ABSTRACT
On october 1, 2015, twenty-six-year-old Christopher Harper-Mercer shot and killed nine people, and wounded nine others, in an attack at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon. Wearing body armor, Harper-Mercer entered an English classroom—one in which he had been enrolled—where he herded the students together, asking some of them if they were Christians before shooting them, although he shot both Christians and non-Christians. As police arrived at the scene, the man was wounded by police when he leaned out a window, whereupon he killed himself. Police recovered six guns and considerable additional ammunition from the scene: five handguns and one long gun (it was not fired). Eight more guns were found at the man’s apartment. In all, the shooter had fourteen guns, all legally obtained either by him or by family members within the previous three years.
