Oregon School Shooting Draws Obama's Outrage on Gun Laws

Washington: President Barack Obama, speaking hours after a gunman killed a student and wounded a teacher at an Oregon high school, said on Tuesday that his failure to push through stricter gun laws was the greatest frustration of his presidency, declaring, "We're the only developed country on earth where this happens." (Shooter Kills Student at Oregon High School)

Speaking in blunt and bitter terms about a bloody trail of shootings in the last month, Obama said: "Our levels of gun violence are off the charts. There's no advanced, developed country on earth that would put up with this."

While the president said he had undertaken several executive actions to tighten existing regulations, the failure to require a background check for buyers of guns left the nation vulnerable to an unending series of mass shootings. "The bottom line is, is that we don't have enough tools right now to really make as big of a dent as we need to," Obama said to a young audience at a White House question-and-answer session sponsored by the social media site Tumblr.

The string of shootings continued on Tuesday when a gunman at Reynolds High School in Troutdale, Oregon, killed a 14-year-old student and wounded a physical education teacher. The authorities in Troutdale, a Portland suburb, did not immediately identify the gunman, who carried a rifle and was later found dead at the scene. It was unclear if he was a student or knew either of the victims.

The student who was killed was identified as Emilio Hoffman, a freshman at the school. The teacher, Todd Rispler, was wounded in the hip, but the injury was not serious, officials said.

The president's emotional remarks later in Washington were specifically in response to a question from a student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where six students were killed late last month by Elliot O. Rodger.

"What are you going to do?" the student asked. "What can we all do?"

Obama replied that passing federal legislation would require a shift in public opinion big enough to move Congress, where he said most members "are terrified of the NRA."

"Until that changes, until there is a fundamental shift in public opinion in which people say: 'Enough, this is not acceptable, this is not normal, this isn't sort of the price we should be paying for our freedom,'" Obama said, "sadly,  not that much is going to change."

The president expressed little hope for a change in sentiment, noting that even his push for background checks for would-be gun buyers fell short in the wake of the 2012 schoolhouse slaughter in Newtown, Connecticut.

"The fact that 20 6-year-olds were gunned down in the most violent fashion possible and this town couldn't do anything about it was stunning to me," the president said.

In Troutdale, the high school had tried to prepare for such a shooting by conducting a dry run in a test of its emergency plan, Mayor Doug Daoust said. "This has been a very unsettling day for our precious city," he said.

After the early morning shooting, students were crying as they filed out of the school, hands atop heads, before being taken to a Fred Meyer supermarket, where they were reunited with family members waiting behind police tape. And as in the Santa Barbara area, Las Vegas and Seattle, trauma counselors were called out to help the survivors.

Alex Santos, a pastor at the Apostolic Church in Portland, said he had dropped his daughter at the school around 8:05 a.m. and heard what he thought was a car backfiring. Within minutes, he said, "I looked in my rearview mirror and I saw police vehicles coming down the street."

"I saw them go to the gym," Santos added, "and then I heard pop, pop, pop." He immediately texted his daughter, who was safe.

One student was arrested when officers found a handgun while they were patting down students as they left their classrooms. The Troutdale police chief, Scott Anderson, said the person with the handgun was not involved in the shooting, but had been arrested.

Obama has used some of the strongest language of his presidency in addressing the issue of gun violence, although he had remained quiet during the recent spate of shootings, until Tuesday. "The country has to do some soul-searching about this," he said. "This is becoming the norm. And we take it for granted in - in ways that, as a parent, are terrifying to me." The nation, he said, should be ashamed of its inability to pass even mild restrictions.

Referring to those who argue that gun violence is caused by untreated mental illness rather than lax gun laws, Obama said, "You know, the United States does not have a monopoly on crazy people."

"It's not the only country that has psychosis," he added. "And yet, we kill each other in these mass shootings at rates that are exponentially higher than any place else. Well, what's the difference? The difference is, is that these guys can stack up a bunch of ammunition in their houses."