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“A shooter at Troutdale’s Reynolds High School is dead, according to officials with the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office,” koin.com reports. “No one else is known to have died in the shooting, though at least one teacher was reportedly injured . . . Close to 100 police and sheriff’s units are on scene, as well as at least 19 medical personnel and FBI. A LifeFlight helicopter landed in a nearby field.” UPDATE [via a local reader]: Police are still looking from a second shooter. It’s a huge school. News conference in a few minutes. A staff member was shot in hip and a student was life flighted out.

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83 COMMENTS

    • Fox is actually attacking the gun free zone thing right now. CNN is pushing the same “this always happens, think of the children.” I hope no one other than the shooter died.

  1. Christ, another incident to feed the anti-gun lobby. Hopefully we have some positive news out of this, like maybe a legally armed staff took out the shooter or something to that nature. While these incidents represent mental illness and the state of our society as a whole rather than guns we all know what certain folks will do with this info and those on the fence on this issue tend to be the middle ground undecided folks which are the dumbest group of voters and crap like this will push them back into the arms of the anti-gun folks. Everyone start carrying everywhere you go so we can take out these nuts before they get their 15 minutes.

  2. Was curious so looked up the city really quick. Middle class suburb roughly 83% white voted 75% D with population of 16,000. They are going to milk this one no matter what.

    • Reynolds HS is in Troutdale, but it draws a lot of it’s students from Gresham. And a large chunk of those students happen to be from a lower income part of the city. So Reynolds has a bit of a gangster problem.

      • Being from Brooklyn its hard for me to wrap my head around “gangsters” from a little suburb of Portland.

  3. Do you guys think it is time to stock up on even more mags and such or not? Ive got plenty but with all of these things happening back to back, what does everyone think?

        • You could Paint the orange tip black and rob a store. Since I can’t be bothered to think of a lawful reason to own such a potentially deadly device, I’m going to push for them to be banned. /sarc

      • +1
        It seems like enough people have woken up that it would be very difficult for any major gun control moves to be made. However, what we need to do is push back against existing gun control or else we will die the death of a thousand cuts so to speak.

      • Victim counts per incident seem to be going down since Sandy Hook. CHL carriers have risen sharply in the past year and a half, gun sales are through the roof, and what might have been a mass shooting before have been stopped by vigilant armed citizens.

        Santa Barbara wasn’t one since half were car/knife, Colorado was stopped by an armed off duty officer within 80 seconds, Nevada wasn’t a mass shooting by definition (> 3) after they were interrupted by Joseph Wilcox, John Meis stopped the Seattle shooter with pepper spray after 1 murder and 2 injured.

  4. What I find really sad is that so many people, especially young males have such debilitating social or chemical problems that they not only feel the need to throw their lives away, but take others with them while they do it.

    And I honestly think some of it is so they can feel like at least one time in their lives they matter.

    I don’t think there is any simple way to fix this sort of thing. Ultimately, people need purpose. Our culture has been gradually moving away from a straight playthrough and more to a sandbox style of reality (gamer terms) especially for our youth.

    Without proper direction, I think a lot of kids out there are just… lost.

    • I hate sandbox video games (only exception SR3 and SR4.) Makes me feel like I’m just wasting my time. I want story and context, not 60 hours of darts and delivering cookies.

      • Exactly my point.

        Everyone is different. But what is being offered to kids now is, “Be yourself! Believe in yourself! Do what you what! Etc etc etc”.

        The problem with that is not everyone WANTS to not know what the hell their path in life is supposed to be or what direction they should go. Some people thrive with more structure.

        Case in point: My brother is an extremely hard worker and never fails at anything he works at, but he is not creative at all. If he falls into something or is given a job or task he does well and enjoys what he’s doing. If he didn’t have direction on what to do in life when he was younger, who knows where he’d be now.

        As a culture, we used to have trades and clear career paths. Now… well, look at me. I work in project management after a military career and working in restaurants. I’ve been all over the place.

        People who thrive in the sandbox environment who have lots of time and creativity have done amazing things. I mean, there are folks on youtube doing things they love and making well into the 6 figures. Look at this site! Blogging is a legitimate profession now.

        But then you look at how short a college degree goes these days, and the sheer variety of jobs out there even within one career path and it can be daunting.

        Plus, I’d argue that passion wanes in the face of instant gratification. The rise of social media and how connected everyone is now has replaced vision with distraction.

        I think all of this adds up to a disenfranchised youth who don’t really have a lot to ground them to life and reality. Strong family ties can definitely help… and it something none of these shooters have had.

        Sure, they’re still evil and should be reviled, but I have empathy for some of them. While there is absolutely no excuse for murder, much less mass murder, I really do feel like the modern culture is fucked and technology is outpacing our species’ ability to socially adapt.

      • This. A thousand times this. So much of the game play of those games is NPCs bringing their petty little issues to you to solve. Why would I want to be a concierge with a shotgun? How is that fun?

      • I wouldn’t be horribly opposed to more linear games if they were actually more than just a quick story mode tacked onto a map pack for online play. I spend 50-60 bucks on a linear game, knock it out in a day or two, and now I’m bored. At least with the sandbox games there is something to do after you complete the main story line.

        That all being said…I think the comparison stands pretty well. The difference between someone who is…”well adjusted” or whatever term you want to use is they’ll fire up the game and think “wow, there is so much more to do and achieve, I don’t know where to start” where as someone like today’s newest shooter thinks along the lines of “I just don’t know what to do…might as well just call it quits.”

        • I’m glad you could understand what I wrote. 🙂 I was unsure I would be effective in explaining my thoughts.

    • Couldn’t agree more. Guns aren’t the issue.There are obviously greater societal issues that are brewing and rising. They can try to slap whatever bandaid they think will help (in this case they push for gun control), but that isn’t the issue.

  5. Good grief, did this recent slew of psychos get together on Facebook or something? This makes, what, 5 attacks in the last 19 days? Maybe it’s just me, but this is starting to get scary-weird.

    • If you look back, patterns like this are pretty common. The nutjobs inspire each other. One does something and gets a lot of attention, the next one attempts (and hopefully fails) to top them. Then we get a run of them for awhile. That’s why we really need to stop feeding them what they’re looking for. The prime motivator for a mass killing (or some other shocking public act of violence) is a desire for fame.

      • It’s also true that mass shooters tend to plan their rampages weeks, months, even years in advance.

        Which together with the copycat effect, suggests that at any given time, there are in fact several would-be mass shooters out there just waiting for the time to be right.

    • I was thinking the same thing. I don’t mean to put on a foil hat or anything, but this sudden rise in mass shootings within the past year seems suspicious. Seems awfully convenient this is all happening in the wake of anti-gun campaigns.

      I don’t know, it just seems weird to me.

        • Possibly.

          Editors decide which stories are newsworthy and which get ignored. It’s fairly easy to create a perception that (X) is happening more often than normal just by covering the incidents of (X).

    • What’s to talk about? We’re seeing a sort of population bottleneck that many people saw coming 40 to 50 years ago:

      Behavior is in large part based in genetics. Low impulse control, poor future time orientation, and high orientation to histrionics are most likely inherited characteristics.

      Example (one of many many many):
      https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2899491/

      Young people who manifest these traits require way more parental oversight to rein in and correct than your average breeding human cares to lavish on its offspring in this era of wall to wall broadband and WiFi. Schools cannot do it, nor do I think they should (schools should be a setting for the learning-ready, not mass incarceration/day care).

      For the past 50 years as a society we have agreed to pretend that money and social setting trump genetics, in the name of all sorts of lofty goals and ideas. Any and all evidence to the contrary is not only silenced, it is career-ending for anyone to insist this get a hearing. Not only that, we have systematically provided incentives for awful parents to have the most kids, while constantly demanding that others raise them.

      This is why the gun gets the focus. As long as tools used by the out-of-control are pursued, those in charge (or who want to be, like Shannon Lou Who) can claim to be Doing Something.

      That plays well in November. Of course they can blame the gun, because it’s a lot easier to pass laws that criminalize the law abiding than it is to deal with the genetic roots of criminality and sociopathy. Even MENTIONING that is enough to cost a person their job in many places, such as schools or universities. (Dysgenics for some reason is less threatening to most people than eugenics it seems, and of course the bar for parenting is set pretty low: a man having a Negligent Discharge of gametes.)

      In my experience as a liberal, getting liberals and progressives to consider population genetics and evolutionary biology where humans are concerned is as impossible as getting fundamentalists to consider it where all other animals are concerned. For liberals, who are the Establishment now, the only animal that has NOT evolved in the past 50,000 years is /H. sapiens/, and sociology is everything…despite half a century of evidence that this is absolutely NOT how humans work.

      I encourage TTAG readers to bone up on the humongous body of science on the heritability issue before politicians who choose to ignore it trash what’s left of our human rights to self defense and free speech. The blogger HBDChick provides diverse data and political perspectives on this topic, and for a more liberal take on it, there is JayMan.

      • Oh great, eugenics. Why don’t we talk about phrenology while we’re at it and discuss how the brow angle of the noble savage indicates a decrease in reasoning ability, an increase in addictive personality traits, and a propensity towards violence as a result? I bet if we make a government committee to discuss and pick out desirable human traits they will come up with a solution that will solve all our problems!

        • So in other words, you don’t believe in genetic traits. You’d better get in touch with the CDC, anyone who researches diabetes, cancer, or heart disease, and so on – this information will be invaluable.

          I think what he was saying was that modern governments incentivize the continuation of poor genetic traits. Eugenics? Probably not, but there is arguably a crutch provided for natural selection by various support structures of modern welfare governments.

  6. Is it the coverage that is increasing or is it coincidental that “shootings” are on the rise since the “swap”? Opening the boarders, creating a juvenile refugee crisis (by the way try taking kids, even yours, across state lines only to abandon them and see what happens when your caught), all in relatively a short time span? I thing he’s flooding the zone because of the November elections, which, I fear will be FUBAR and with some key offices probably ending up in the courts.

    • It’s pretty big news, which can have a huge impact on a wide range of firearms issues. But if it makes you feel better, as far as I know, TTAG didn’t report on last week’s Atlanta courthouse shootout. That one was dramatic for including an “assault weapon” and a fire, but ultimately only one grazed deputy and a killed active shooter. No further fatalities.

    • Respectfully disagree. Those on the other side of the argument are most certainly paying attention. The information is essential so the collective ‘we’ can speak with authority to the specifics of each case and refute inaccurate fear-mongering.

      There is a fine line between glorifying and reporting, I don’t personally believe TTAG has crossed that threshold. In fact, I believe TTAG, TTAK, and any other sister site (The Truth About Hammers?) should report attacks related to the subject matter. Need to get the tool out of the spotlight, and highlight that its a series of desperately sick individual humans perpetrating these acts.

  7. Apparently one student has now died of his wounds in addition to the shooter.

    As terrible as this is, though, such a death toll is never news when it’s in “da hood” but only when it happens like this. Wonder how many yutes will be shot and killed in Chi-town today. And tomorrow. And the next day…

  8. 2013, the FBI ran 21,000,000 gun background checks. That worked well!
    At VT Shooting over 300 cops on Campus after the first two dead sure stopped the next 30 dead.

    Gun Free Zones have worked well in the last 150 spree murderers.
    Now if one of todays 10,000,000 CCW holders had been there, all
    150 shootings would have had fewer dead.
    See Las Vagas, Trolley Mall, and at least three school shootings,
    plus the Appalachian Law School incident.

    ABC Radio News. Reports. One student other than the murderer is Dead in the Gym.

  9. All I keep hearing from the news anchor bobble heads is how they cannot confirm or do not want to speculate and that they only want to say the “facts” but that the gunman used an “automatic” AR-15, wouldn’t want to speculate or anything.

  10. Clearly it was a bad idea for the media to make anti-gun martyrs of all these spree killers. This is what REAL trolls do when you feed them.

  11. Dead white kids sell. Dead “yutes” are of no concern to MDA, and the rest of their ilk. “For the white children……” How terribly sad of them.

      • 6 people shot at a strip mall in Chicago a week ago, 2 children. Not a peep on national news since they were black, live deep in Democrat gun control territory, and don’t fit the narrative. Thats why he racialized it, the news only cares when its white children dieing.

  12. One student plus shooter dead. News update just said they sent in a “robot” to find shooter in bathroom, sounds like he shot himself. The police “never entered a tactical situation” whatever THAT is supposed to mean.

  13. There are shootings in inner city schools all the time, yet this gets coverage because it white, middle-class, suburbia.

    • Yeah, and your point with your racial comment is what, exactly?

      Last I checked the big city media are chockfull of all sorts of criminal behaviors regardless of race. Maybe you don’t read those. Maybe you only notice when suburban crime is reported.

      What’s your agenda? Do you think only black-on-black crime should be reported, and any other configuration ignored? Why are you racializing the topic, particularly since we don’t know anything about the facts of the case relating to that? Are you an anti trying to inject racism into RKBA?

      • His point is that blacks and Latinos shoot each other every day of the week in the ‘hood, but when it happens in a lily-white school/neighborhood, that’s when the Shannon Watts’ of the world appear and want “solutions”.

  14. Unfortunately these recent Lone Wolf Terrorist attacks further demonstrates LEO’s ineffectiveness at protecting our society. Rather than focus resources into cyber investigators and proactive community outreach, they gun up and use intimidation tactics in an effort to deter crime rather than prevent it.

    I am not saying its the officers fault, clearly as with any government agency, there are politics that affect what they are allowed to do and they do the best they can with the resources they have available. However in just about every single recent case, there was some type of Internet chat or Facebook page, or similar evidence, that if someone was looking for it, could have been used to thwart these attacks.

    The Vegas attacks are a prime example of this where the parents knew there was an issue and LEO ignored, was unable, or unwilling to do anything about it. That has to stop. It will not surprise me to find out the perp in this attack has a similar backstory to the Sandy Hill perp.

    We have to find a way to detect these individuals, develop procedures to escalate a response by LEO to concerns raised by family members and healthcare providers, and that is appropriate to the individual situation without casting a wide net that interferes with lawful gun owners rights. It’s not easy, but that doesn’t mean legislators or gun rights groups should take the easy way out. Both groups need to work together to find a middle ground that provides for the interests of all involved.

    • Police state ain’t the answer. Many of these recent “near mass” shooting have been stopped by vigilant citizen first responders. The solution is citizens exercising their right to keep and bear arms.

  15. I’ve been thinking about this lately, and I think all mass shooters have one thing in common: Learned Helplessness. For those unfamiliar with the term, it refers to a psychological condition stemming from the perception that nothing you do makes any difference in your life. Example: You are a desperate youth who wants romantic attention. Susie is the hottest thing you’ve ever seen. You hear she likes big muscles. You work out hard, get ripped, and approach her. She’s not impressed. Turns out she likes guys with big muscles and long hair. Several months later, you’re ripped and trailing long, flowing locks. Nope, you’re blonde and Susie likes black hair. Easy enough, you dye your hair and presto! Susie should love you. Except she doesn’t. See? Nothing you do can change the outcome.

    This effect is even more profound when you’re desperate for something deeper than just carnal gratification. Bottom line is, if you feel you need something, and you’re desperate to get it, and nothing you can do seems to get it for you, you start to go through a cycle of depression, aggression, suicidal tendencies, etc. Many animals in these types of studies just give up and die.

    Humans have a unique ability to watch others’ futile efforts and acquire learned helplessness. That’s why you can’t say, “Billy was bullied, that’s why he snapped and went postal.” Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he just watched his dad work his tail off at work to be passed up again and again for a promotion. Maybe he watched someone be bullied and nothing they could do would change it. Maybe Billy is surprisingly mature for his age and was aware of the downward spiral of society and felt powerless to change it. Maybe we’ll never know why. Maybe ‘why’ doesn’t matter. Maybe the answer to many of these cases is to teach people to be individual and empowered. Maybe, just maybe, things like ‘zero tolerance’ policies, NCLB, and the myriad other ways our asinine public school system tries to pound everyone into neat little categories are having a cumulative effect of teaching kids to feel helpless. Helpless enough that they feel angry, agressive, and suicidal all in one.

    That, or maybe crazy people just do crazy shit. Yes, there is that.

    • Susie seems to be a vapid airhead thats not worth his time if she’s that shallow.

      I’ve taken up the opinion that maybe if the world hates you maybe its not the world that has the problem. Every single precious snowflake can’t be accommodated, I.E. people hate you because you are a fat jerk face, its not the world’s fault that you are a fat jerk face they hate.

  16. I’ve got way too much time on my hands so, lets assume a steady state of life and death in this country for the past 83 years. Lets say there are 340,000,000 people in the country. They all live to an average age of 83 years old. If we divide the 340 million by 83 years and assume a straight line of life and death (all die at 83). That means deaths are 4,096,385.54 per year.

    Dividing by 365 days per year (another audacious assumption) we get 11,222.97 die each day. So this was one person, What happened to the other 11,221.97 today? I know the day is not over yet but…
    Looks good focusing on one life, guess the rest don’t count.

    On the other hand the CDC says for 2011 (preliminary), see below. I don’t see guns and I can’t even pronounce the names of some of these diseases.

    Perhaps as a society we should focus on the big killers or are we focusing on the little killers for another reason – most of Africa is limiting citizens rights to guns, that’s where the largest killings are currently taking place.

    CDC data:
    Methods—Data in this report are based on death records comprising more than 98 percent of the demographic and medical files for all deaths in the United States in 2011. The records are weighted to independent control counts for 2011. Comparisons are made with 2010 final data.
    Results—The age-adjusted death rate decreased from 747.0 deaths per 100,000 population in 2010 to 740.6 deaths per 100,000 population in 2011. From 2010 to 2011, age-adjusted death rates decreased significantly for 5 of the 15 leading causes of death: Diseases of heart, Malignant neoplasms, Cerebrovascular diseases, Alzheimer’s disease, and Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome and nephrosis. The age-adjusted death rate increased for six leading causes of death: Chronic lower respiratory diseases, Diabetes mellitus, Influenza and pneumonia, Chronic liver disease and cirrhosis, Parkinson’s disease, and Pneumonitis due to solids and liquids. Life expectancy remained the same in 2011 as it had been in 2010 at 78.7 years.

  17. Thanks TTAG for posting when a shooting-murder occurs.
    You are a great source for the facts!
    The MSM is nothing but an anti-gun, anti-American
    Propaganda Organ from PROGRESIVES, No truth. Allowed.

  18. Tama,

    I’m not injecting racism into this, merely pointing out a fact. I’m white, and find it terribly disturbing that the anti camp seems to only focus on these tragedies when it happens in white suburbia.

    BTW, I’m not an anti anything……………

  19. Forget ammo, it’s time to stock up on kitchen knives. If we follow Britain’s example, knife control is the wave of the future. Steak knives will be the new .22LR.

    Buy early while you can still find them.

    • Thats no fun. If you really want to prepare bury a couple of 12 gauge shells in your yard. Then 15 years from now after the caliphate rolls across europe (popularly elected due to shifting demographics) and the US embraces common sense disarmament you can have a chuckle when a burka wearing mother loses her **** after her teen digs up those .73″ weapons of mass destruction.

  20. Clicked the link. You probably shouldn’t make your little songs public. Not because they’re “controversial,” just because they aren’t good.

  21. Another shooter at a school. Another dead shooter, who can’t be interrogated to see why or who put him up to this. I won’t say who or Watts I think is behind this, but man, what a busy week.

  22. All school shootings are a tremendous tragedy. Each one, like yesterday, fuels the cry to ban guns.
    Obama is leading the cry and very soon all gun owners will suffer.

    I’m sure we all agree that the loss of just one child is certianly a tragedy and want a solution to end it.
    Banning guns is not the answer.

    I wonder how each of you would react if I told you last year 2013, Children, between the ages
    1 and 4: 825,
    5 and 14: 2,055
    15 and 24: 10600
    TOTAL: 13,480 CHILDREN & YOUNG ADULTS WERE KILLED IN A MOTOR VEHICLE ACCIDENT!!
    Wheres the cry to BAN MOTOR VEHICLES?

    CHECK IT OUT AT: http://www.allcountries.org/uscensus/129_death_and_death_rates_by_age.html

    Maybe goverment should demand auto makers to make safer cars, or face the possibility of being banned from the auto industry. We all know what GM/Chevolet is responsible for many deaths because of a faulty ignition switch. Will they be prosecuted for their willfully ignoring the deadly problem”? Or maybe we should join together and cry “BAN GM AND THE CHEVOLET”!

    In 2013, many children were killed in play ground accidents, swimming, hiking, playing football, playing baseball

    Do we talk about banning all the above activities? Not really.

    But let there be a gun involved, and the only thing you hear is BAN THE GUN!!

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