Bend residents want accountability. Oregon’s gun laws make it hard.

As calls for accountability grow in last week’s school shooting in Oregon, the state’s gun laws — shaped by liberal politics and libertarian traditions — could make it difficult to hold anyone criminally responsible.

Police have said the mother of the 16-year-old shooter had purchased the Maverick 88 12-gauge pump action shotgun that he used to kill three children and a teacher at Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend. They have yet to reveal how the shooter, who was killed by a passerby, got the weapon.

But even if his mother gave him the gun, she might not face legal consequences.

“That is a common practice in our state and around the country, to give kids a shotgun when they turn 16,” said Shawn Kollie, a Medford, Oregon, criminal defense lawyer who specializes in helping gun owners in Second Amendment cases. “That in and of itself doesn’t create criminal or civil liability.”

On Thursday, picture day for Silver Rail’s 450 students, the teenage gunman jumped a chain-link fence, shot through a locked side entrance and opened fire in a special education classroom. A teacher wrestled with him, and a father of two students saw what was happening as he was driving by on his lunch break, pursued the gunman into the school, and fatally shot him with a handgun.

The attacker, Griffin J. John II, had been a special education pupil at Silver Rail several years earlier, though investigators have not yet said where or whether he was in school at the time of the shooting.

On Monday, the Silver Rail campus remained cordoned with yellow police tape, and the sidewalk outside was carpeted with flowers, balloons, stuffed animals, candles and notes of grief. With most schools still closed and community events canceled, hundreds of people visited to acknowledge the loss or take in the scene in silence.

Some also talked about redress.

“There has to be some accountability there,” said Morgan Coats, a parent of a 7-year-old at another Bend school who dropped off a bouquet Monday. “Having a 16-year-old have access to a gun and that much ammunition? How is that possible?”

Michael Caba, a retiree who left flowers, said anyone “in the chain of causality that could have foreseen this should be held accountable.”

“If I give a gun to a troubled person and I don’t secure it and they go out and do something, I feel like I’m part of that,” he said.

But the law is not so straightforward in Oregon, a Democratic-led state that contains millions of acres of forests and farmland, particularly in the east of the Cascade Mountains.

Broadly speaking, Oregon earns high marks from gun safety advocates for its firearms laws. Everytown for Gun Safety, one of the nation’s largest gun violence prevention organizations, ranks Oregon 12th in the country for the strength of its laws, citing recent legislation tightening storage requirements, banning untraceable “ghost guns” and prohibiting devices that can convert semiautomatic firearms into machine guns.

But when it comes to the gifting of guns to children, Oregon’s laws resemble those of far more conservative states.

Decades ago, Oregon lawmakers made an exception to gun laws that allow parents to give rifles and shotguns to minors. In many areas of the state, as in other parts of the American West and South, it’s a rite of passage for a young person to receive a weapon for hunting or target practice.

“Personally, I wouldn’t give a 16-year-old a gun, but that’s not the standard,” said Josh Marquis, a retired Oregon prosecutor. “Part of growing up here is hunting and the outdoors. It’s part of the culture.”

Politically, however, several high-profile shootings over the past two decades have led to a continuing push for tougher gun laws in the liberal urban corridor along Interstate 5, which includes Portland, Salem and Eugene.

Legislators updated gun laws five years ago after a deadly attack during the holiday season at a suburban Portland mall that began when a man stole his roommate’s unsecured AR-15. They stiffened requirements for storage and made it easier to sue parents whose children misuse weapons if they failed to lock up the guns or supervise their use.

Lawmakers opted not to impose criminal penalties in part because similar statutes in other states disproportionately affected parents of color, said Amie Wexler, executive director of the Alliance for a Safe Oregon, a gun safety advocacy group.

Empirical evidence shows “we can’t arrest our way out of this problem,” she said. But she also noted that “nothing feels adequate for these families.”

A law firm announced Monday that it had been hired by the family of a 5-year-old victim in the Silver Rail shooting, Rhoam Summer, to investigate claims against anyone who contributed to the violence. In a statement, the firm promised an independent investigation into whether the school was secure and had an adequate attack plan, and how the shooter was “allowed to gain access to the weapon, and then the school.”

Prosecutors have increasingly sought to hold parents criminally responsible for school shootings committed by their children. In Michigan, the parents of a teenager who killed four classmates at Oxford High School in 2021 were each convicted of involuntary manslaughter. In Georgia, a father who gave his teenage son a rifle, which was later used to kill four people at Apalachee High School in 2024, was convicted of murder and involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to 15 years in prison.

In Bend, investigators have executed search warrants at an apartment the shooter shared with his mother, seizing electronic devices and other potential evidence.

The morning after the shooting, the attacker’s mother, Shauntai May Nickerson, said that she had seen no warning signs that her son might commit violence. “If I could have prevented this, I would have,” she said with tears.

It was not clear whether she had legal representation, and she declined to speak with a reporter who knocked on her door Sunday.

Prosecutors could consider charges ranging from reckless endangerment to manslaughter or criminally negligent homicide, a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

But that would require evidence of more than just a parent’s awareness that a child was troubled. Prosecutors would have to establish that the mother disregarded — or, in the case of criminal negligence, failed to recognize — a substantial and unjustifiable risk.

“They’re essentially the same standards that would keep an adult from buying a gun,” said Marquis. “I think it would be very unlikely this woman will be charged unless there’s something very significant in her son’s background that hasn’t become public yet.”

Investigators have said the shooter did not have a juvenile record and that they could not yet answer questions about whether he had any history of mental health challenges. That context could factor into whether prosecutors determine his mother knew or should have known to restrict his access to the firearm.

“I’m not saying it’s impossible, but you are talking about flagrant disregard of a known risk,” said Kollie. “You’d have to have an admission by the mother or some incredible eyewitness — like a counselor who says, ‘I sat down with the kid and the mom and said: Get rid of the gun.’”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.