Kaylub Giamanco charged into Silver Rail Elementary and killed the gunman murdering children.
Newly released 911 audio captured the exact words he said right before he did it.
That makes Giamanco a criminal under the gun-free zone law Oregon Democrats refuse to touch.
Oregon's Gun-Free Zone Law Made This School Shooting Hero a Criminal
"Someone's at the school, at my daughters' school with a gun," Giamanco told the dispatcher on October 15.
"I have a gun, and I will shoot them right now if I have to," he said next.
He was driving past Silver Rail Elementary when he saw a 16-year-old gunman throw a rifle over the fence and climb after it.
His daughters were inside that building.
So was a killer who would murder three children – ages 5, 8 and 11 – and a 25-year-old teacher before Giamanco ever reached the door.
He did not wait for police.
He grabbed his own handgun, ran onto campus, and shot the teenager dead.
Under Oregon law, that school sat inside a gun-free zone, and Giamanco was not legally supposed to be carrying there at all.
Republican state Rep. Alek Skarlatos said what every parent in Bend was already thinking out loud: a concealed-carry holder broke the law and saved lives doing it.
Oregon Democrat Rep. Jason Kropf called the shooting "terrifying and heartbreaking," but not one Democrat in Salem offered to repeal the statute that criminalized the man who stopped it.
Rep. Emerson Levy praised law enforcement's quick response and never once mentioned the father who got there before they did.
Oregon Democrats built the very rule that turned a grieving father into a criminal the moment he decided three dead children was enough.
Good Guy with a Gun History Beats Police Response Time
This is not the first time an armed citizen reached a killer before police could.
In December 2019, church volunteer Jack Wilson drew his pistol inside West Freeway Church of Christ in Texas and dropped an armed attacker in six seconds flat.
President Trump praised Wilson by name, because the lesson was obvious even then: evil does not wait for a squad car.
Three years later, 22-year-old Elisjsha Dicken was carrying a legally owned pistol under Indiana's constitutional carry law when a gunman opened fire inside the Greenwood Park Mall food court.
Dicken killed him in fifteen seconds.
Neither Wilson nor Dicken needed a permission slip from the government to protect the people standing next to them, and neither did Kaylub Giamanco.
Gun rights researchers have tracked that pattern for years, and the National Rifle Association's American Rifleman has documented case after case of armed civilians stopping mass killers faster than responding officers ever could.
The FBI's own active-shooter data is notorious for undercounting cases where an armed citizen stopped an attack without ever firing a shot, because a shooting that ends before it spreads still gets filed as if the gun never mattered.
Bend, Oregon just became the newest entry in that file.
Democrats do not want that file to exist.
Within hours of the shooting, Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden was already demanding Congress pass new gun restrictions, the same tired script Democrats run after every tragedy.
Not one of those bills would have stopped a 16-year-old from throwing a rifle over a fence and climbing after it.
The only thing that stopped him was a father willing to break Oregon's own gun-free zone law to do it.
Giamanco's daughters are alive tonight because their dad ignored a Democrat-written statute instead of obeying it.
That is not a loophole Democrats should be campaigning to close.
It is the entire argument for why law-abiding Americans need to be armed in the first place.
Giamanco should not face a single day in court over this.
If Oregon Democrats had any sense of shame, they would scrap the gun-free zone law before another parent has to choose between following their statute and burying their kids.
Expect the opposite: watch Salem Democrats spend next session trying to make what Giamanco did harder to repeat, instead of expanding the kind of law that let him do it at all.
Three families in Bend buried their children this month, and Kaylub Giamanco's family did not have to join them, because one dad refused to stay in his car.
Sources:
- Alex Sundby, "Hero dad in Oregon school shooting told 911 he'd shoot gunman 'right now if I have to' before killing him," CBS News, November 4, 2026.
- "Oregon political leaders react to deadly shooting at Bend elementary school," Fox11 Online, October 2026.
- "Watch: Hero Who Stopped Texas Church Shooter: Without The Second Amendment You Will Lose All Other Rights," The Daily Wire, December 2019.
- "Gone in 15 Seconds: Police Correct Timeline of Armed Civilian Stopping Indiana Mall Shooter," Washington Examiner, July 2022.
- "Armed Citizens Outperform the Police in Stopping Mass Murderers," American Rifleman.
