It's Portland and we usually think we're mostly peaceful and safe, but the US can be a violent place with shootings every day, and they can happen anywhere. We've had some close calls like the 2010 would-be bomber who tried to blow up a van full of explosives at the Portland downtown tree-lighting celebration (intercepted by the FBI and still pending trial). We had a disturbed young man with a pistol who shot and killed 2 young women (and wounded another 7) at an under-21 night club in 2009, and 14 years ago the really tragic shooting at a Eugene-area high school, where a very disturbed 15 year old Kip Kinkel killed his parents and 2 other students in a shooting spree at Thurston high.
Tuesday December 11, 2012 at about 3:30 PM a shooter armed with a rifle went into a large mall in Portland and started shooting at random, killing two, shooting another, and apparently then killing himself. This happened less than 12 hours ago so a lot of details aren't known, but I imagine his story will be similar to the other disturbed shooters. I was at a grocery store a mile away from the mall a half-hour before the shooting and was probably putting away groceries at home when it happened. You never know when you might be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and Christmas shopping at the mall on a Tuesday afternoon is not where you'd expect to see a shooting. It was a very sad day for Portland.
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