Oregon gunman in massacre had cache of 13 weapons, US agent says

ROSEBURG, OREGON - The Oregon gunman who carried out an execution-style massacre at a college classroom had a cache of 13 weapons, body armor and ammunition, authorities said on Friday as they sought a motive for the bloodiest US mass shooting this year.

Celinez Nunez, assistant special agent of the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, disclosed the cache as details emerged about the suspect in Thursday's rampage at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, about 180 miles (290 km) south of Portland.

Six of the guns, plus body armor and five magazines of ammunition were recovered from the campus where the gunman stormed into a classroom, killing nine people before he was shot dead by police, Nunez told a news conference.

Douglas County Sheriff John Hanlin declined to name the gunman, saying, “Again, you will not hear anyone from this law enforcement operation use his name. I continue to believe that those media and community members who publicize his name will only glorify his horrific actions. And eventually, this will only serve to inspire a future shooter."

Law enforcement sources confirmed reports identifying the suspect as Chris Harper-Mercer, 26.

The gunman shot a professor and then ordered cowering students to stand up and state their religion before he shot them one by one, according to survivors' accounts.

Another seven guns and a significant stockpile of ammunition were found at the apartment he shared with his mother in nearby Winchester, about 170 miles (273 km) south of Portland, Nunez said.

Although authorities have disclosed scant information about the gunman, they appeared to be learning more about him and why he might have opened fire.

The shooter left behind a "multipage, hate-filled" statement in the classroom, according to a tweet from an NBC reporter, citing multiple law enforcement sources who were not identified. Citing unspecified sources, CNN said the statement showed animosity toward blacks.

Hanlin declined to comment when asked about the writings at a news conference.

Harper-Mercer, who identified himself on a blog post as "mixed race," enlisted in the US Army and served for about a month in 2008 before being discharged for failing to meet administrative standards, military records showed.

A man identifying himself as the gunman's father Ian Mercer told reporters outside his home in Los Angeles on Thursday night, "It's been a devastating day, devastating for me and my family."

At some point of his life, Harper-Mercer appears 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.

Harper-Mercer was born in the United Kingdom and arrived in the United States as a young boy, his stepsister Carmen Nesnick told CBS Los Angeles.

After the shooting, Mercy Medical Center in Roseburg received 10 patients, including one who died in the emergency room, hospital officials told reporters on Friday. Three were transported to other facilities because they needed a higher level of care, four required surgery, and two were treated and released. All were treated for gunshot wounds.

Gun control debate
The violence, the latest in a series of high-profile mass killings across the country, has fueled demands for stricter gun control in the United States.

Not counting Thursday's incident, 293 US 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.

Hours after Thursday's shooting, a visibly frustrated President Barack Obama urged Americans to press their elected leaders to enact tougher firearms safety laws.

"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."

Gun control advocates say easy access to firearms is a major factor in the shooting epidemic, while the National Rifle Association and other pro-gun advocates say the Second Amendment of the US Constitution guarantees Americans the right to bear arms.

Oregon Governor Kate Brown declined in television interviews on Friday morning to discuss gun control, as did the sheriff, and both said it was a time for healing the community.

A month after the December 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, Hanlin wrote a sharply worded letter to Vice President Joe Biden saying he would never enforce a federal law that violates the Constitution.

"Gun control is NOT the answer to preventing heinous crimes like school shootings," Hanlin wrote in the letter, dated Jan. 15, 2013. (Additional reporting by Doina Chiacu in Washington; Suzannah Gonzales in Chicago; Jane Ross in Roseburg; Shelby Sebens in Portland, and Katie Reilly and Angela Moon in New York)

source: interaksyon.com

Study: Hotter temperatures leads to hotter tempers

WASHINGTON — As the world gets warmer, people are more likely to get hot under the collar, scientists say. A massive new study finds that aggressive acts like committing violent crimes and waging war become more likely with each added degree.

Researchers analyzed 60 studies on historic empire collapses, recent wars, violent crime rates in the United States, lab simulations that tested police decisions on when to shoot and even cases where pitchers threw deliberately at batters in baseball. They found a common thread over centuries: Extreme weather — very hot or dry — means more violence.

The authors say the results show strong evidence that climate can promote conflict.

"When the weather gets bad we tend to be more willing to hurt other people," said economist Solomon Hsiang of the University of California, Berkeley.

He is the lead author of the study, published online Thursday by the journal Science. Experts in the causes of war gave it a mixed reception.

The team of economists even came up with a formula that predicts how much the risk of different types of violence should increase with extreme weather. In war-torn parts of equatorial Africa, it says, every added degree Fahrenheit or so increases the chance of conflict between groups— rebellion, war, civil unrest — by 11 percent to 14 percent. For the United States, the formula says that for every increase of 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit, the likelihood of violent crime goes up 2 percent to 4 percent.



Temperatures in much of North America and Eurasia are likely to go up by that 5.4 degrees by about 2065 because of increases in carbon dioxide pollution, according to a separate paper published in Science on Thursday.

The same paper sees global averages increasing by about 3.6 degrees in the next half-century. So that implies essentially about 40 percent to 50 percent more chance for African wars than it would be without global warming, said Edward Miguel, another Berkeley economist and study co-author.

When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change updates its report next year on the impacts of global warming, it will address the issue of impacts on war for the first time, said Carnegie Institution scientist Chris Field, who heads that worldwide study group. The new study is likely to play a big role, he said.

Hsiang said that whenever the analyzed studies looked at temperature and conflict, the link was clear, no matter where or when. His analysis examines about a dozen studies on collapses of empires or dynasties, about 15 studies on crime and aggression and more than 30 studies on wars, civil strife or intergroup conflicts.

In one study, police officers in a psychology experiment were more likely to choose to shoot someone in a lab simulation when the room temperature was hotter, Hsiang said. In another study, baseball pitchers were more likely to retaliate against their opponents when a teammate was hit by a pitch on hotter days. Hsiang pointed to the collapse of the Mayan civilization that coincided with periods of historic drought about 1,200 years ago.

People often don't consider human conflict when they think about climate change, which is "an important oversight," said Ohio State University psychology professor Brad Bushman, who wasn't part of the study but whose work on crime and heat was analyzed by Hsiang.

There's a good reason why people get more aggressive in warmer weather, Bushman said. Although people say they feel sluggish when they are hot, their heart rate and other physical responses are aroused and elevated. They think they are not agitated, when in fact they are, and "that's a recipe for disaster," Bushman said.

Experts who research war and peace were split in their reaction to the work.

"The world will be a very violent place by mid-century if climate change continues as projected," said Thomas Homer-Dixon, a professor of diplomacy at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Ontario.

But Joshua Goldstein, a professor of international relations at American University and author of "Winning the War on War," found faults with the way the study measured conflicts. He said the idea of hotter tempers with hotter temperatures is only one factor in conflict, and that it runs counter to a long and large trend to less violence.

"To read this you get the impression, if climate change unfolds as we all fear it will, that the world will be beset by violent conflict and that's probably not true," Goldstein said.

"Because of positive changes in technology, economics, politics and health" conflict is likely to continue to drop, although maybe not as much as it would without climate change, he said.

Miguel acknowledges that many other factors play a role in conflict and said it's too soon to see whether conflict from warming will outweigh peace from prosperity: "It's a race against time."

source: philstar.com