It isn’t every day that you have an active shooter in your neck of the woods. At least not where I live. That is in a quiet neighborhood in a small city in Oregon, about an hour south of Portland.
We’ve had a lot of booms lately, which I assumed were fireworks left over from the Fourth. This morning there were a whole bunch of booms and they sounded different from previous noises. There were also other sounds, which might have been construction since there are lots of houses going up near me, but were--just a little weird. So I went online and found out that there was police activity near my house. Next I got a shelter-in-place text from my local police department. As it turned out, there was an active shooter around the corner from me!
The guy in question was having a mental health crisis, and had pipe bombs and an AR15 according to the neighbors. Certainly something was making all those loud booms. The shooter wound up blockaded in his house with his family. There was a SWAT team called in, and police swarmed in from neighboring counties. My street was one of those that was blocked off but I was never in actual danger. I spent my time texting and calling friends and relatives and monitoring Facebook and Nextdoor to get updates. I was never really scared, just very, very interested. It took a couple of hours, but he was finally taken into custody. As far as I have heard, no one was injured. White guy, of course.
So my county is fairly rural, and a couple of real nut jobs have been elected as county commissioners. They declared the county as a ‘second amendment sanctuary’ and said that county employees were not allowed to enforce state gun laws. Like the Oregon Red Flag law, which might have kept this guy from getting an AR15. The sanctuary law was recently thrown out by the courts, and the commissioners are using our taxes to appeal the decision, which is obviously a complete waste of time and money. But I do wonder if the shooter had better access to a weapon because of our commissioners. I think it is time for me to write some letters to let them know how I feel about all that.