ADVERTISEMENT 2
ADVERTISEMENT 3
Error: No articles to display
ADVERTISEMENT 1
ADVERTISEMENT 4
Children categories
ROSEBURG, Ore. (AP) —
Hundreds of people lined the road leading to the Oregon community college where a gunman killed nine people, holding signs reading "UCC Strong" as students returned Monday to the scene of the deadliest shooting in state history.
The Umpqua Community College campus in the small town of Roseburg reopened last week, but students are heading back to class for the first time since the Oct. 1 shooting, which also wounded nine people.
Residents waving American flags and signs greeted students driving into campus. Volunteers and dogs came to offer comfort, and tissues were available in every classroom. State troopers and sheriff's deputies patrolled the grounds.
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown joined interim college President Rita Cavin and student body president Tony Terra in welcoming students who returned for morning classes.
"There was a lot of hugs and a lot of tears," the governor told reporters. "We are here to help students rebuild their lives."
The gunman, Christopher Harper-Mercer, 26, shot his victims in a classroom in Snyder Hall before exchanging fire with police and then killing himself. Administrators have not started talking about what will happen to Snyder Hall, which is still closed, Cavin said.
It's also too soon to say how security at the college might change, she said. Campus police are not armed in this conservative town where residents commonly own and carry guns. The shooting has led to calls for more gun restrictions to reduce the bloodshed, while others here and across the country contend that the answer is more people being armed.
The campus was closed to the media for much of the day. Despite that, many students skipped class Monday because they didn't want to confront reporters, Cavin said.
"We're hoping they understand this level of press activity is going to diminish really quickly, and it will feel safer to come back," Cavin said. "Some of them are just holding back and waiting for the campus to look like the campus they left."
Supporters started lining the street before dawn. Workers from AAA Sweep, a Roseburg parking-lot sweeping company, arrived at 5:30 a.m., even though some of them didn't get off work until 2 a.m.
"UCC touches everybody in this community in some way," company owner Carl Bird told The Register-Guard newspaper. "You've got displaced workers that come here, you've got kids out of high school coming here, I've hired people from here.
"And they all put back in the community when they graduate," he said. "So it's just something that I felt we should support."
LAWRENCEVILLE, Ga. (AP) —
Ben Carson suggested last week the Holocaust wouldn't have happened if Jews in Europe were better armed. He argued that gun control is a bigger tragedy than a bullet-riddled body. He said the best way to confront a mass shooter is to rush the gunman.
The statements, after the mass shooting in Oregon that killed nine college students, have drawn no shortage of criticism, including from public-safety experts and the FBI. Carson's commentary on gun policy is emblematic of his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.
The retired neurosurgeon is a political rookie who prefers to muse on the news of the day and make academic arguments, rather than offer a clear picture of what policies he would pursue if elected.
The freewheeling approach has put Carson at the top of many preference polls, where he and billionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump are looking down at more than a dozen candidates with experience developing and implementing policy in governor's mansions and on Capitol Hill.
"He's exactly the kind of man we need representing and leading our country," said Paige Mitts, a 51-year-old financial planner, as she waited outside a suburban Atlanta bookstore over the weekend to meet Carson. "Who better than a surgeon to solve the complex problems we face?"
Yet some Republicans, including Carson's rivals for the GOP nomination, question how long he will be able to stick with his style, even in an election year in which conservative discontent with anyone in elected office has powered the candidacies of Carson, Trump and former technology executive Carly Fiorina.
"Dr. Carson will have to get more detailed, have a consistent message," said Henry Barbour, a Republican National Committee member from Mississippi who is neutral in the primary campaign. Influential in GOP circles nationally, Barbour is a nephew of former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, one of the veteran politicians trying to catch up to Carson, was less diplomatic. "You know, Dr. Carson loves to sit around and speak theoretically about things," he said in an interview Friday on Fox News Radio. "I want to talk about the things that are going to directly affect the American people."
While Trump benefits from decades in the spotlight, Carson is, like Fiorina, trying to build a national profile from scratch. But unlike Carson, the former technology executive used the first two GOP debates to project a confident command of policy, firing off in rapid detail the ways in which she would rebuild U.S. military might on Russia's doorstep and detailing her interactions with foreign leaders during her career in business.
"You've got Fiorina out there proving every day that she knows her stuff," Barbour said. "Trump," Barbour added, "is just Trump."
Both Trump and Fiorina largely stuck to the popular conservative approaches to gun violence in the days after the Oregon shooting, matching a robust defense of the rights of firearms owners with a focus on mental health care.
"The Second Amendment to the Constitution is clear," Trump said at a campaign appearance in Tennessee, before noting that he has a New York concealed-carry permit. Fiorina also hammered President Barack Obama for "politicizing" the Oregon shooting with his call for stricter gun regulations.
While Carson made similar arguments, they were often drowned out by his headline-grabbing remarks. Some of his advisers have privately acknowledged that he needs to be more disciplined, but as he signed books Saturday in the Atlanta area, Carson said his place in preference polls validate his approach.
"It says that the people are waking up and they are starting to realize that listening to the pundits and the experts and the news media probably is not the right thing to do," he said.
The next morning, Carson was back on national television, explaining again why he thinks "it's not hyperbole at all" to link 2nd Amendment rights to preventing the rise of a Nazi-like form of tyranny in America.
"Whether it's on our doorstep or whether it's 50 years away," he told CBS "Face the Nation" moderator John Dickerson, "it's still a concern, and it's something that we must guard against."
LAS VEGAS (AP) —
When the Democratic candidates for president take the stage for their first debate this week in Nevada, they'll do so in a state that serves as a reminder of why Hillary Rodham Clinton is the front-runner for the nomination.
One of the first four states to cast ballots in the presidential contest, Nevada is home to large communities of immigrant families, including many who have only recently arrived in the state. When combined with the state's baroque caucus system, which is so complex that the rules surrounding it run 51 pages, that means winning the state and the largest share of delegates requires a higher degree of organization and effort to get-out-the-vote than in most others.
And so for all the excitement generated to date by Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, and for all the anticipation about whether Vice President Joe Biden will decide to make a late entry into the race, it is Clinton and her campaign that are set up to win when Nevada Democratic caucus next February.
Clinton installed staff on the ground in Nevada six months ago, and she now has 22 paid operatives in the state. They have recruited more than 3,000 volunteers, who have already held events in remote desert towns as well as the state's urban centers. Clinton herself has made wooing immigrants a keystone of her campaign; she announced her immigration policy approach at a Las Vegas high school this spring.
"That's a lot of shoe leather, and they've been on the ground for 5-6 months," Billy Vassiliadis, a veteran Democratic strategist in Nevada who isn't involved in the current race, said of the Clinton campaign's efforts. "That's going to be a challenge that I don't think a Sanders can overcome, that — God bless his heart — I don't think Joe can overcome."
Meanwhile, Sanders put a single paid staffer in the state less than two weeks ago, and recently added a few more. Biden has yet to decide whether to run and does not have any formal campaign operation.
None of the other candidates Clinton will debate Tuesday night — former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, former Rhode Island Sen. Lincoln Chaffee and former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb — have a campaign organization that can match Clinton's. All are largely afterthoughts in early preference polls.
The differences in the structural strength of the campaigns were evident this past weekend. While Sanders' single Nevada staffer had his first meeting with hundreds of Sanders volunteers at a community college on Saturday, Clinton's campaign flew in Democratic rising star Rep. Joaquin Castro of Texas in Las Vegas and former NBA player Jason Collins in Reno to cheer on volunteers and staffers who had been knocking on doors and making calls for months.
"We gave — and we know we have — the best candidate for president of all the candidates for president, Democrat or Republican — Hillary Clinton," Castro told about two dozen Clinton volunteers who, armed with clipboards filled with computer-generated lists of potential voters, were about to set out for an afternoon of door-knocking in heavily Latino East Las Vegas.
Sanders supporters argue they can catch up. "There is a movement here, even in Nevada, for Bernie Sanders," said Jim Farrell, Sanders' Nevada state director. "This is not a normal election cycle."
Yet neither was 2008, when Clinton won the Nevada caucus. Her state director then was Robby Mook, who is now her national campaign manager. Her field director that year was Marlon Marshall, now the national campaign's director of public engagement. Emmy Ruiz, who worked on the Clinton 2008 effort and then ran Obama's successful 2012 race in Nevada, is now overseeing Clinton's 2016 effort in the state.
Vassiliadis, who worked on the 2008 Obama campaign, said it had staff on the ground in the spring of 2007 and nabbed the coveted endorsement of the Culinary Workers Union, which represents tens of thousands of casino workers in the state. And yet they couldn't catch up to Mook and the campaign he built for Clinton in Nevada.
Clinton's team is doing it all over again, including targeting the state's diverse electorate. The campaign hosts Filipino-style potluck dinners and is courting black pastors as well as Nevada's influential corps of immigrant-rights activists. And what the campaign does in Nevada, Marshall said, will pay off across the country.
"The diversity of Nevada and the outreach programs you use there can help us reach out to those communities in other states," he said.
Yet for all her successes in Nevada in 2008, Clinton left the state with one fewer delegate than did Obama. It's something noted by some Sanders backers, who cite the complex rules that can generously apportion delegates to runners-up as they tout the potential for the enthusiasm for his campaign to ultimately trump Clinton's structural edge.
"We'll go to the Democratic clubs and see a Hillary person will get up — they're all very nice people, but it's like they memorized a speech," said Tazo Schafer, 67, a retired academic who is volunteering for Sanders, his first involvement in presidential politics since Eugene McCarthy's campaign. "Then the Bernie people get up and say, 'Enough is enough,' and there's real passion."