It's been a sad week in Oregon. There are shootings almost every day in Oregon, but this week has been more shocking than most. Once again, guns got into the wrong hands -- a teen, who then took them to school and killed someone. In this case, there are two teens dead (including the shooter) and one man injured.
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| Shooter Jared Padgett (source) |
On Tuesday, June 10, 15-year old Jared Padgett woke up in the morning
and broke into his father's "secured" guns, stealing an
AR-15 assault rifle with nine magazines of ammunition "capable of firing
several hundred rounds," a semi-auto handgun, and a knife, put them
into a guitar case and duffel bag, and went to school on the school bus. When asked
by other students what was in the case and bag, he said they contained
sports gear and a stand for his uniforms.
Once at his school, Reynolds High School in Troutdale, Oregon, he donned
a "non-ballistic vest used for carrying ammunition and a multi-sport
helmet" and entered into a locker room. There he shot to death 14-year old Emilio
Hoffman, shooting
him twice in the chest, and encountered PE teacher and track coach Todd
Rispler, grazing the man in the hip with a bullet. Students said that it "sounded
like fireworks were going off inside the school," from all the shots
being fired. Rispler fled from Padgett
and went to the office, where he
initiated a school-wide lockdown procedure.
Two
armed school resource officers, Nick Thompson and Kyle Harris, then found
Padgett in the halls and exchanged fire with him. Padgett retreated to a men's bathroom. Eventually, as more police and SWAT
responded, and the school were being evacuated,
hands on heads, to a
nearby Fred Meyers parking lot to awaiting, panicked parents, a remote-controlled
robot with a camera went into the bathroom and found Padgett dead in a stall from
a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
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| Todd Rispler (source) |
But the gun crimes weren't over.
One other boy, unrelated to the shooting, was
found to have a gun on him on school grounds as he sat in a classroom. He was arrested and taken away. Why did he have a gun, and where did he get
it? Was he planning on shooting someone,
too, unrelated to the Padgett's shooting??
And another man, 21-year old Joseff Powell, who feared for his 15-year
old freshman sister's safety, had rushed to an evacuation area at a church,
where students were being corralled, evaded a police checkpoint, and was caught
with a unlawfully concealed, loaded 9mm semi-auto handgun. The man claimed "he didn't realize"
he had a weapon on him.
Why did young Jared decide to go shooting at his high school? According
to his own diary, he was on a mission to cleanse the world of
"sinners." He was a religious
fundamentalist and, since
age 12, a deacon in the local Mormon church, where he
was thought of as "being quiet" but "highly regarded for his
spirituality" by church elders.
But it was more than this, wasn't it?
His parents had just gone through
a messy divorce, and his father, no doubt a very pro-gun person, since he
owned an assault rifle, had custody
of Jared and at least one of his five siblings. Doubtless this affected young Jared's
mindset. Had his father instilled in him
any of the pro-gun paranoia I often report on here at New Trajectory? I do not know.
And though Jared was, in many ways, a "normal kid" who liked
to talk about girls and cars and often seemed friendly, he was
also known to be "conceited at times", talk back to teachers, and
had an anger streak.
He also "showed
off about guns" to his friends, talking about his guns and bullets at
home, and "loved
guns," and got training in arms as
a member of the Junior Reserve Officers' Training Core (JROTC) as a means
of one day entering the military. One
can assume, then, that he was trained in gun safety and had gotten all the
admonitions about handling guns inappropriately. Doubtless he went shooting with his father,
too.
Just to re-emphasize: this boy, who was known to have angry
outbursts, arms training, and an unstable family life, and who "showed off
about guns," was in a household with guns which were clearly not secured
well enough.
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| 14-year old victim, Emilio Hoffman (source) |
And as for the young victim, Emilio Hoffman, one of the
3000 or so children shot to death in America a
vigil was held in his honor with candles and prayers. Services
are scheduled for June 22. Likely he
wasn't targeted by the shooter, but was simply
in the wrong place at the wrong time.
According to an
article:
each year in America, He enjoyed science, history and played on the Reynolds Raiders junior varsity soccer team. Coaches tweeted that he was "a great soccer player and a great friend."
“Soccer was his whole life,” Jennifer Hoffman said.
After his death was announced Tuesday, there was an outpouring of support for him on social media.
“Emilio loved his friends, and his friends loved him. You couldn't be around Emilio without laughing,” his mother said Wednesday. “Anyone who has ever met Emilio laughed with him.”
That's another beautiful life extinguished by gun violence.
So, as life starts to return
to some semblance of "normal" at Reynolds High School, with
around 2000 students and their families traumatized, what are we to learn?
Since the Sandy Hook shooting, there have been 74
shootings at American schools and colleges, more than one shooting a
week when classes are in session, including 39 at K-12 schools like this
one. The vast majority of these have
been committed by students who accessed their parents' guns. HERE
and below is a map of those 74 shootings, and HERE is a listing of
them.
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| Shootings at K-12 schools in red, at colleges/universities in purple. Everytown for Gun Safety/Mark Gongloff (source) |
Clearly more needs to be done. Better
security at schools? Sadly, lockdown
drills at schools have become as common as fire drills, and armed security
guards are becoming necessary. But it
certainly comes with risks, particularly in the hands of non-police. I know of at
least ten examples of where legally-armed security guards, police, and
conceal carry holders have CAUSED incidents, including the injuring of
children, on school grounds, despite the NRA line that schools should arm their
teachers and staff. None have ever
stopped a shooting, but armed police (not citizens) have limited the shootings
in a handful of cases (including this one and the Sandy Hook shooting). Should students carry bulletproof
blankets with them in the hallways, as one Oklahoma company attempts to
convince us? What about bulletproof
backpacks and vests? A round from an
AR-15, like the one used in the Reynolds and Sandy Hook shootings, would go
right through these. Short of turning
schools into prisons, there is no way to completely prevent a school shooting.
Making fortresses of our schools doesn't solve the problem, it merely
treats the symptoms. Instead, we need to
do more to keep guns out of the hands of those who shouldn't have them in the
first place, including children. One way
to do this is to mandate a state-wide (or, better yet, nation-wide) Child
Access Protection (CAP) law. One such
bill is
being re-introduced in Oregon. In
the 23 states that have implemented CAP laws, accidental and suicide shootings
among children, teens, and even adults have dramatically decreased, sometimes
by as much as 50%! See statistics on CAP
laws HERE.
And let's not forget that this is just one of the many shootings that happen each week in Oregon, which are dutifully recorded at the Oregon Shootings Facebook page.
Lawmakers weighed in. Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber said in a statement, "Today Oregon hurts as we try to make sense of a senseless act of violence." But other than offering his thoughts and prayers, there was no call for action. President Obama was more straightforward, stating, "My biggest frustration so far is the fact that this society has not been
willing to take some basic steps to keep guns out of the hands of
people who can do just unbelievable damage,” and, in response to the insanely high number of shootings in America, "We should be ashamed of that. There’s no place else like this."
And what did the Oregon gun lobby group, Oregon Firearms Federation, have to say about the school shooting? Nothing, of course. The deaths of innocents are inconvenient for their "guns everywhere" agenda. They decided instead to release a statement about fears of a ban on lead ammunition. Real thoughtful.
I'll leave this post with the words of one of the Reynolds High School
teachers, Seth Needler, who experienced the fear of huddling in a dark classroom with
his students during the lockdown, hearing distant gunfire and wondering if the
shooter would walk into his room. Having
survived the experience, does he feel like arming himself and his
coworkers? Far from it. An excerpt from his
Facebook post:
I don’t blame this on a mentally unhinged youth, although that might be what it was, or on lax security, or even on society’s general decline. This was a case, like all the other recent school shootings, of gun violence due to lax gun regulation, and the proliferation of military assault weapons in the hands of everyday citizens.
I’m sick and tired of hearing gun enthusiasts claim that any kind of gun regulation is an attack on the second amendment, or that the solution to gun violence is more guns. I completely fail to understand how one organization, which is the lobbying arm of one industry, can control every politician in Congress to the extent of preventing any action at all on gun control, even after polls show that 90% of Americans are in favor of it.
But every time another shooting happens, and undoubtedly this will be no exception, people (including me and my family and friends) sigh, groan, bemoan the incident, talk about how awful it is, criticize the NRA and its lopsided influence, and then do…nothing. The only constituency that responds with any energy to incidents of gun violence is gun enthusiasts, who declare that it just provides more proof of their hypothesis that schools need to be staffed with U.S. Marshalls and teachers need to be armed and carry loaded weapons. Rather than stricter gun regulation, we get weakening of the existing regulation, and states literally pushing each other out of the way to be the most liberal when it comes to who can carry weapons into how many different venues, including churches, schools and even bars. Everybody laughs about it on late night TV, and then goes back to their business.
He goes on to suggest a number of commonsense gun regulations and then
finishes with a call to action:
I can’t sit around anymore and do nothing. I encourage anyone reading this to take action also. Politicians say all the time that they get far more calls from their pro-gun constituents than the other 90% of us. Nothing will change without a massive, concerted uprising from us, the people. ....
Isn’t it time to put the NRA in its place? If not now, when?
UPDATE (6/15/14): The family of the shooter, Jared Padgett, released a statement apologizing for the actions of their son, saying that they are "horrified and distaught" and that they tried to instill good values in him. They said nothing about how the way their guns were stored or took any responsibility for it.
ADDENDUM (6/16/14): A related blog post from another blogger, HERE and HERE.
UPDATE (6/18/14): Last night, a vigil was held for the victim, Emilio Hoffman. Hundreds showed up to participate, including the family of the shooter.
UPDATE (6/19/14): According to newly-released police information, the shooter got the weapons and a duffel bag used to carry them from his brother's room, who lived with him. The report doesn't describe any "security measures" that were overcome by the shooter to get the guns. There were also other guns and weapons found in the suspect's home. The article also has additional details about the moment-to-moment of the shooting:
When detectives spoke with Padgett’s brother, they learned that he owns the weapons detectives later found at the school. The weapons, police said, were stored in Padgett’s older brother’s room, and that the two shared a room, the affidavit states.
On the day of the shooting, Padgett’s older brother went to the Wood Village Fred Meyer, which is where students were taken by bus after being evacuated, the affidavit states. “He was unable to locate his brother,” the affidavit states.
Padgett’s older brother went home “and saw that his rifle was not in the bedroom where he left it,” and could not explain where it had gone, the affidavit states. Detectives showed Padgett’s older brother a photo of the green bag and confirmed that it was in fact his bag that was issued to him as part of the United States Army Reserve program, the affidavit states..
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