at reynolds high school in troutdale, oregon. one student and the gunman are dead. a teacher is hurt. this is all happening on the second to the last day of school. let s start with nbc s pete williams, who has been working the phones. what is the latest you can tell us? we will get some more details out of this news conference, but it does appear to be basically as we have known it for the last couple of hours, that there were three people shot today, two of them killed, one student, the person with the gun and a teacher, todd, a track coach and health teacher, who received a very slight, superficial wound on his hip. he was not even transferred to the hospital. his friends say that he s otherwise okay. the shooting took place according to several witnesses and law enforcement officials in a locker room or at the near the gymnasium of reynolds high school, which is the second largest high school in oregon. so it s a big school, about
we seem to have a mass shooting every week. and it would become easy to become numb to these tragedies. but it s still worth thinking about them and trying to learn what lessons we can. we re still learning the details from this latest tragedy in trout dale. but in the weekend shooting of two law enforcement officials is and one civilian walmart shopper, there is already a lot for us to consider. in 1958, the headquarters of the national rifle association had these words on the wall. firearm safety education, marksmanship training, shooting for recreation. and according to michael wadman, pragmatic firearm safety was, in fact, the nra s focus. the nra was established to improve the poor marksmanship of soldiers but morphed post world war ii into an organization for sportsmen. they stood in support of tighter gun laws following the assassination of jfk, and they backed the ban of saturday night special handguns, saying the nra does not necessarily approve of everything that goes bang. i
some shell casings have been recovered from the scene that would be consistent with that type of weapon. others say the person was wearing a helmet, like a motorcycle helmet. but we don t know who it was. several of the students also say that the person with the gun appeared to be pursuing or chasing this teacher, todd rispler, the teacher who received the minor wound. whether that s correct weeshs don t know. so often in the several minutes after these shootings happen, you get a lot of conflicting was in and that s what the police are trying to sort through now. they want to interview the students, too, because they re the eyewitnesses. in terms of what the motive was for the shooting, obviously something we don t know at this point, do you expect us to learn that in this press conference or that we don t know for a long period of time? it depends on what happens
unfolding, trying to reconstruct precisely how the shooting took place. the police will be doing that work, the state police and folks from the bureau of fbi and federal bureau of tobacco and firearms so they can reconstruct exactly what happened. luke russert here. do you know anything about the shooter? do we know anything else? we ve only gotten descriptions of what the gunman looked like, hearing from students who were in the area at the time. several of them said he appeared to be wearing like a bullet-proof or tactical vest. some of them said he was carrying and they say it was a he carrying what looked to them like an assault rifle, like an ar-15.
said, this shooter seemed to have pursued a teacher, one student was killed. what does it mean that this seems to be an execution of a certain student and pursuing of a certain teacher. it does not seem to be shooting into a crowd from what we ve learned so far. we re going to have to see how that plays out. i agree. that s an important factor. you ve put your finger on it. is it revenge on the teacher who might have failed the student or for some other reason, disciplined the student? we ll have to wait and see. or is it a student who just entered the building bent on mass murder and he was confronted by the educator, the teacher, the coach? that remains to be seen. that may give us a little insight into the motive. but certainly when someone goes to a school like that to shoot somebody and kill somebody, they have suicide also programmed in. they re not seeing the consequences of their actions as something that can be relieved by, you know, normal process. they see murder and suici