[Photo: President Obama. He urged for gun control to prevent killings in US. Photographer: Chuck Kennedy (Official White House photo).
WASHINGTON (AA and Agencies): A 20-year-old male shooter who opened fire at a community college in Oregon on Thursday is dead, according to authorities. The gunman who opened fire at Oregon’s Umpqua Community College targeted Christians specifically, according to the father of a wounded student.
The gunman, while reloading his handgun, ordered the students to stand up if they were Christians, and then shot them.
Douglas County Sheriff John Hanlin said the unidentified shooter who caused multiple casualties, engaged police who first arrived at the scene, but noted that no officers were injured in the shooting.
Authorities declined to give specifics about the number of causalities but earlier reports citied state police announcing as many as 15 dead and at least 20 others were wounded at Umpqua Community College.
Local television network KATU News reported the casualty count could increase at the rural are school.
President Obama, in an impassioned appearance at the White House, said that grief was not enough, and he implored Americans, “whether they are Democrats or Republicans or independents,” to consider their representatives’ stance on gun control when they voted and to decide “whether this cause of continuing death for innocent people should be a relevant factor.”
The massacre added the community college to a string of schools that have been left grieving after mass shootings, a list that runs from Columbine High School in 1999 to Virginia Tech in 2007 to Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., where 20 children were killed in 2012.
Roughly 3,000 students attend the school.