‘WE HAVE BECOME NUMB TO THIS’
OBAMA LASHES OUT AT GUN LAWS AFTER MASS SHOOTING IN OREGON
Kortney Moore was in a writing class at Umpqua Community College in sleepy Roseburg, Ore., at about 10:30 a.m. on Thursday when a shot came through a window.
A gunman entered her classroom in Snyder Hall and told people to get on the ground. Moore, 18, told the Roseburg News Review the man started asking people to stand up and state their religion, and then opened fire.
In the chaotic scene that followed — one that has become all too familiar in the United States — 10 people were killed and seven others injured.
President Barack Obama, speaking from the White House hours later, was blunt in his assessment.
“There is a gun for roughly every man, woman and child in America. So how can you make the argument with a straight face that more guns will make us safer?
“Somehow this has become routine,” Obama said. “The reporting is routine, my response here at this podium ends up being routine … We’ve become numb to this.”
For those at the college, there was nothing but terror.
Brady Winder, a 23-year-old student who had arrived just weeks ago from Portland 300 kilometres away, was in an adjoining classroom when he heard “at least nine shots,” he told the New York Times.
“There’s a door connecting our classroom to that classroom, and my teacher was going to knock on the door,” Winder said, “but she called out, ‘Is everybody OK?’ and then we heard a bunch more shots. We all froze for about half a second.
“We heard people screaming next door.”
“And then everybody took off. People were hopping over desks, knocking things over.”
Winder said the building is unusual in that all classrooms open to the outdoors without hallways, and “as we were running away, I think there were more shots, but my brain was kind of panic mode, just focused on running as fast as I could.”
Jasmyne Davis, 19, was in class when the gunfire began. She said she heard one shot, followed by a 30-second pause, before she heard an argument and eight more gunshots from the classroom next door.
Two students ran out the door of her classroom, but a female student who tried to run out was shot in the right arm, Davis said. “Close the door!” the student yelled as she fell back into the classroom.
Kenneth Ungerman, 25, a Navy veteran and student at the college, was just outside of Snyder Hall when the shooting started. Ungerman said he and a National Guard recruiter heard the pop of gunshots.
“We’re both veterans. We know what a gunshot sounds like,” Ungerman said.
As 15 to 20 shots rang out, students began running out of the right side of the hall, yelling: “There’s a shooter! Run, run! Get out of there!”
“We got underneath my jeep, rolled on top, and took off,” Ungerman said. They stopped at the entrance to the campus to stop traffic.
“We all in the classroom got down beneath the tables,” student Cassandra Welding, who was not in the classroom where most of the shootings occurred, told CNN.
A student opened the door, and the gunman shot her, Welding said.
“So we locked the door and shut off the lights,” she said. She called her mother, thinking “this was the last time I was going to speak with her.”
She told CNN she and her classmates put their backpacks and chairs in front of themselves “in case he came in.”
Then a police officer came into the classroom, “and said the shooter is dead.”
Douglas County Sheriff John Hanlin said the shooter died at the scene after a gun battle with authorities, but Hanlin didn’t say whether the man killed himself or was shot by police.
One rifle and three pistols were recovered, CNN reported.
Hanlin refused to release the man’s name, but several law enforcement officers identified him as 26-year-old Chris Harper Mercer.
An online dating profile that appears to belong to Mercer lists his hobbies as “Internet, killing zombies, movies, music, reading.” He says his ethnicity is “mixed race” and he lives at home with his parents, is a Republican and not religious.
In an online blog that appears to belong to Mercer talks about mass shootings, including one in Virginia in August that resulted in the deaths of a television reporter and cameraman.
“I have noticed that so many people like (Virigina shooter Vester Flanagan) are alone and unknown, yet when they spill a little blood, the whole world knows who they are. A man who was known by no one, is now known by everyone.”
In the immediate aftermath, Moore was the only witness to say the gunman had asked about the students’ religion, though she did not immediately respond to interview requests from other news organizations.
The recently retired president of Umpqua Community College, Joe Olson, said last year, one of the biggest debates on campus was whether the school should have armed security officers. He says the college had three training exercises with local law agencies in the past two years, “but you can never be prepared for something like this.”
But “this” has become frighteningly common in communities of every size across the United States.
An ongoing study by the Boston Globe has found 294 mass shootings to date in 2015 — more than one for each of the 274 days.
It defines mass shootings as ones where four or more people have been shot, although not necessarily killed. Of those, 84 incidents are defined by the FBI as “spree shootings” — where two or more people are killed without a cooling-off period.
At the White House, Obama chastised politicians for neglecting to do anything to halt the epidemic of gun violence.
“… Somebody somewhere will comment that Obama politicized this issue. Well this is something that we should politicize, it is relevant to our common life together, to the body politic.”
“As I said just a few months ago, and I said a few months before that, and I said each time I see one of these mass shootings, our thoughts and prayers are not enough. It’s not enough,” he said.
“It does not capture the heartache and grief and anger that we should feel, and it does not to prevent this carnage from being inflicted someplace else in America next week or a couple months from now.”