Some students and parents go through a second mass shooting in 15 months

An East Lansing student escapes from the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, killing three people and five critically wounded on the same day as a September 28, 2012, shooting

A mass shooting at Michigan State University left three people dead and five others critically wounded Monday evening, triggering an hourslong manhunt and shelter-in-place orders before the suspect died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, police said.

The Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre of 20 children and six adults in 2012 was shocking for the nation, but it failed to ignite the political debate over gun reform. In a horrible and extreme example of how gun violence is a constant companion for today’s young people, some Michigan State University students who survived Monday’s mass shooting had also escaped with their lives from a November 30, 2021, shooting at Oxford High School, about an 80-mile drive east of the MSU campus in East Lansing.

Monday’s assault occurred hours before the five-year anniversary of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The 67th mass shooting with four or more shot, not including a shooter, took place in the year.

“The FBI and their colleagues are going through the history of this person to try to understand what his motivations were, to try to understand what brought him to this moment in this community at this time,” CNN senior law enforcement analyst Andrew McCabe said. “This community is struggling to understand why they are the latest in what is a uniquely American experience, and understanding and experiencing a mass shooting in their midst.”

Hours after the first gunshots rang out, the suspect “was contacted by law enforcement off campus” and “it does appear that that suspect has died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound,” Rozman reported.

Trush saw the police cars and ambulances speeding down the street while he was watching TV. People ran out of the building.

The Student Staff, Faculty, and Campus Police Respond to a Shooting at MSU During the 5th Anniversary of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School

“One of the things I’m most proud of is on a campus this size how quickly every student staff faculty member immediately took action. They slept in place and did so for several hours, according to the interim president.

The shelter-in-place orders went into effect Monday and another student, Gabriel, said he and his dorm mates hunkered down.

According to CNN, the student said she was taking shelter in a lounge area of Campbell Hall on the north side of the campus.

“We’re not learning very much,” Charles told CNN’s Erin Burnett earlier in the night, saying she did not hear any gunshots herself, but that some of her co-workers heard shots.

The university will move into emergency operations for the next two days because there is no longer a threat to the campus.

The campus police said that all classes, athletics and campus activities are canceled for the remainder of the day.

“We want to wrap our warm arms around every family that is touched by this tragedy and give them the peace that passeth understanding in moments like this… we will change over time,” Woodruff said. “We cannot allow this to continue to happen again.”

The attack at MSU – which came one day before the five-year anniversary of a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida – resulted in the closure of all East Lansing Public Schools Tuesday.

It has been a really bad night. It’s been horrific for all of the students here and around the region. The schools have been closed. This has affected our whole region, our whole community. It’s affected families, everyone across our community,” Lansing Mayor Andy Schor said.

The nightmare has been a terrible one, said Rozman. “We are relieved to no longer have an active threat on campus, while we realize that there is so much healing that will need to take place after this,” he added.

The response to the shooting was a monumental task, according to the Vice President for Public Safety and Chief of Police.

The response to the situation was divided into several parts and we were able to get a good amount of evidence and share it when it came through. With a large university and areas we are responsible for, that becomes a challenge.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/14/us/michigan-state-university-shots-fired-tuesday/index.html

The Campus Shootings: A wake-up call for a second shooting in Michigan, and the regret of my daughter going to school, my son, and me

The two buildings at the center of Monday evening’s shootings are accessible to the general public during business hours, police said in an early morning news conference Tuesday.

This could save lives in the future. The plague of gun violence is too late for three Michigan State students who will never graduate and their fellow Spartans who are currently going through a college experience stained by it.

Ferguson told the station that her daughter and other students were also survivors of a shooting at Oxford High School, which is just 80 miles northeast of theMSU campus.

We now have a complete generation that has grown up with this countless times over their entire lives, from elementary all the way up to now.

Ferguson, who was with her daughter, said it was like reliving Oxford all over again.

Ferguson’s daughter started attending the school a month ago. The mother described her daughter as “unbelievably terrified” and said it was “really, really surreal” to relive such a horrific experience.

The Representative said it was difficult to see a young person wearing a sweatshirt after the shooting.

“As a representative of Oxford, Michigan, I cannot believe that I’m here again doing this 15 months later,” Slotkin said during a news conference Tuesday. I am angry that we have to have another press conference to talk about our children being killed in school.

There are children in Michigan that have been through a second school shooting in less than a year. If this is not a wake-up call to do something, I don’t know what is.”

After being on Michigan State’s campus last night during the tragedy, he has many thoughts running through his head.

Do we really want to see guns gone? Dana Nessel says it’s impossible to tell the truth about a gun shooting that has nothing to do

Even after more people are killed because of firearms, nothing will be done because of tortured politics of gun control and splits among Americans.

“And unfortunately, as it turned out, the answer is no,” Nessel said. We had to worry about a mass shooting at their school when our kids went to college.

“They are terrified, their parents are terrified,” Michigan Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin told CNN on Tuesday after meeting survivors and family members from Michigan State, which is in her district. “It’s frightening and we either take action or we don’t care about it.”

Dana Nessel thinks it’s going to be a miracle if her kids survive four years at Michigan State without some type of incident.

The kids are familiar with active shooter drills. Every parent knows the lurking anxiety that the worse could happen one day when they drop their child off at class. Fear went away for a while during the Covid-19 school shutdowns.

A previous generation of students was marked by the Columbine High School shooting in Littleton, Colorado, in 1999 that killed 12 students and a teacher, and the Virginia Tech massacre in which 32 people died in 2007.

Alexandria Verner, one of three students who died, was remembered by her Clawson Public Schools Superintendent Billy Shellenbarger as “everything you’d want your daughter or friend to be.” Two of the students killed were from the same high school in Michigan.

“How is it possible that this happened in the first place, an act of senseless violence that has no place in our society and in particular no place in school,” asked Jon Dean, superintendent of Grosse Pointe Public Schools. It touched our community twice.

Such is the inertia surrounding gun politics in Washington, that it’s become a cliche in itself to write that the usual rituals of regret and condolences played out in the capital after a mass shooting but without any expectation that politicians would respond with meaningful measures to stop it happening again.

President Joe Biden and a bipartisan group of senators did pass the most significant gun safety law in decades last year, though it failed to ban any weapons and fell well short of what the White House, gun control advocates and most Americans want to see. Future gun control legislation is unthinkable with Republicans now holding a narrow House majority.

Firearms reform activists will hope that the Democratic sweep of the governorship and both chambers of the state legislature in Michigan will open the possibility of significant changes to the law – but gun politics remain treacherous for lawmakers in swing states who want to cling onto power.

Speaking at a conference ofcounty executives in Washington, Biden decried mass shooting as a family’s worst nightmare that is happening too often in this country.

“We have to do something to stop gun violence ripping apart our communities,” he said, and renewed his call for an assault weapon ban that everyone knows had no chance of passing even in a Democratic-run Congress.

Maybe it is on individuals to take action given the paralysis of gun politics. Several recent cases of mass shootings have appeared to have a common factor: the disturbed mental state of an eventual perpetrator who had access to guns.

But there is rarely any concentrated effort from Republicans in Washington to spend the vast amounts of money needed to overhaul mental health services. In the states, Republican governors and legislatures are busily loosening already lax guns laws in a way that are likely to lead to even easier access to weapons.

While police are still searching for a motive for the Michigan State gunman’s rampage, his father, Michael McRae, said that after his mother died several years ago, he became “more and more bitter … angry and bitter … evil angry.” The brother of the gunman was a criminal and socially isolated, his sister told CNN. He had a history of mental health issues, police said.

Despite the deadlocked debates over guns rights and gun control, more pro-active action by loved ones and others might allow some red flag laws that could see weapons taken from the mentally ill to work. The former FBI senior official, active shooter expert and author said people should act if they see their family members getting mentally ill.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/15/politics/gun-violence-michigan-state-mass-shooting/index.html

What’s wrong with the terrorists in the United States, and what can we do to keep them coming out? Jake Tapper tells CNN

“We have to follow through, we have to report stuff,” she told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “It’s the ‘see something, say something’ that has prevented us having the terrorist events in the United States. We have to do the same things for these types of situations.