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Late Night Roundup: Kindergarten Carson

Late Night Roundup: Kindergarten Carson

The late night shows took a hard look at the Republican candidates’ responses to school shootings.

Ben Carson came under particular attention for calling upon civilians to charge against a gunman together — even laughing as he described it — and also his call for even kindergarten teachers to be trained and equipped with guns.

Larry Wilmore put it bluntly: “You are out of your f@#$ing mind.”

Larry also showed a kindergarten class where Carson’s ideas are actually put into practice.

Trevor Noah slammed Carson for describing the victims’ actions as having “let him shoot you.” Trevor also noticed the similarity between Carson’s strategy of charging a gunman en masse — and zombie movies: “Wait a second: slow, languid pace; dead eyes; loves brains. Oh my god, this explains everything — Ben Carson is a zombie!!!”

The Daily Show correspondent Desi Lydic also examined Carson’s victim-blaming: “We’ve all heard the saying: ‘Guns don’t kill people — people shot by guns, who don’t rush the guy shooting them, kill people.'”

Stephen Colbert highlighted Jeb Bush’s remarks “stuff happens” remark about not acting to prevent school shootings. “Jeb Bush clearly has all the advantages that a candidate could want, and should be doing way better. But when he says things like that, after 142 school shootings since Sandy Hook, it sounds like he’s got — how can I put this delicately — stuff for brains.”

Twisted Social Media And Mass Murder

Twisted Social Media And Mass Murder

The first details about the mass killer at the community college in Roseburg, Oregon, were that he was a young man, lonely and full of hate. Of course he was. They all are.

Lonely young men full of hate have been with us since there were lonely young men. The modern phenomenon of their acting out their madness on a large scale started almost 50 years ago, when Charles Whitman climbed the University of Texas Tower and shot to death 16 people down below. There have been similar assaults against innocents ever since, but what accounts for the current rapid pace of what used to be rare, horrific events?

One change may be the growth of social media, creating an online community to ease the loneliness of these mentally ill time bombs — and perhaps endorse their perverse fantasies. The community lets the killers know that after the deed, which usually includes their death, they will have lots of people following them.

Christopher Harper-Mercer, who slaughtered nine at Umpqua Community College, had made an online reference to Vester Lee Flanagan, who murdered two former colleagues from a Roanoke, Virginia, TV station while they were on the air. Flanagan had referenced Dylann Roof, a young white man accused of murdering nine people at an African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina. Flanagan was enraged at Roof and then copied him.

In between, there was John Russell Houser, a rare older mass shooter, 59, who posted his political ravings online before killing two and wounding nine others at a movie theater in Lafayette, Louisiana. And he may have been copying James Holmes, who killed 12 and injured 70 at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado.

The natural response after these multiple shootings is to blame lax gun control. The appalled father of Harper-Mercer went on TV and did just that. Politicians agreed or not, depending on their fear of the National Rifle Association.

Yes, bans on weapons of war and gun sales to the mentally ill are desperately needed. Looking back at these massacres, most of the weaponry was legally obtained.

But perhaps as dangerous as the flood of arms are the fumes of paranoia spread by the NRA and other peddlers of gun mania. What better audience for the instant-empowerment-of-guns message than depressed, lonely men?

Ours seems to be the only culture that uses guns for psychotherapy, as was well-portrayed in the movie American Sniper. One creepy similarity between Harper-Mercer and Adam Lanza, who slayed 26 at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, was that their mothers took them out shooting.

Certainly in Lanza’s case, the mother bizarrely thought she could channel her boy’s sick obsession with guns into a bonding thing. Both mothers had left lying around the house the guns their deranged sons used.

In the meantime, these lonely men find companionship, however imaginary, in these online communities of gun worship, places that often validate their paranoiac thoughts. (Many also seek refuge in violent video games.) What they desperately need is real community to offer reality checks and interface with mental health professionals.

Some law enforcement is trying to withhold the perpetrators’ names to deprive the criminals of the celebrity they crave. These officers fully understand the motive, but their good efforts can’t go far. The curious public does want to know names and the killers’ grievances, however crazy, and media will provide them.

The bigger concern is the ugly public seething online, honoring killers past and certifying the most twisted worldviews. Social media have some very dark corners that encourage mass bloodshed, and what can we possibly do about it?

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.

Umpqua Community College alumnus Donice Smith (L) is embraced after she said one of her former teachers was shot dead, near the site of a mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, October 1, 2015. REUTERS/Steve Dipaola

Gunman In Oregon College Massacre Committed Suicide

Gunman In Oregon College Massacre Committed Suicide

By Courtney Sherwood and Emily Flitter

ROSEBURG, Ore. (Reuters) – The gunman who killed his English professor and eight others at an Oregon community college committed suicide after a shootout with police who arrived within five minutes and exchanged fire with him almost immediately, authorities said.

Investigators had previously said the 26-year-old shooter was killed by the officers who raced to the rampage at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, which ranks as the deadliest among dozens of U.S. mass shootings in the past two years.

Douglas County Sheriff John Hanlin told a news conference on Saturday the state medical examiner had determined that the gunman, Christopher Harper-Mercer, took his own life.

Releasing a timeline of the massacre’s first hour, Hanlin said two Roseburg police officers were on the scene within five minutes, and reported to dispatch that they engaged the gunman just two minutes later. Hanlin said they “neutralized” him.

“Officers responded immediately … there was an exchange of gunfire, (and) the shooter was neutralized,” the sheriff said. “As far as the very specific information regarding whether it was an officer’s bullet or his own bullet, we aren’t prepared at this time to discuss.”

Hanlin said an additional handgun was also recovered from the shooter’s apartment, making a total of 14 weapons seized: eight from his home, and six he took to the college.

Harper-Mercer was officially identified on Friday as the assailant who survivors said stormed into the classroom of his introductory writing class on Thursday and shot the professor at point-blank range, before picking off other victims one at a time as he questioned each about their religion and whether they were Christians.

Authorities have disclosed little of what they may know about the gunman’s motives.

Citing unnamed sources, CNN said he left a statement that showed animosity toward blacks. An FBI spokeswoman declined to comment on the investigation.

Bonnie Schaan, mother of 16-year-old Cheyeanne Fitzgerald who was shot in the attack, said her daughter told her the shooter chose a male student and handed him an envelope.

“He told everybody else to go to the middle of the room and lay down,” Schaan said, outside the hospital where her daughter remains in critical condition after having a kidney was removed.

“She was right there,” Schaan told reporters. “He (the gunman) called the one guy, gave him the envelope and told him to go to the corner of the classroom because obviously he was going to be the one that was going to be telling the story.”

Asked if the shooter had given anything to anyone at the scene, Sheriff Hanlin said he did not know.

‘SOME KIND OF ISSUE’

In a brief statement on Saturday, the gunman’s family said they were “shocked and deeply saddened by the horrific events.”

Harper-Mercer’s father, Ian Mercer, told CNN that his son must have had “some kind of issue” with his mental health, and wondered “how on earth” he had been able to amass his weapons cache.

“They talk about gun control. Every time something like this happens, they talk about it, and nothing is done … It has to change,” Mercer said, adding that he had “no idea” his son owned any guns.

The New York Daily News reported that the gunman’s mother, Laurel Harper, had stockpiled firearms, fearing stricter gun laws and had sought out a shooting range that would let her and her son shoot without supervision.

Shelly Steele, who hired Harper, a nurse, to care for her own son, told the newspaper Harper “said she had multiple guns and believed wholeheartedly in the Second Amendment and wanted to get all the guns she could before someone outlawed them.”

Harper also told her Harper-Mercer was “sickly” as a child, had “mental problems” growing up and suffered from Asperger’s Syndrome.

Hanlin said investigators have to run down hundreds of leads and have seized evidence from multiple locations, including the weapons and ammunition, documents and digital media.

Late on Friday, it emerged Harper-Mercer was once turned away from a Los Angeles-area firearms academy by an instructor who told Reuters he found him “weird” and “a little bit too anxious” for high-level weapons training.

He had a month-long stint in the Army in 2008 and a preoccupation with weaponry that dated back at least two years.

At some point, Harper-Mercer, who identified himself as “mixed race” on a social networking site, appeared to have been sympathetic to the Irish Republican Army, a militant group that waged a violent campaign to drive the British from Northern Ireland. On an undated Myspace page, he posted photos of masked IRA gunmen carrying assault rifles.

His victims were named on Friday, and aged from 18 to 67. Five wounded remain hospitalized, three in critical condition.

One of those wounded, Chris Mintz, 30, a U.S. Army veteran who served in Iraq, was credited with probably saving lives when he stopped the gunman from entering another classroom before police arrived. Mintz drew fire that left him with seven bullet wounds and two broken legs, according to his former girlfriend.

By mid-afternoon on Saturday, a GoFundMe site set up by Mintz’s cousin to help pay for his treatment and recovery had received more than $660,000 in donations.

(Additional reporting by Eric M. Johnson and Jane Ross in Roseburg, Alex Dobuzinskis in Los Angeles, Barbara Goldberg and Katie Reilly, Doina Chiacu in Washington, Suzannah Gonzalez in Chicago, Shelby Sebens in Portland; Writing by Steve Gorman and Daniel Wallis; Editing by Bernard Orr and Clarence Fernandez)

Melody Siewell leaves flowers at a memorial outside Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, United States, October 3, 2015. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

Oregon Town Reels From Classroom Carnage

Oregon Town Reels From Classroom Carnage

By Eric M. Johnson and Courtney Sherwood

ROSEBURG, Ore. (Reuters) – Residents of a quiet Oregon town struggled to comprehend the carnage left by the latest U.S. mass shooting as investigators puzzled over what drove a young gunman to kill nine people in a college classroom before he died in an exchange of gunfire with police.

The Thursday late-morning shooting rampage at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, a former timber town of 20,000 on the western edge of the Cascade Mountains, ranked as the deadliest mass killing this year in the United States.

The gunman stormed into a classroom in Snyder Hall on campus, shot a professor at point-blank range, then ordered cowering students to stand up and state their religion before he shot them one by one, according to survivors’ accounts.

Seven people were hospitalized, three of them listed as critical.

The killer died after exchanging gunfire with two police officers who confronted him.

The gunman was not identified by local authorities, and Douglas County Sheriff John Hanlin vowed never to utter his name. But a law enforcement source confirmed media reports naming the suspect as Chris Harper-Mercer, 26.

In a photo posted on what was believed to be his MySpace profile, a young man with a shaved head and dark-rimmed eyeglasses stares into the camera while holding a rifle.

“WE’VE BECOME NUMB”

At the White House, a visibly angry President Barack Obama challenged Americans across the political spectrum to press their elected leaders to enact tougher firearms-safety laws.

He lashed out at the National Rifle Association gun lobby for blocking reforms and lamented how common mass shootings had become.

“Somehow this has become routine. The reporting is routine. My response here, at this podium, ends up being routine,” he said. “We’ve become numb to this.”

Residents at an apartment house a short distance from campus where the suspect lived recognized him from photos and described him as edgy.

A man identifying himself as Ian Mercer, the gunman’s father, spoke briefly to a throng of reporters and camera crews outside his home in Los Angeles on Thursday night.

“It’s been a devastating day, devastating for me and my family,” he said, according to a transcript provided by KNBC-TV.

Authorities offered no motive for the shooting. Hanlin, the county sheriff, said an investigation was underway by homicide detectives and federal agents. Residents of Roseburg, about 260 miles (420 km) south of Portland, were left to ponder the how and why of the violence.

“ARE YOU A CHRISTIAN?”

Accounts from survivors were chilling.

Stacy Boylan, the father of an 18-year-old student who was wounded but survived by playing dead, told CNN his daughter recalled seeing her professor being shot point blank as the assailant stormed into the classroom.

“He was able to stand there and start asking people one by one what their religion was,” Boylan said, relating the ordeal as described by his daughter. “‘Are you a Christian?’ he would ask them. … ‘If you’re a Christian, stand up. Good. Because you’re a Christian, you’re going to see God in just about one second,’ and he shot and killed them. And he kept going down the line, doing this to people.”

Scores of people huddled at a somber candlelight vigil in a park on Thursday night.

“We need to start loving each other as people … or our nation is going to start falling apart,” said Michael Sprague, 35, a businessman who lives in the Roseburg area.

The violence in Roseburg was the latest in a flurry of mass killings in recent years across the United States and the deadliest so far in 2015. It surpassed the nine killed in a gun battle between motorcycle gangs in Waco, Texas, in May, and the nine who died in the rampage at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, in June.

Not counting Thursday’s incident, 293 mass shootings have been reported this year, according to the Mass Shooting Tracker website, a crowd-sourced database kept by anti-gun activists that logs events in which four or more people are shot.

The violence has fueled demands for more gun control in the United States, where ownership of firearms is protected by the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, and for better care for the mentally ill.

Those grieving at Thursday night’s vigil said they were still trying to understand the tragedy.

“You know, there’s all this stuff in the news and with politics going on about the Second Amendment and gun control,” said Ken Shemel. “It’s like, ‘Come on, guys, just give us a second to breathe,’ you know?”

(Additional reporting by Jane Ross in Roseburg, Shelby Sebens in Portland, Curtis Skinner in San Francisco, Sharon Bernstein in Sacramento, Fiona Ortiz in Chicago, Jeff Mason and Robert Rampton in Washington, Dan Whitcomb, Piya Sinha-Roy and Daina Beth Solomon in Los Angeles and Katie Reilly in New York; Writing by Steve Gorman; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe)

Photo: People take part in candle light vigil following a mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon October 1, 2015.  REUTERS/Steve Dipaola