4 dead in Canada school shooting, suspect caught

WINNIPEG, Manitoba -- Four people were killed and others injured in a school shooting in a remote part of Saskatchewan on Friday and a male suspect is in custody, Canadian police said.

Officials have not given a motivation for the shooting in La Loche, about 600 km (375 miles) north of the city of Saskatoon.

"Obviously this is every parent's worst nightmare," said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who initially reported five people were killed. He was in Davos, Switzerland, for the annual World Economic Forum.

Mass shootings are relatively rare in Canada, which has stricter gun laws than the United States. In the country's worst school shooting, 14 college students were killed at Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique in 1989. A shooting in 1992 at Concordia University in Montreal killed four.

The latest shooting occurred in the high school, called the Dene Building, and another location in Saskatchewan, Trudeau and Canadian police said.

Police took the suspect into custody outside the school and seized a gun.

La Loche acting Mayor Kevin Janvier told the Canadian Press the incident may have started at the suspect's home.

“I’m not 100 percent sure what’s actually happened but it started at home and ended at the school," Janvier said.

Among Canada’s provinces, Saskatchewan had the highest rate of police-reported family violence in 2014, double the national rate of 243 incidents per 100,000 people, according to a Statistics Canada report on Thursday.

Extra doctors and nurses were sent to treat patients in Keewatin Yatthe Regional Health Authority's 16-bed hospital, said spokesman Dale West. He declined to say how many people had been injured.

Teddy Clark, chief of the Clearwater River Dene Nation, said his daughter told him about the shooting, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported.

"We're just trying to pull together here and make sense of all this," Clark told CBC television. "It's not a very pretty scene right now."

La Loche student Noel Desjarlais told the CBC that he heard multiple shots fired at the school, which has about 900 students.

"I ran outside the school," Desjarlais said. "There was lots of screaming, there was about six, seven shots before I got outside. I believe there was more shots by the time I did get out."

A cellphone video taken by one resident and broadcast by the CBC showed students walking away from the school across the snow-covered ground and emergency personnel moving in.

In 2014, a teacher expressed concern about violence at the La Loche school, noting that a student who had tried to stab her was put back in her classroom after serving his sentence, and another attacked her at her home.

"That student got 10 months," Janice Wilson told the CBC of the student who tried to stab her in class. "And when he was released he was returned to the school and was put in my classroom."

source: interaksyon.com

Federal judge upholds stricter Colorado gun laws

DENVER -- A federal judge upheld gun laws on Thursday introduced by Colorado in the wake of deadly shooting rampages there and in Connecticut, dismissing a lawsuit brought by sheriffs, gun shops, outfitters and shooting ranges.

The two laws, passed in 2013 by Colorado's Democratic-controlled legislature with scant Republican support, banned ammunition magazines that hold more than 15 rounds and required background checks for all private gun sales and transfers.

The bills were introduced in response to a shooting spree in 2012 that killed 12 people at a suburban Denver movie theater, and the slaying later that same year of 20 children and six adults at an elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

But they immediately met resistance from critics, including most of Colorado's elected sheriffs, who said they severely restricted citizens' constitutional right to own and bear arms.

Last year, voters recalled two key Democratic members of the legislature that approved the controversial measures.

After a two-week civil trial, US District Chief Judge Marcia Krieger ruled the lawsuit lacked standing and said no evidence had been produced that showed limiting magazines to 15 rounds seriously diminished the ability to defend oneself.

"Of the many law enforcement officials called to testify, none were able to identify a single instance in which they were involved where a single civilian fired more than 15 shots in self defense," she said in her ruling.

Responding to complaints about expanded background checks, she said there were more than 600 firearms dealers in the state which actively perform private checks, and that it takes an average of less than 15 minutes for a check to be run by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.

Governor John Hickenlooper, a Democrat who signed the bills into law, was named as the defendant in the lawsuit.

Colorado has seen two of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history. In addition to the 2012 theater shooting, it was the site of a 1999 massacre at Columbine High School, where two teenagers shot dead a teacher and 12 other students before committing suicide.

But it is also a state where gun ownership is treasured.

Colorado's Attorney General John Suthers, a Republican, said his office never claimed the laws were "good, wise, or sound policy," but that it had fulfilled its responsibility to defend the constitutionality of the state law in question.

source: interaksyon.com