A guy walked into a classroom at Umpqua Community College and by the time he stopped shooting, before he was put down, there were at
least nine dead and seven wounded, three of them critically. Finally this year, after all the other shootings in America, somebody shot up another school, and turned it into another slaughterhouse.
In October of last year, less than 400 miles away, maybe six hours by car, a high school student, Jaylen Fryberg, 15 years old, a freshman, shot four fellow students dead at Marysville-Pilchuck High School before shooting himself good and dead with a weapon his gun-loving father bought for him.

The gun, it turned out, was purchased illegally, so at least we didn’t see people running to the Second Amendment for cover, after another terrible moment in the shooting gallery that this country has become when people were once again running for their lives.
On the same day that college students were dying because of being college students, Gov. Chris Christie, looking as presidential as possible, declared a state of emergency in his state, New Jersey because of the approach of Hurricane Joaquin. Christie specifically mentioned the counties of Salem and Cumberland and Atlantic and Cape May.
“I need all of you to begin to prepare today,” Christie said.

Brady Winder, 23, of Portland, said he was in the room next door when he heard a loud thud that didn’t sound like a gunshot. He then heard a percussion of gunshots and the students all fled out the front door.
But the real state of emergency on this day, on the other side of America, was Douglas County in the state of Oregon, because of another mass shooting, this time at Snyder Hall at Umpqua Community College. One student at the school tweeted, “Students are running everywhere.” The reason is simple enough: The real state of emergency, in a country where anybody can get a gun and no one is safe in elementary schools and colleges and community colleges and churches and Army bases and military recruiting centers, isn’t just Douglas County in Oregon. It is everywhere.
Even before the vigils are held and the dead are buried and the wounded, with the grace of God, recover, there will be all the predictable responses, from the President on one side, and all the politicians who have pimped out the Second Amendment and sold themselves out to the National Rifle Association on the other. And then nothing will change. Nothing ever changes, except the death toll from gun violence in what we still tell ourselves is the most enlightened country on earth.
You can bank and bet on the fact that we will be told, especially by Republicans running for President, that no change to the current gun laws would have saved anybody in Roseburg, Ore. They will talk about how the real issue is mental illness. And they will all sound unhinged and half-crazy in the process. Because the truly insane notion in this country is that the laws we do have on the books about guns are enough. All the way back in April, there was Sen. Marco Rubio speaking at the NRA’s annual convention in Indianapolis, telling his audience that the right to own a gun is part of the American dream. “I’m always amused that those who come up to me and say no other country has a constitutional right like this,” Rubio said. “As if to imply that there is something wrong with us.”
The young people who were gunned down because they went to class at a small school in southern Oregon had their own dreams until the shooting started. Somebody needs to tell Rubio and all the other candidates who act like members of the NRA pep squad that what is tragically and fundamentally wrong is that mass shootings become a routine part of American life, and death.
“Each time we see one of these mass shooting, our thoughts and prayers are not enough,” President Obama said Thursday night. “It does not capture the heartache and grief and anger we should feel.”
MIKE SULLIVAN/AP
Authorities say 10 people, including the shooter, were killed.
“We are the only advanced country on Earth that sees this kind of mass shooting every few months,” he said.
“We have become numb to this,” he said.
But Barack Obama has been helpless on guns across his entire presidency because of opposition from a cowardly Republican Congress. All he does, consistently and well, is eulogize the dead, from Newtown, Conn., to Charleston, S.C., where he spoke at the funeral of the Rev. Clementa Pinckney and said, “God has given us the chance, where we’ve been lost, to find our best selves,” before he led the congregation in the singing of “Amazing Grace.”
We never find our best selves on the subject of gun sanity. We just end up with more shootings and the death of more innocents, and hear once again that guns aren’t the problem here.
Tell that to the families of the dead at Umpqua Community College. The newest state of gun emergency was there on Thursday. The gun “plague” that Gov. Cuomo talks about was there. The latest slaughterhouse was there. But could have been anywhere.
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