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10 Confirmed Dead In Shooting at Oregon's Umpqua Community College
CNN and other sources report that an attacker, now in custody, shot and killed a
reported ten people, and wounded another 20, at Oregon's Umpqua Community College, about three hours south of Portland, and described by CNN as "technically a gun-free zone." Students are being evacuated to a nearby fairgrounds, and local authorities advise anyone to avoid the area of the college. Wikipedia editors are also quickly compiling information about the attack. More news on the attack is still breaking; expect updates here.
FWIW, most military bases are gun-free zones. You are not allowed to carry firearms unless you are an MP. Yes, it makes zero sense, but that's the actual regulation.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
And i don't necessarily mean the shooter. If early reports prove accurate "The night before the attack, the alleged shooter appears to have had a conversation with others online about his intentions, the source said."
There's your problem right there. A person with issues made what might have been a final plea for help the night before and everyone just blew it off. Depending on what he said, at the very least he could have been held for making terroristic threats and possibly had a psych eval. Noooo. No one wants to get involved. It has f-all to do with guns. We'd rather lock up and ignore some guy with 1/2 oz of weed than commit and help the mentally ill. When the U.S. gets serious about mental health and people start getting involved instead of letting their friends self destruct, we'll see these events decrease.
In the meantime, I reserve the right to defend myself and my family. That doesn't mean playing hero. That means getting them out of harms way. If out of harms way means past an active shooter, then at least we have a chance.
Exercised restraint due to the large crowd.
This is a good point that gets overlooked a lot.
You'd be a complete fool to try and return fire against a target that you have not identified in a crowd. You're just as likely to add to the problem as to solve it, and even might end up being mistaken for the active shooter yourself.
I have many guns, I sometimes carry a gun (I have a CHL in Texas). I would never, ever, ever draw my gun and fire at someone unless I had a clear and open line of fire, I was 100% sure of my target, and I was directly saving lives by stopping someone who was clearly intent on killing innocent people.
If there are other people either in front of or behind him, around him, or I'm unsure of the situation, I would not draw and fire.
I'm both legally and morally responsible for every round I put downrange, I would never wish to place an innocent in harms way.
I own and carry guns responsibly, I am not "Rambo", and real life is NOT a movie.
You left out WHITE... Most of these idiots are white.
Actually, not. It turns out non-white, non-Asian, people are (currently in the US) more prone to mass murder, both offenders as a percentage of their population and as a victim-count per-capita of offender's group's population.
But their victims are more often also non-white, non-Asian, and the attacks generally "aren't news". (When was the last time you heard the national media do a big news event on a drive-by or other mass shooting in the poorer residential areas of Chicago, Springfield, New York City, Philadelphia, or DC?) It's another example of how black (or Chicano, etc.) lives DON'T matter - to the news media.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I'm from the gun-averse camp, but I'm well aware that nothing can be done to silence the gun lobby in this country. It's in the Constitution, and we're too diverse a country to ever support taking it out. You could have daily mass shootings of 50+ people and the NRA would still defend gun rights, with millions of owners right behind them. Even background check laws will never be strengthened beyond what's there already because people are going to assume the government will be coming for their guns.
So, it seems to me that the next best thing would be to fix mental health care and make sure everyone has equal access to it. Who knows what happened, but it's most likely someone with an ax to grind who just happened to get triggered today. Right now, there's virtually no state-run inpatient mental health treatment beds outside of maybe the psychiatric ERs. You basically have to be Hannibal Lecter to get committed to an asylum now. There's also not that much support available in the community. Deinstitutionalization was supposed to get people out of the hospital -and- treat them on an outpatient basis, but they forgot the second part when states closed all the asylums.