Washington, Oct 3: A heavily-armed man Friday walked into a college classroom and opened fire after asking students’ religions, killing at least nine people and wounding 20 others before being shot dead by police in the US state of Oregon, in yet another carnage that prompted President Barack Obama to voice outrage over lax gun-control laws.
The gunman was identified as 26-year-old Chris Harper Mercer, with eye-witnesses reporting that he allegedly targeted Christians.
An eyewitness said the
gunman demanded to know students’ religions before shooting them. The police said the motive of the shooter was not known. One professor in the classroom was shot from point-blank range.
The attacker opened fire at Umpqua Community College in rural Roseburg, about 180 miles south of Portland – the capital of Oregon – and then went on to other classrooms gunning down his victims, witnesses said. The gunman, while reloading his handgun, ordered the students to stand up if they were Christians, one of the wounded students, Anastasia Boylan, was quoted as saying by CNN. The college has about 3,000 students.
“And they would stand up and he said, ‘Good, because you’re a Christian, you’re going to see God in just about one second’,” Boylan’s father told the channel.
“And then he shot and killed them.”
A security official said the attacker had body armour with him and was heavily armed, with a large amount of ammunition — enough for a long gunfight.
The Oregon college shooting is the latest in a series of shootings in the US, including at a Charleston church, Sandy Hook school and Oak Creek Gurdwara.
Since Obama’s re-election in November 2012 there have been 993 mass shooting events in the US, not including Umpqua. Almost 300 of them have occurred in 2015.
A visibly angry Obama, who has so far failed to convince the Republican-majority Congress towards stringent gun-control laws, spilled out his frustrations, saying “our thoughts and prayers are not enough”.
In the last seven years, Obama has addressed the nation more than a dozen times on nine different shooting attacks.
“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,” Obama said. PTI