Shocker and non-shocker: Another school shooting today at a community college in Oregon, reports currently differ on those killed, CNN says 10, NBC with 13, with more than 20 injured — the shooter, a 20-year-old kid was killed by police.
In this latest horror, President Obama conveyed the sense:
“Somehow this has become routine. The reporting is routine. My response here at this podium is routine… We’ve become numb to this.”
(Illustration found here).
Shock but not, that’s the numbness effect. The shooting today at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, OR, is the 45th school shooting so far this year. Since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012, there’s been 142 such horrible incidents.
Also including this ugly, shitty stat: ‘The Washington Post notes that no calendar week has passed during Barack Obama’s second term without an incident in which four or more people were shot.’
In today’s incident, there could have been a motive act, somewhat with the shooter — via USAToday:
One student, Kortney Moore, 18, told News Review-Today that she was in her writing class in Snyder Hall when a single shot came through a window.
Moore said she saw her teacher get shot in the head, apparently after the gunman came into the classroom.
At that point, Moore told the newspaper, the shooter ordered everyone to get on the ground.
The shooter then asked people to stand up and state their religion and then started firing, Moore said.
Gun-fucking-crazy America..
Sitting in my draft box for weeks, this gun-violence piece from Yahoo News last August shows a really-freakish American underbelly. Based upon a new study by University of Alabama criminologist Adam Lankford.
Some notes:
The failure of the U.S. health care system to treat mental illness is partly to blame for America’s disproportionate share of mass shootings, but it is not a unique factor.
What is unique, Lankford says, is America’s gun-toting culture.
According to data cited by the study, there were approximately 88.8 firearms per 100 people living in the United States in 2007, well above Yemen’s 54.8 firearms per 100 people — the world’s second-highest rate of gun ownership.
“Because of its world-leading firearm ownership rate, America does stand apart,” Lankford writes, “and this appears connected to its high percentage of mass shootings.”
What’s more, American mass shooters are 3.6 times more likely to arm themselves with multiple weapons than mass shooters in other countries.
As the Oregon shooting plays out today, we’ll get a better picture of what happened, which will be bloody-murky at best, however,