Kaylub Giamanco and the Bend School Shooting: What an Armed Dad’s Story Teaches the Rest of Us

On October 15, a 36-year-old carpenter named Kaylub Giamanco decided to skip the lunch he’d packed and drive home for leftover tacos with his wife. That choice put him on Brentwood Avenue in Bend, Oregon, right as a 16-year-old with a shotgun was walking toward Silver Rail Elementary. His two daughters were inside. It was school picture day.

A few minutes later, the Bend school shooting was over. Three children, ages 5, 8 and 11, and a 25-year-old teacher had been killed. Two others were wounded. And the attack was stopped by a dad with a .40 caliber handgun he says had mostly been collecting dust in his truck.

Giamanco stayed quiet for a week. Then he sat down with Oregon Public Broadcasting for his first full interview. It’s worth watching before you read any further.

Interview footage from Oregon Public Broadcasting.

Before I go any further, I want to be upfront about what this article is and isn’t. I’m not interested in turning Kaylub Giamanco into a comic book character. He’s not asking for that either. He told OPB he’s a political independent, he doesn’t want this turned into a political fight, and he spent a big part of that interview apologizing to families whose kids he couldn’t reach in time.

What I am interested in is this: an ordinary guy with a rarely used handgun and some informal training walked toward gunfire and ended it. He was candid about how it went. Those of us who carry owe it to ourselves to listen closely.

What Happened at Silver Rail Elementary

Here’s the sequence as Giamanco described it to OPB, which seems to line up with what Bend police have said publicly.

Just before 1 p.m., he turned onto Brentwood Avenue and saw a figure dressed in black carrying a long gun. His first thought was that it was a prank, maybe a BB gun. Then the shooter fired twice at a red pickup truck and once more at a woman mowing the school lawn. Then he tossed the gun over the school fence and climbed after it.

That’s when it clicked. Giamanco opened his center console, grabbed the handgun, pulled the magazine from a separate compartment and drove into the school parking lot. He had Siri dial 911. The dispatcher started asking questions, and he cut it short: “I’m sorry, I have to go in. People are going to die.”

He followed while staying out of sight. He heard the shooter fire twice into the locked glass doors at a side entrance. Then he heard kids begging for their lives, and more gunfire. He went prone and army crawled along the windows, got in through a low window that had been shot out, and stayed on his hands and knees until he reached the special education classroom.

Before going in, he racked the slide to make sure a live round came out. Then he looked through the classroom window and saw a teacher physically fighting the shooter, both of them turned sideways to him.

“I knew that he did not know that I was there,” he told OPB.

He swung the door open, stepped in and fired. The teacher and the shooter both went down. The teacher got up and ran out of the room. Giamanco believes she thought he was a second attacker. The shooter started scrambling for his weapon, and Giamanco fired two more times to make sure he couldn’t hurt anyone else.

By then he could hear sirens. He went looking for the teacher, then put his gun on the ground and raised his hands as the first officer came in wearing armor and carrying a rifle. Later he walked back to his truck, unloaded the gun, set it on the floorboard and called his wife. Then he called his mom. When she told him he’d saved lives, he told her he didn’t save everybody. “I didn’t get them all.”

The Teacher Who Bought Him the Time

Bend police say the teacher in that room threw her phone at the shooter, tackled him and fought him for the gun. She was unarmed. Police Chief Mike Krantz called what she did heroic, and he’s right.

Giamanco is the first to say it. He told OPB he still doesn’t know her name, that she gave him the chance to take his shot without losing his own life, and that he’d love to give her a hug because she’s the real hero in this.

I think that’s an important part of this story and it gets lost fast. Two people stopped this attack. One had a gun. One had a phone and her bare hands.

Lessons From the Bend School Shooting

None of what follows is a critique of a man who did something most people never will. It’s what I took away from his own words, and it’s the stuff I’d want my students thinking about.

Normalcy Bias Hits Everyone

Giamanco’s first read was “prank” or “BB gun.” That’s not a flaw in him. That’s how human brains work. We look for the explanation that lets us keep our day normal.

What broke the spell was watching rounds go into a truck and toward a person. The goal isn’t to never hesitate as I think that would be unreasonable. The goal I would think is to get through that hesitation fast. People who have rehearsed these scenarios in their heads, even just on the drive to work, tend to get there quicker.

Where Your Gun Lives Matters

He told OPB his heart dropped for a second while he wondered whether the gun was even in the console. It was. The magazine was stored in a different compartment, so he had to grab both and put them together while things were unfolding in front of him.

It worked and in this case maybe that didn’t cost him any time. I don’t know. But his own description makes the point better than I could. Under stress, you don’t want to be wondering where your gun is or what condition it’s in.

To be clear, we generally don’t endorse keeping a firearm stored in your vehicle. A gun on your body is a gun you know is there, and a gun left in a car is a theft risk. That said, a gun in the console is probably better than no gun at all, and this story makes that case pretty well. If you do stage one in a vehicle, know exactly what condition it’s in, check it regularly, keep it secured against theft, and know your state’s vehicle carry laws.

There’s a Time for Caution and a Time for Fast Moving Force

Think about the matchup. One guy with a handgun against an attacker with a shotgun. On paper, that’s not a fight you want.

Giamanco played it somewhat carefully. He stayed out of sight on the approach, went low along the windows, came in through an entry point the shooter wasn’t watching, and looked before he went in. He did describe running from one point to another so it wasn’t all caution.

When he finally engaged, the shooter was tied up with the teacher and had no idea anyone else was there. Surprise is a real advantage, and he kept it until the moment he used it.

Here’s the harder part, and I realize it may not be popular to question his decisions. There’s a time for being discreet and exercising caution. And there’s a time to bring absolute force to the threat, as hard and as fast as you possibly can. In an active shooter event, its usually the latter.

We don’t know what would have happened if he’d tried to use his truck to hit the shooter out on Brentwood Avenue, or if he’d sprinted straight at him the second he got out of the vehicle. Maybe it ends sooner. Maybe it ends with Giamanco shot in the parking lot and nobody left to stop the attack. We will never know. Either way moving toward the gunfire took extraordinary courage.

But the math here is clear. Every few seconds you’re behind in the fight against an active shooter, bodies are stacking up. Time is the variable that matters most, and caution costs time. That’s one of the hardest lessons Ed Monk drove home in our active shooter webinar with him, and that is a critical thing you must understand about these situations. Speed of response is EVERYTHING.

Know Your Gun Is Ready Before You Need It

Racking the slide before entering told him he had a round in the chamber. Most instructors would teach a press check here instead, since racking dumps a live round on the floor. But the principle is the one that matters. He confirmed his gun would go bang before he stepped through that door.

Based on the story this also suggests to me that he racked the gun first in his car when he loaded it, and then again as he crawled toward the classroom. Stress will have an impact to be sure and I suppose it is a testament to his training that he was worried about making sure the gun was ready to go but also a testament that he didn’t have the training to do that without reducing his round count by 1. Regardless he got it done.

The Threat Decides When You Stop

After his first shots, the shooter went for his shotgun. Giamanco fired twice more and explained exactly why: he was afraid the shooter would keep killing people.

That’s the standard we teach. You shoot to stop the threat, and you stop when the threat stops. Just as important, you need to be able to explain what you saw and why you acted. His explanation was clear and specific a week later, on camera, while he was still visibly rattled.

To Everyone Else, You Might Look Like the Bad Guy

The teacher who had just been fighting for her life looked up, saw a man with a gun come through the door, and ran.

Responding officers face the same problem with even less information. Giamanco handled it how most concealed carriers probably would say is the by the book response: gun on the ground, hands up, before the first officer reached him. Also consider he didn’t have a holster on him. No place to put that gun away.

There’s also a lesson in the 911 call. He didn’t have time to stay on the line. But if you can get out one more sentence before you hang up, make it a description of yourself. Something like “I’m armed, I’m wearing a gray hoodie and jeans, I’m going in.” Dispatch can pass that to the people running toward the sound of gunfire. Of course maybe he did just that. We don’t know.

Training Doesn’t Have to Be Fancy, It Has to Exist

Giamanco isn’t a cop or a competitive shooter. He grew up hunting with his grandfather, stepped away from guns as a young adult, and got back into them years later when a client he was building for, a decorated Iraq veteran, and members of his platoon offered to train him.

He was direct about what that meant: “if I didn’t have that training, I probably wouldn’t be alive today.”

That training wasn’t a tactical academy. It was people who knew more than he did, willing to teach him. Most of us can find that. And the skills that showed up in that hallway, moving under stress, getting a gun into action, making a hit when it counts, are skills you can build with dry fire practice at home and regular range time.

You don’t know what skill level will be needed on the day you are called into the fight. This time the training this man had was sufficient.

The Aftermath Is Part of the Event

A week later, Giamanco says he lies awake replaying it. He sees faces and hears screams. He wonders whether he could have gotten there sooner. His family moved out of their house temporarily because they can see the school from it.

It’s what happens to people after violence, and it happens to good people who did the right thing. If you carry, part of your plan should cover what comes after: who you’ll call for legal help, who you’ll talk to about what you saw, and how you’ll take care of your family while you work through it.

What Happens Now

Giamanco says he wants to use the attention for something useful. He’s floated the idea of a motocross race that would raise money for school safety improvements like better locks and reinforced glass, and he’d like to see a school resource officer in every school. Meanwhile, Deschutes County officials told OPB that concealed handgun license applications have gone up since the shooting.

He also told OPB something I keep coming back to. He plans to teach his daughters how to use guns, because he thinks being afraid of guns is more dangerous than being comfortable with them.

I’d guess a lot of you reading this already agree with him on that.

Kaylub Giamanco didn’t save everyone, and he’ll carry that. But a lot of kids went home to their parents because a dad who happened to be driving by made a decision in a few seconds and followed through. The best way to honor that is to take our own preparation seriously and that includes pushing decision makers to harden our schools.

What will it take for someone to allocate the assets to have a law enforcement officer in every school. To install reinforced glass that doesn’t shatter so easily? If decision makers keep ignoring the problem or focusing on solutions that aren’t solutions at all we can all expect more tragedies like this one.