An epidemic: Multiple school shootings stun nation

An epidemic: Multiple school shootings stun nation

The nation was stunned yet again by a stream of mass school shootings all taking place within nine days of one another.
The first of these all too frequent mass shootings took place in Roseburg, Oregon. On Thursday, October 1, 2015, the Umpqua Community College Campus erupted into screams and sounds of shots fired. The gunman, Chris Harper Mercer, 26 years-old, apparently burst into a classroom, firing as he entered. According to cnn.com, an eyewitness, Anastasia Boylan, said Mercer, “Told the professor, ‘I have been waiting for years to do this,’” and then he shot the professor point blank. Boylan was wounded by a bullet that entered her spine and she survived by playing dead when the shooter called out to her. Boylan further recounts that the gunman ordered all of the Christians in the room to stand and told them they would, “see God in just about one second” (cnn.com).
Mercer apparently was armed for a prolonged gunfight according to cnn.com. Authorities recovered three pistols and one rifle at the scene, and the gunman was wearing full body armor. Nine were killed and nine were wounded from the gunshots. The shooter was also killed, but it is unclear as to whether he committed suicide or if he were caught in crossfire from the police.
Another student, Cassandra Welding, stated how after the students all heard the shots fired they “dropped to the ground—huddling behind backpacks and chairs, or underneath tables” (cnn.com). The college, which, according to cnn.com, has had barely any crimes reported since 2009, only a handful of burglaries, no sex offences, no liquor violations, no assaults, no weapons possessions or hate crimes, has been shaken to the core. There was a campus-wide candlelight vigil the evening of the shootings; students wept while bagpipes played in the background. Roseburg, Oregon has approximately 22000 residents. Umpqua has roughly 13,600 students, many of whom are of non-traditional age.
The shooting prompted immediate response on the campaign trail, causing some candidates to publicly decry the lack of gun control, while others claimed that stronger gun control was not the answer. President Barack Obama, in his fifteenth speech regarding gun control stated, “Somehow this has become routine…The reporting is routine. My response here at this podium ends up being routine, the conversation in the aftermath of it. We’ve become numb to this” (cnn.com).
The next two shootings occurred at Northern Arizona University and Texas Southern University campuses. In Flagstaff, Arizona, a shooting left a freshman dead and three others injured. In Houston at TSU, two were shot, with one fatality. The last was at Pepper Tree Elementary School in Upland, California where a woman shot her mother-in -law and then herself with a pellet gun.