A Mass Shooting? Wake Me Up when Something Unusual Happens

[Joe Guy]

Gunman opens fire at Oregon college; at least 12 killed
Jeff Barnard and Gosia Wozniacka, Associated Press Updated 4:40 pm, Thursday, October 1, 2015

ROSEBURG, Ore. (AP) — A gunman opened fire at a rural Oregon community college Thursday, killing at least a dozen people before dying in a shootout with police, authorities said.

The killer, identified only as a 20-year-old man, invaded a classroom and demanded that people stand up and state their religion before spraying more bullets, one student reported.

Authorities shed no light on the gunman's motive and said they were investigating.

Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum said 13 people were dead after the attack at Umpqua Community College in the small timber town of Roseburg, about 180 miles south of Portland. It was not immediately clear whether that number included the gunman. State police Lt. Bill Fugate told KATU-TV that at least 20 others were hurt.

"It's been a terrible day," a grim-faced Douglas County Sheriff John Hanlin said at a news conference. "Certainly this is a huge shock to our community."

Hours after the attack, a visibly angry President Barack Obama spoke to reporters, saying the U.S. is becoming numb to mass shootings and that the shooters have "sickness" in their minds.

Repeating his support for tighter gun-control measures, the president said thoughts and prayers are no longer enough in such situations because they do nothing to stop similar attacks from happening a few weeks or months later. He challenged voters wanting to confront the problem to vote for elected officials who will act.

Police began receiving calls about a campus shooting at 10:38 a.m. The school has a single unarmed security guard.

Kortney Moore, 18, said she was in a freshman writing class when a shot came through the window and hit the teacher in the head.

The gunman then entered the Snyder Hall classroom and told people to get on the floor, she told the Roseburg News-Review newspaper. He told people to stand up and state their religion before opening fire.

Next door, students heard a loud thud and then a volley of gunfire, Brady Winder, 23, told the newspaper.

Students scrambled "like ants, people screaming, 'Get out!'" Winder said. He said one woman swam across a creek to get away.

The sheriff said officers had a shootout with the gunman, but it was not clear if he was killed by authorities or whether he took his own life.

The gunfire sparked panic as students ran for safety and police and ambulances rushed to the scene.

Lorie Andrews, who lives across the street from the campus, heard what sounded like fireworks and then saw police cruisers streaming in. She spoke with students as they left.

"One girl came out wrapped in a blanket with blood on her," she said.

Some students were in tears as they left. Police lined up students in a parking lot with their hands over their heads and searched them before they were bused with faculty to the nearby county fairgrounds, where counselors were available and some parents waited for their children.

Jessica Chandler of Myrtle Creek, south of Roseburg, was at the fairgrounds desperately seeking information about her 18-year-old daughter, Rebecka Carnes.

"I don't know where she is. I don't know if she's wounded. I have no idea where she's at," Chandler said.

Carnes' best friend told Chandler that her daughter had been flown by helicopter to a hospital, but she had not been able to find her at area medical centers.

Interim college President Rita Cavin said it was awful to watch families waiting for the last bus of survivors and their loved ones were not on it.

"This is a tragedy and an anomaly," she said. "We have a wonderful, warm, loving and friendly campus."

The sheriff described the town of 22,000 as a peaceful community that has crime like any other. In fact, it's no stranger to school gun violence. A freshman at the local high school shot and wounded a fellow student in 2006.

The community along Interstate 5 west of the Cascade Mountains is in an area where the timber industry has struggled. In recent years, officials have tried to promote the region as a tourist destination for vineyards and outdoor activities.

Many of the students in local school district go on to attend the college of 3,000 students.

"We are a small, tight community, and there is no doubt that we will have staff and students that have family and friends impacted by this event," Roseburg Public Schools Superintendent Gerry Washburn said.

Former UCC President Joe Olson, who retired in June after four years, said the school had no formal security staff, just one officer on a shift.

One of the biggest debates on campus last year was whether to post armed security officers on campus to respond to a shooting.

"I suspect this is going to start a discussion across the country about how community colleges prepare themselves for events like this," he said.

There were no immediate plans to upgrade security on the campus in light of the shooting, Cavin said.

source

[Lord Jim]

Oregon gunman singled out Christians during rampage

The gunman who opened fire at an Oregon community college was forcing people to stand up and state their religion before he began blasting away at them, survivors said Thursday.

A woman who claimed to have a grandmother inside a writing class in Snyder Hall, where a portion the massacre unfolded, described the scene in a tweet.

“The shooter was lining people up and asking if they were Christian,” she wrote. “If they said yes, then they were shot in the head. If they said no, or didn’t answer, they were shot in the legs. My grandma just got to my house, and she was in the room. She wasn’t shot, but she is very upset.

The Twitter user then recalled how her grandmother attempted to save the life of one of her close classmates.
Modal Trigger
Two women wait outside Umpqua Community College campus after a shooting.Photo: AP

“She tried to perform CPR on her friend, but it was too late,” the woman said. “I hope nothing like this ever happens again.”

Kortney Moore, an 18-year-old student at Umpqua Community College who was also in the room, told Oregon’s News Review that the shooter was indeed on the hunt for Christians.

Moments after hearing a bullet come flying through a window, she said the 20-year-old shooter made his way inside and targeted their teacher, pumping a single round into their head.

As the young man ordered people to the ground, Moore laid patiently with her classmates and waited, according to the News Review.

Once they all got down, she said the gunman began asking people to rise and say what their religion was. After they stood and gave their answer, he started shooting.

One very strange thing about this is that the cops still haven't released the killer's name...

[dales]

One very strange thing about this is that the cops still haven't released the killer's name...

Ties to ISSA perhaps?

Fear of rampant Islamophia?

I smell a conspiracy !

[Gob]

And now the shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon. It's the 45th mass shooting in the United States in the 274 days so far in 2015, a spokesperson for Everytown for Gun Safety tells Newsweek.

ISLA VISTA, CA—In the days following a violent rampage in southern California in which a lone attacker killed seven individuals, including himself, and seriously injured over a dozen others, citizens living in the only country where this kind of mass killing routinely occurs reportedly concluded Tuesday that there was no way to prevent the massacre from taking place.

“This was a terrible tragedy, but sometimes these things just happen and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them,” said North Carolina resident Samuel Wipper, echoing sentiments expressed by tens of millions of individuals who reside in a nation where over half of the world’s deadliest mass shootings have occurred in the past 50 years and whose citizens are 20 times more likely to die of gun violence than those of other developed nations.

“It’s a shame, but what can we do? There really wasn’t anything that was going to keep this guy from snapping and killing a lot of people if that’s what he really wanted.” At press time, residents of the only economically advanced nation in the world where roughly two mass shootings have occurred every month for the past five years were referring to themselves and their situation as “helpless.”

[Lord Jim]

They've now identified the guy; Chris Harper Mercer.

Maybe the delay was to give his family time to get to a secure location in case some whacko wanted to get retribution against them....

[Lord Jim]

Wow, we managed to make it a whole three posts (including the OP) discussing this case before we got our first gun control post...


For my part, all I'm going to post in this thread are things relevant to this particular case. I have absolutely zero interest in participating in our 1,754th gun control discussion. I have no reason to believe it will lead anywhere that the previous 1,753 didn't. A total waste of keystrokes.

I'm just going to scroll past anything said in this thread about it, and I will not be responding to anything anyone says on the subject pro or con.

[MajGenl.Meade]

Mmmmm.... smell that Onion!

[Lord Jim]

From what I'm seeing and reading this looks like an angry young guy who couldn't get laid....

26 years old, still living with his parents, lists his income as under $25,000 per year...

Really sounds like quite a catch....

ETA:

He also calls himself a conservative and a Republican...

But what comes through most strongly to me when I read this is how desperate he is for a relationship:

[Guinevere]

Wow, we managed to make it a whole three posts (including the OP) discussing this case before we got our first gun control post...


For my part, all I'm going to post in this thread are things relevant to this particular case. I have absolutely zero interest in participating in our 1,754th gun control discussion. I have no reason to believe it will lead anywhere that the previous 1,753 didn't. A total waste of keystrokes.

I'm just going to scroll past anything said in this thread about it, and I will not be responding to anything anyone says on the subject pro or con.

And there in a nutshell, is the Republican response to our 45th school shooting this year. Duck, ignore, disseminate. As the President said: "We are not the only country on Earth with mental illness or with people who want to harm to each other, but we are the only country that has these mass shootings every few months."

I'm done crying about these senseless deaths. Time to repeal the second amendment.

[RayThom]

Chris Harper Mercer
https://www.facebook.com/unicornwhisperR?fref=ts
One of his posts reads: "trolling for hookers so I can help them find their lord and savior." Obviously a preacher looking to convert the sinners to his brand of christianity.

He appears to have had some strange link to the Irish Republican Army. I'm guessing that his religious question was asked in order to separate catholics from protestants. Nonetheless, it appears to be more mass murder committed in the name of religion. This time Catholic rather than Islam.

God bless America... but I think she's having problems with the quality of blessing needed.

[Lord Jim]

One thing that is striking to me is how many of the perpetrators of these horrific crimes seem to fit a very similar basic profile:

Intelligent, narcissistic under-achievers with poor social interaction skills who don't feel that in one way or they have gotten what is due to someone as great as they are....(recognition, respect, romance, etc.)

And this gap between the reality of their lives and what they believe themselves to be entitled to creates a rage and resentment that just builds and builds and builds...

We'll learn a lot more about this scumbag over the next hours and days, but based on what has come out so far he certainly seems like an excellent fit for that profile...

[Lord Jim]

I'm guessing that his religious question was asked in order to separate catholics from protestants. Nonetheless, it appears to be more mass murder committed in the name of religion. This time Catholic rather than Islam.

I doubt that, or he would have asked that specific question...

On his profile that I posted, he says a couple of times that he dislikes "organized religion"...

There's a lot of creepy stuff on his Facebook page at that link; here's one that I'm sure really contributed to his being such a chick magnet:

Chris Harper Mercer As a kid (and a twenty-something), I used to throw ants into spider webs. I wasn't a complete monster though, because I'd put little slivers of tape on them that functioned as armor. Does that count as animal torture?

[wesw]

guin, how many lives will another civil war cost?

that will be the price of repealing the 2nd amendment.

[Gob]

We are not America...

In his very fine speech this morning, full of sorrow and frustration, President Obama made a mistake: Australia is not like the United States. We decided not to be.

We decided to grow up instead and become a more reasonable, rational society that explicitly values human life and prefers to think the best of people, rather than the worst.

The US is too immature a society to be allowed to play with guns. It has never shed its Wild West mythology. Americans still use their courts to kill people, which sends a message in its own way. Read The New Yorker's account of the Rodricus Crawford case and see a state that thinks taking a life is a no big deal. It's a country that values property more than life.

Unlike the US, we collectively decided to have a decent social safety net, the concept of a living wage and make good education freely available. Most of us are wary of those with extreme views of any kind.

Inherent scepticism about church and state turns out to be not such a bad thing.

Unlike Australia, the US is at war with itself, strongly divided on racial, religious, political and social lines. We have our problems, significantly worse in some places than others, but overall our gaps are bridgeable. The US seems to prefer to use its societal chasms as moats and defend their borders.

The dystopian viewpoint is a significant theme in American literature, the assumption that the country is a disaster away from rape and pillage, from turning into plundering carnivores. Having never made peace with its past, which pretty much was one of rape and pillage, it hasn't escaped it.

From The Road to Hunger Games, the effect is numbing. The National Geographic Channel features a show called Doomsday Preppers, a how-to guide for armed and dangerous "survivalists" building redoubts on the assumption that everyone else is armed and dangerous and out to get them. It is a nation that is collectively paranoid.

It doesn't seem to help to have a large body of religious fanaticism – it doesn't help anywhere, whatever the particular brand of religion. There's little difference between the violently fundamentalist Christian, Muslim, Hindu or Jew.

There's an American brand that hasn't evolved far from justifying slavery. It carries a fundamentalist certainty that is in equal parts both ignorant and frightening. The concept of American exceptionalism – that God has a chosen mission for the USA – is a dangerous adjunct.

It's all fodder for the deranged fanatics of the American gun lobby, with a bible in one hand and an assault rifle in the other. It's fuel for the paranoid interpretation of a line in the constitution that is a blatant anachronism.

We have our share of deranged individuals, but we try not to empower them. We don't promote violence for good or bad and increasingly decry the bad.

That was another mistake Obama made: talking of responsible gun owners having firearms to "protect their families". The statistics have long been in – having firearms is more likely to endanger families than to protect them. Obama is not immune to the paranoia.

And so, when domestic terror struck at Port Arthur and John Howard showed political leadership, we overcame our ratbags, our Leyonhjelms, and agreed to reasonable controls on firearms. They're not particularly tough, except in restricting access to weapons specifically designed for killing human beings. Only an NRA member could think that unreasonable.

The restrictions demonstrably work.

The immediate American-like response at the crazier end of the National Party has abated. It's safe to say we're now rather proud as a nation of our gun laws. We haven't suffered another mass shooting. In National Party heartland, there are men alive who would not be if guns had remained so freely available when they were troubled youths.

And I write as a person who grew up with a knowledge and enjoyment of and respect for firearms. My father was a policeman. We had firearms in the house. I have a gun licence. It's been a little while now, but I enjoy shooting clays when I have the chance. And I think only a madman would want to water down our gun laws or, in America's case, not adopt them.

But, no, we are not like America. We're a society the USA should aspire to be.


Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/business/comment- ... z3nNQu6lpd

[wesw]

[Econoline]

guin, how many lives will another civil war cost?

that will be the price of repealing the 2nd amendment.

Personally, I think that, instead of repealing the 2nd Amendment, we should try to amend it to read:

• "A completely unregulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

No, on second thought, let's also get rid of the unnecessary commas and capital letters:

• "A completely unregulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

Then people will finally have to confront and discuss the question of whether firearms should be REGULATED or UNREGULATED.

[Big RR]

Jim--a lot of violent criminals, especially mass murderers seem to meet that profile; this guy could easily be Oswald or Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver; or, I would bet, and zealous suicide bomber/assassin, killer for any cause. It's a volatile mix of personality traits that seems to crave recognition, good or bad.

[Sue U]

I'm done crying about these senseless deaths. Time to repeal the second amendment.

Hooray! What took you so long????

guin, how many lives will another civil war cost?

that will be the price of repealing the 2nd amendment.

Because???????

[oldr_n_wsr]

Anybody read up on HOW he got the guns? Didn't Oregon just enact a mandatory background check on ALL gun purchases?
Of course if he had them ahead of the check then that doesn't apply.

[Lord Jim]

Jim--a lot of violent criminals, especially mass murderers seem to meet that profile; this guy could easily be Oswald or Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver

Funny you should mention Oswald; I thought of him as I was constructing the profile description...

And now we know more about Harper; and it reinforces the picture:

Chris Harper Mercer, Oregon Gunman, Is Recalled as a Recluse Close to His Mother

TORRANCE, Calif. — Chris Harper Mercer, the man identified as the gunman in the deadly rampage at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Ore., on Thursday, was a withdrawn young man who neighbors said wore the same outfit every day — combat boots, green Army pants and a white T-shirt — and was close to his mother, who fiercely protected him.

Neighbors in Winchester, Ore., and Torrance, Calif., where Mr. Mercer, 26, lived with his mother, Laurel Harper, remember a reclusive and seemingly fragile young man with a shaved head and dark glasses who seemed to recoil from social interaction.

“He always seemed anxious,” said Rosario Lucumi, 51, who rode the same bus in Torrance as Mr. Mercer when she went to work. She said she believed he took it to El Camino College. “He always had earphones in, listening to music.”

“He and his mother were really close,” said Ms. Lucumi, who estimated that Mr. Mercer and his mother, who shared a small one-bedroom apartment in Torrance, lived there for less than a year. “They were always together.”

Bryan Clay, 18, said he once asked Mr. Mercer why he wore “a military get-up” every day.

“He kind of just didn’t want of talk about it” and changed the subject, Mr. Clay said.

“He didn’t say anything about himself,” he added.

Derrick McClendon, 42, another former neighbor, said that Mr. Mercer was so timid and ill at ease that on occasion he would ask him if something was wrong.

“I would say, ‘Hey, man, you all right?’ ” Mr. McClendon said. “He would say ‘hi,’ but that’s it. He was really shy.”

Mr. Mercer appeared to have sought community on the Internet. A picture of him holding a rifle appeared on a MySpace page with a post expressing a deep interest in the Irish Republican Army. It included footage from the conflict in Northern Ireland set to “The Men Behind the Wire,” an Irish republican song, and several pictures of gunmen in black balaclavas. Another picture showed the front page of An Phoblacht, the party newspaper of Sinn Fein, the former political wing of the I.R.A.

A picture of Mr. Mercer also appeared on a long-dormant dating website profile registered in Los Angeles. On it, he described himself as an “introvert” with a dislike for “organized religion.”

In the offline world, Mr. Mercer’s mother sought to protect him from all manner of neighborhood annoyances, former neighbors in Torrance said, from loud children and barking dogs to household pests. Once, neighbors said, she went door-to-door with a petition to get the landlord to exterminate cockroaches in her apartment, saying they bothered her son.

“She said, ‘My son is dealing with some mental issues, and the roaches are really irritating him,’ ” Julia Winstead, 55, said. “She said they were going to go stay in a motel. Until that time, I didn’t know she had a son.”

Rosario Espinoza, 33, was once a neighbor of Mr. Mercer’s and moved into the apartment that the mother and son shared when the two moved from Torrance a couple of years ago. She said that the two “kept to themselves,” but that from time to time Mr. Mercer’s mother would complain that Ms. Espinoza’s young children were playing too loudly and bothering her son.

“They’re normal children that play, but she would get really upset,” Ms. Espinoza said. “It was during the daytime. But I guess the noise would really upset him, the son.”

Other neighbors said she would confront them about their barking dogs when they returned from work. “She would wait till they got home and knock on their door,” Kim Hermenegildo, 48, said.

Ms. Espinoza said that she heard Mr. Mercer’s mother got a job in Oregon, prompting the family’s move north.

Mr. Mercer and his mother shared an apartment in Winchester, a dun-colored building that sat roped off behind police tape on Thursday evening, guarded by sheriff’s deputies who shooed away reporters.

Bronte Hart, a neighbor who said she lived in an apartment below Mr. Mercer’s, described a more assertive young man than his former neighbors in California did. Far from avoiding social interaction, she said, he frequently shouted at her for smoking on her balcony. [At this point, the rage and frustration must have been starting to build.]

“He yelled at us, me and my husband,” said Ms. Hart, who lives in the building with her husband and father. “He was not a friendly type of guy. He did not want anything to do with anyone.”

Ms. Hart and her father, Eli Loomas, said the authorities came to the apartment complex and began asking questions about Mr. Mercer on Thursday morning. A woman who may have been his mother also showed up, they said, and she appeared distraught.

Another neighbor, a man in his 50s who declined to give his name, said that Mr. Mercer lived on the second floor of the three-story building with his mother. He said he believed they were both students.

“Chris was a good kid, you know,” he said, adding that he had spoken to Mr. Mercer only briefly over the last few years. “He’s always been polite to me.”

When asked if he had ever seen Mr. Mercer with firearms, the man demurred. “I’d rather not say,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/03/us/ch ... oting.html