When a 16-year-old gunman forced his way into Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend, Oregon, and murdered three children and one teacher, the slaughter ended not with the arrival of police but with the intervention of an armed community member who pursued the killer into the building and shot him dead. Police reached the scene three minutes later to find the threat already neutralized. That is the central fact of this tragedy, and it carries a clear lesson: individual self-defense is the first and most reliable guarantee of public safety, and no government agency can be everywhere at once.
The same inability of the state to be omnipresent is now endangering the electoral process itself.
Federal authorities are investigating suspicious mailings containing white powdery substances sent to congressional offices and state election administrators in Oklahoma, Louisiana, Ohio, Delaware, New York, and Wyoming, with at least five Democratic senators among the intended targets.
These terroristic letters arrived just weeks before an election, part of a pattern that saw election officials in 17 states threatened in 2024 and fentanyl-laced envelopes in prior years.
Law and order means more than investigating after the fact; it means protecting those who administer our elections from intimidation and ensuring that voting proceeds without fear.
Abroad, the principle is identical: sovereignty cannot be outsourced to foreign critics or international bureaucrats. The Israel Defense Forces is conducting reviews of hundreds of combat incidents while fighting an existential war against Hamas and other terror proxies, yet BBC Verify has sought to second-guess the pace of those internal investigations.
The IDF has already removed soldiers from combat roles for failing professional standards, but urban warfare against an enemy that hides in schools and mosques does not conform to the timelines of external observers.
Israel’s mission—dismantling terror infrastructure and securing the return of hostages—requires the full force of its military apparatus, not hand-wringing from international media that demands accountability while Israel defends itself after the October 7 massacre.
The Iranian threat reinforces the point. Houthi militants, armed and emboldened by Tehran in violation of UN Security Council resolutions, launched a ballistic missile attack on al-Maashiq Palace in Aden, the seat of Yemen’s internationally recognized government, killing five people and injuring 16. The Prime Minister and his cabinet narrowly escaped.
This is not a distant civil war; it is a direct assault on national sovereignty by a proxy of a state sponsor of terror, and it demonstrates that appeasement of Iran only invites further aggression against allies and shipping lanes alike.
The thread connecting Bend, the election mailings, Jerusalem, and Aden is the failure of reliance on distant institutions and the necessity of resolute, armed self-defense at every level. A bystander with a gun stopped a school shooter because he was present and prepared.
Election officials must be protected because the state cannot guarantee their safety by mail inspection alone. Israel must be allowed to fight its war without media-imposed deadlines. And the United States must confront Iran’s proxies rather than accept their attacks as inevitable.
Liberty is not preserved by disarming the law-abiding, by softening our stance on election terror, or by letting foreign journalists dictate how a sovereign ally defends itself. It is preserved by citizens who refuse to be victims, by a government that secures elections rather than merely investigates threats, and by a nation that stands with allies fighting for survival. The Oregon bystander did not wait for permission. Neither should we.
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