Guns are deep in the culture of Oregon town beset by school shooting
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Version 0 of 1. ROSEBURG, Ore. — One week ago, the Roseburg Rod and Gun Club hosted a gun show at the local fairgrounds. Two hundred vendors turned out. On Thursday and Friday, those fairgrounds were swarmed by grief counselors, and by families reuniting with friends after a young man carrying six guns killed nine people at Umpqua Community College. Back at the club, men who gathered for a friendly shooting competition worried that they would be unfairly judged — and their gun rights possibly restrained — by the actions of one deranged man. “That kid was definitely not normal,” said Mark Anderson, a retired teacher and a range safety officer at the club. More people die from car accidents than shootings, he added. “It’s not the gun’s fault.” There are constants in the small towns of western Oregon, such as church and timber and a stubbornly high unemployment rate. In Roseburg and surrounding Douglas County, one of these constants is the right to bear arms. That was especially true Friday, even as residents began to mourn those killed by the gunman, identified as Chris Harper Mercer. The city is ringed by nearly 3 million acres of commercial forests. Those forests supply the local economy with a 10th of its jobs — a rarity in a state where timber employment has cratered — and they loom large in the area’s support for gun rights. Young men and women here grow up to work in the woods and the lumber mills, and they learn to hunt the woods for birds and large game. The county of 107,000 is a conservative place where Mitt Romney thumped President Obama, 62 percent to 35 percent, and where elected officials have time and again raised their voices against proposed gun-control measures. In 2013, after a man killed 20 children and 6 adults with a rifle at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., the Douglas County sheriff sent a letter to Vice President Biden. The Obama administration was pushing for a law to expand federal background checks for gun purchases, which would ultimately fail in the Senate. The sheriff, John Hanlin, said he was making “a formal request that you NOT tamper with or attempt to amend the 2nd Amendment” — and vowing not to enforce any such law that violated the Constitution. “Gun control,” he added, “is NOT the answer to preventing heinous crimes like school shootings.” On Friday, as his department continued to investigate the shooter in their midst, Hanlin told CNN that gun control has “certainly got to be part of the discussion” but that this is no time for debate. He added, “My position on it has not changed.” When Oregon lawmakers were considering a bill this year to expand state background checks, county leaders passed a resolution “objecting to any expansion of Oregon’s failed ‘background-check’ system for firearms transfers between qualified, law-abiding persons.” The bill passed over the county’s objections, and Gov. Kate Brown (D) signed it. (The bill’s author, state Sen. Floyd Prozanski, represents part of Roseburg, a town of 22,200, although he hails from the much more liberal Eugene area). That legislation made Oregon one of the first states to adopt the blanket background checks that have been pushed by a national gun-control group funded by former New York City mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. Those checks apply to almost any transfer of a gun between two people who aren’t related to each other, and not just to sales at shops and gun shows. Until that point, Oregon put relatively few restrictions on gun ownership compared with other states. A right to bear arms is enshrined in the state Constitution. No state license is required to buy a gun. It is a “shall issue” state for concealed-weapons permits, meaning applicants need only to satisfy certain criteria — such as not having any outstanding warrants for their arrest — and do not have to demonstrate a need to carry a gun concealed. The background-checks law was a step in a different direction. And to some in large swaths of rural Oregon — and vast expanses of the country — it felt like a betrayal of their way of life. “We’re being besieged,” Earl Skonberg, 76, said at the Rod and Gun Club on Friday morning as rifle cracks filled the air. He said that since the shooting he had been fielding calls from reporters asking whether Mercer was a member of the club. He was not, Skonberg said. The gun club has been in operation for more than a century. Anderson said there has not been a single fatality on its property. The range hosts a junior day for youngsters ages 8 to 18 to learn about shooting in all disciplines, including pistol, rifle, shotgun and archery. Members also participate in a popular annual shotgun competition around Thanksgiving in which the winner takes home a frozen turkey. The 105-acre forested parcel is home to nature trails and a pavilion for special events that abuts the 200-yard rifle range. “That’s for ‘shotgun’ weddings,” Skonberg said. On Friday, Skonberg was among about a dozen club members gathered for a weekly “five stand” shotgun competition, in which participants take turns shooting flying bright orange clay discs. Patty Meek took up the sport in the spring and said she enjoys learning how to track the discs in the air. Wearing a camouflage National Rifle Association cap, Meek smiled when she used her 12-gauge to blast the target out of the sky. The men beside her let out a whoop. “I like the camaraderie of it,” she said. Anderson, 61, retired nine years ago as a teacher after spending 30 years in Roseburg schools. He recalled lockdown drills in which he bolted the doors, closed the shades and hunkered down with the children. His eyes welled up when he talked about the Umpqua shooting. “It’s a tragedy,” he said. “When kids get killed, you feel for them and their families. . . . I’m still waiting to hear the names. In a small community like this, everybody knows somebody.” Skonberg said the club members — who insisted that a reporter try shooting some clay targets — represent a side of the rural gun-owning community that doesn’t see much coverage in the aftermath of mass shootings. “This has nothing to do with what happened over there,” Skonberg said, gesturing to the campus just out of view. “But we’re going to pay the price for it.” Many residents here are already leery of the government intruding into their lives. For years, Roseburg residents have blamed the federal government for chopping off their timber economy during the spotted-owl fights of the early 1990s, which led to a reduction in the amount of federal land available for harvest. Since then, Oregon’s wood-products industry has crashed. Roseburg has held out longer than most timber towns, but it, too, is facing the harsh realities of economic transition. The average pay has dropped well below what it was in the 1980s. Unemployment remains above 8 percent, higher than state and national levels. “It’s a rural area,” said Brian Rooney, a regional economist who studies Douglas County for the Oregon Employment Department. “There’s a lot of seasonal employment. If you lose a job in a rural area, it takes longer to find a job.” In recent years, one institution has loomed large for young people in Douglas County, a training ground for students seeking skills in welding or winemaking or a host of other jobs in the changing local economy: Umpqua Community College. Students from the college filed to the fairgrounds Thursday to ride buses to get their cars on campus. Some exchanged teary hugs. Many Roseburg residents will find another kind of comfort in tradition, this weekend, amid a tranquil early morning spent in the woods. On Saturday, deer season opens. Tankersley reported from Washington. |