At least ten shot dead at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon; more injured

Gun vio­lence has once again left dozens of peo­ple dead and wound­ed at a place of learn­ing, this time right here in the great Pacif­ic North­west:

An inci­dent with an active shoot­er has tak­en place at Umpqua Com­mu­ni­ty Col­lege in Rose­burg that has left at least 10 peo­ple dead and more than 20 injured.

Accord­ing to Andrea Zielin­s­ki with the Dou­glas Coun­ty Sheriff’s Office deputies respond­ed to reports of shots fired at the school at 10:37 AM.

Ore­gon State Police spokesman told CNN that 10 peo­ple have been killed and 20 are injured.

Addi­tion­al infor­ma­tion has not yet been released and will be post­ed as it becomes available.

The gun­man is said to be dead after a con­fronta­tion with police. A Dou­glas Coun­ty com­mis­sion­er had pre­vi­ous­ly told CNN that the shoot­er had been appre­hend­ed and is in cus­tody. That was appar­ent­ly not cor­rect. The shoot­er is report­ed­ly a male.

The first call to 911 was placed at 10:38 AM Pacific.

The Ore­gon­ian has a live­blog going where they are pub­lish­ing reg­u­lar updates.

Rose­burg is a city in south­ern Ore­gon, home to 21,181 peo­ple as of the 2010 cen­sus. It is about an hour’s dri­ve south of Eugene, and it is bisect­ed by Inter­state 5. Umpqua Com­mu­ni­ty Col­lege is actu­al­ly locat­ed six miles north of the city, and has around 1,400 enrolled stu­dents. The col­lege offers two-year pro­grams. The aver­age age of the stu­dents there is thir­ty-eight, we understand.

Its cam­pus con­sists of six­teen build­ings on one hun­dred acres, locat­ed along­side the North Umqua Riv­er. The cam­pus is rel­a­tive­ly iso­lat­ed; there isn’t much else in the imme­di­ate vicin­i­ty around it. How­ev­er, it is locat­ed fair­ly close to Inter­state 5.

Umpqua’s web­site is cur­rent­ly down. We’re not sure if that’s because it can’t cope with a sud­den spike in traf­fic, or whether there is anoth­er rea­son. How­ev­er, you can look at a snap­shot of its web­site from last week on Archive.org.

It goes with­out say­ing that this is a ter­ri­ble tragedy that will leave many Ore­gon fam­i­lies in the worst kind of pain and anguish. The kind that nev­er real­ly goes away.

We don’t know who the vic­tims are, but we’ll be pray­ing for them and their fam­i­lies. The next few hours will be very, very dif­fi­cult, as fam­i­ly and friends learn the fate of their loved ones from authorities.

We can­not con­tin­ue to tol­er­ate gun vio­lence as a soci­ety like we have been. Ore­gon and Wash­ing­ton have been lead­ers in strength­en­ing gun back­ground check laws, but we need to do more. Much more.

So far, in 2015 alone, there have been a stag­ger­ing 39,383 inci­dents of gun vio­lence, and 9,936 deaths. That’s close to half the pop­u­la­tion of Rose­burg, and three times the num­ber of peo­ple killed dur­ing the Sep­tem­ber 11th attacks.

Here’s a more com­pre­hen­sive break­down from the Gun Vio­lence Archive (data val­i­dat­ed as of ear­li­er today):

• Total Num­ber of Inci­dents: 39,383
• Num­ber of Deaths: 9,936
• Num­ber of Injuries: 20,210
• Num­ber of Chil­dren (age 0–11) Killed/Injured: 549
• Num­ber of Teens (age 12–17) Killed/Injured: 1,960
• Mass Shoot­ing: 264
• Offi­cer Involved Shoot­ing: 3,324
• Home Inva­sion: 1,695
• Defen­sive Use: 899
• Acci­den­tal Shoot­ing: 1,388

Notice above that the num­ber of “acci­den­tal” shoot­ings is high­er than the num­ber of inci­dents in which guns were used for self defense. This val­i­dates the para­dox that peo­ple who buy guns for pro­tec­tion actu­al­ly end up mak­ing them­selves less safe.

There is much we can do to make our com­mu­ni­ties and our nation safer. The NRA-led gun lob­by stands in the way. Com­bat­ing their destruc­tive influ­ence and reduc­ing gun vio­lence is one of the most wor­thy caus­es of our time.