ROSEBURG, OREGON — On Thursday, October 1, 2015, Umpqua Community College became the latest institution of learning to host what has become a new traditional event at American schools — a mass Second Amendment demonstration.
Similar mass demonstrations of every American’s right to own a firearm — no matter how mentally unstable or violent — have left multiple people dead in places like a Louisiana movie theater and one of the nation’s oldest black churches in South Carolina. The demonstration in Roseburg, Oregon this week was no different, this time leaving ten people without their lives, liberty, or any chance of pursuing happiness. Details as to the motive and intent of the Second Amendment demonstrator are unclear at the time of publication, but authorities are confirming they have responded to a mass Second Amendment demonstration.
This is the 45th such Second Amendment demonstration at a school this year alone, though not every demonstration left enough fatalities to be considered a “mass demonstration,” that number according to the FBI’s definition is four fatalities. Recent studies have shown an uptick in the number of mass Second Amendment demonstrations at schools since the famous Columbine demonstration in 1999. Since 1982, the United States has held more than 61 mass Second Amendment demonstrations in various parts of the country. Back in August, one man held a Second Amendment demonstration on live TV, killing two of his former co-workers at WDBJ in Virginia. While in December of 2012, 27 people died from a single mass Second Amendment Demonstration that started in the demonstrator’s home and finished at Sandy Hook Elementary with 20 children under the age of seven dead.
Gun rights activists were quick to tell the public to not jump to any emotional conclusions about the mass Second Amendment demonstration at Umpqua Community College. “We would caution people against thinking that in the only nation with such a high number of guns, and in a country with such a high cultural regard for guns that anything needs to be done to stop people from dying at the end of a gun,” National Rifle Group’s Winston Iacono said in a press conference at the NRG’s headquarters in Virginia.
“Sure, it’s sad that these ten people lost their lives today,” Iacono said, “but what’s worse — an America where nearly everyone can buy a gun unless they’re crazy, or an America where everyone has to own a gun because you just don’t know how crazy the gun owner next door is? I rest my case.”
Iacono blamed gun violence in America on many things in his press conference, but none more strongly than the idea of gun free zones — places where laws or other rules prevent someone from carrying a firearm on the premises. Despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of mass Second Amendment demonstrations take place in private homes where there are no restrictions on carrying a gun, many gun rights advocates point to their existence as being a large target for Second Amendment demonstrators.
“Gun free zones are massive targets,” Iacono said, “because they pretty much are a flashing sign telling Second Amendment demonstrators ‘hey, come over here, no one is armed and can stop you.'” Iacono went on to ask rhetorically, “There’s never any gun violence at a bank; no one ever tries to assault banks with guns, do they?” Iacono says it’s time for Americans to “accept the fact that the only way to stop gun violence is to put more guns into the world” and that “it’s just like when you clean up after a flood by dumping more water onto the floor.”
More on this story as it develops.
