hope to even partially
solve this problem if we refuse to ad-
dress everything that contributes to
these terrible recurring results.
The tortured logic and the half-
truths that tend to dominate the na-
tional conversation following the lat-
est school shooting fatigue me.
Some commentators dismiss as in-
effective any legislation dealing with
access to guns, citing such mean-
ingless statistics as how many vio-
lent crimes don’t involve firearms,
or pointing out that school shooters,
who readily commit the ultimate
crime, would hardly be deterred by
another law.
Of course people commit murder
with knives and other weapons.
But when the topic is mass shoot-
ings at schools, guns — and in partic-
ular how the killer obtained the guns,
whether legally or not — couldn’t be
more relevant.
Pointing out, to mention one espe-
cially obnoxious example I heard re-
cently, that some murderers use ham-
mers is an insulting deflection from
the reality of school shootings.
When the issue is kids getting shot,
talking about hammer-wielding kill-
ers is about as helpful as discussing
their gardening habits.
Conversely, those who focus exclu-
sively, or mainly, on guns, who con-
Jayson
Jacoby
tend that “common sense” gun con-
trol laws offer a sure remedy and that
cold-hearted legislators who block
progress are in effect abetting murder-
ers, seem to me to be more interested
in propaganda than in sober analysis.
The inevitable “blood on the
hands” accusations leveled at politi-
cians and the National Rifle Associa-
tion and many others are as useful as
statistics about murder by hammer.
It is, of course, as easy to criticize
these pundits for their tunnel vision as
it is for them to blame one factor and
dismiss, or understate, all the others.
I think we ought to examine in
great detail all the elements that con-
tribute to this plague. And I believe
it’s possible to take actions on each
element that could, when combined,
potentially prevent some future
shooting sprees.
I’m not talking about a solution, per
se — at least not as that word is com-
monly defined.
There are 400 million guns in
America.
This is a free society where the gov-
ernment can’t incarcerate people who
act strangely.
This helps to make America the
great country that it is.
But it also makes us vulnerable.
That lethal combination that we
can almost always identify, after
Uvalde or Sandy Hook or Columbine
— mentally ill young men who ev-
eryone seems to agree ought not have
access to guns but who did anyway
— can’t be excised with a few precise
cuts, like a lump of malignant tissue.
But surely that combination can be
prevented in some cases.
I have no proposal for how we
can change the laws, regarding guns
and mental health, to stop that fatal
intersection.
And I understand that such
changes almost certainly will affect
mostly people who would never at-
tack schoolchildren. It can hardly be
otherwise, considering the infinites-
imal percentage of people who will
ever commit such acts.
But those effects, which might in-
clude such a minor inconvenience as
having to wait longer to buy certain
types of guns, or the more significant
matter of confining people who today
roam society with no restraints, seem
to me small things put up against the
deaths of children.
Our choices, ultimately, are noth-
ing like as dramatic as the propagan-
dists claim — we needn’t decide to
either scrap the Second Amendment
or accept every school shooting as
inevitable.
Nor do we have to transform our
schools into figurative prisons, with
bars in every window. Merely lock-
ing a door can potentially thwart a
shooter. This costs nothing, requires
no new laws, and impinges on no
one’s rights.
Should we encourage, or at least al-
low, teachers and other school staff to
carry guns if they’ve proved they can
do so safely?
This seems reasonable to me. Still
and all, I think the mantra that goes
something like this — “only a good
guy with a gun can stop a bad guy
with a gun” — is awfully simplistic,
even though the concept is not im-
plausible. The notion that putting
guns, handled by responsible adults,
in classrooms would be the one factor
that persuades a deranged person not
to attempt a school shooting seems to
me egregiously naive, however.
The universal outrage that follows
each school shooting is terribly frus-
trating in its predictability. But it also
renews my hope that this one point
of consensus — our collective horror
at the carnage — might finally per-
sist beyond our initial disgust and
result in tangible changes — to laws
governing gun and ammunition pur-
chases, to the incarceration of people
with mental health issues, to school
security protocols, to police training
for mass shootings.
Any one of these could conceivably
prevent an individual school shooting.
Working on all of these factors —
which is likely to happen only if a lot
of people abandon their illogical focus
on the one factor that most satisfies
their personal political feelings —
could yield more substantial results.
And in this situation, those results
are measured in the most precious
statistic.
Lives.
█
Jayson Jacoby is editor of the
Baker City Herald.