https://www.washingtonpost.com/nati...ory.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.5f744e071ea7
They survived Las Vegas. Then came a second mass shooting.
David Anderson, 23, a survivor of the mass shootings at Borderline Bar & Grill and the Route 91 music festival in Las Vegas, sits outside his home. (Philip Cheung for The Washington Post)
By Katie Zezima and
Katie Mettler
November 9 at 3:13 AM
THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. — When the first shots were fired at Borderline Bar & Grill, David Anderson immediately knew he was in the middle of a mass shooting. He had lived through one last year.
Anderson survived the attack at a country music festival in Las Vegas in October 2017 that left 58 people dead. On Wednesday, he again survived a gunman indiscriminately firing at people enjoying country music, this time at college night at a well-loved bar. Twelve people were killed.
Numerous Borderline regulars attended, and survived, the Las Vegas shooting.
“Vegas Strong” shirts were often spotted at the bar. Patrons gathered here for healing and community. The were a “family,” as Anderson described it.
Now, 13 months later, many again fled the gunshots and chaos of a mass shooting, with memories of the first terrifying experience guiding their actions in another scene of carnage.
“I was at the Las Vegas Route 91 mass shooting, as well as probably 50 or 60 others who were in there at the same time as me,” Nicholas Champion said in a television interview. “We’re all a big family, and unfortunately this family got hit twice.”
[Once again, Nashville faces horrific mass shooting involving country music fans]
Molly Maurer shared her feelings on Facebook about being a two-time survivor:
“I can’t believe I’m saying this again. I’m alive and home safe,” she wrote.
In Las Vegas, Anderson stood near the stage, on the same side of the field as the Mandalay Bay hotel, where a gunman fired shots out of the windows of his suite. Anderson saw a man next to him get shot and dove on top of his then-girlfriend to shield her. When the gunman stopped shooting, Anderson and his group of friends ran out an exit and two miles to their hotel.
On Wednesday, he stood near the bar facing the door — something he now does all the time in public, a learned behavior from the Las Vegas shooting.
He saw the gunman walk in, take a military-like stance and fire. He ducked behind the bar and, when the gunman briefly stopped shooting, ran outside with his friend.
“It was just a surreal shock, the shock factor,” he said.
When Megan Greene came home after surviving Route 91, she could not stand being in the dark. She scratched her legs raw from the anxiety.
Days later, she started participating in a weekly ritual: college night at Borderline. She was grateful to be around so many who were close to her, and many were fellow survivors. But she was also anxious; she ran into a corner, curled up in a ball and cried during a song where people clapped.
She has since moved from California, but Greene said in a text message Thursday that the shooting at the bar she frequented was “too surreal.”
Carl Edgar told the Los Angeles Times that he is a regular at the bar and knew about 20 people inside on Wednesday.
“A lot of my friends survived Route 91,” Edgar said. “If they survived that, they will survive this.”
Anderson said the Las Vegas shooting made him much more aware of his surroundings and people who might seem suspicious.
“It did change me a little bit,” he said.
It also made him more resolute in his belief that an armed, well-trained shooter could make a difference in situations like this. Anderson grew up with guns and is an avid hunter. He believes that guns, if used responsibly, could help.
“If the right people with the right training were there, it could make a difference,” he said.
[Invisible wounds of Las Vegas shooting could affect tens of thousands]
Others felt differently. Susan Orfanos said in a television interview that her son, Telemachus, was killed at Borderline after surviving Las Vegas.
“My son was in Las Vegas with a lot of his friends, and he came home. He didn’t come home last night,” she said. “I don’t want prayers; I don’t want thoughts; I want gun control, and I hope to God nobody else sends me any more prayers. I want gun control. No more guns.”
Telemachus Orfanos, 27, lived with his parents in Thousand Oaks and worked at a local Infiniti dealership. He was a veteran of the Navy.
“It’s a cruel thing to survive the worst mass shooting in the country in modern times, and then to be killed in another just a little more than a year later,” his father, Marc, said in an interview with The Post. “It defies logic.”
His son suffered PTSD from the shooting and had been in therapy, Marc Orfanos said.
“He felt fortunate but also horrified at what he had seen,” he said.
In Las Vegas, Telemachus Orfanos not only survived the massacre — but helped paramedics pull those who’d been injured by gunfire from danger.
“Tel easily saved hundreds of lives,” said Brendan Hoolihan, 21, who met Orfanos amid the mayhem at the Route 91 concert. The two young men were strangers that night who quickly became teammates, rescuing people from the field beneath Mandalay Bay and later assisting victims inside the Tropicana resort.
By the end of the night, they were covered in blood.
For the last year, Hoolihan and Orfanos developed a close friendship, talking on the phone once a month and attending other country concerts together. They’d merged friend groups and “picked each other up nonstop.”
On Thursday, Hoolihan drove several hours from his home in Santa Ana to attend a vigil at Thousand Oaks City Hall for the Borderline victims. Hoolihan wore a Route 91 T-shirt and choked up when spoke of his friendship with Orfanos.
“It’s insane the kind of bond you can have with someone instantly,” Hoolihan said, crying. “I consider him my brother.”
Though he had never met Orfanos’s mother, Hoolihan tracked down her number Thursday.
“I wanted to give her a call and tell her how much her son meant to me,” he said.
Isaac Stanley-Becker contributed reporting from Washington.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46150847
Thousand Oaks: Las Vegas shooting survivor among dead
Related Topics
Media caption"No more guns" - Susan Schmidt-Orfanos' son Telemachus, 27, survived a shooting in Las Vegas last year, but died in Wednesday's attack
A man who survived a mass shooting in Las Vegas last year was among those killed in Wednesday's attack in California, his family says.
Telemachus Orfanos, 27, died alongside 11 others when a man opened fire at the Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks, north-west of Los Angeles.
He escaped death last year when a gunman killed 58 people in Las Vegas.
A number of survivors of that shooting, the worst in modern US history, have said they were at the bar on Wednesday.
"My son was in Las Vegas with a lot of his friends and he came home. He didn't come home last night," his mother told ABC News.
"I don't want prayers, I don't want thoughts, I want gun control", she said.
"It's particularly ironic that after surviving the worst mass shooting in modern history, he went on to be killed in his hometown," his father told the Ventura County Star.
He served in Afghanistan from November 2010 to June 2011, officials say, and was found dead at the scene.
Who are the victims?
Media captionJason Coffman: "The last thing I said was 'Son, I love you.'"
Telemachus Orfanos was a graduate of Thousand Oaks High School and later joined the Navy, according to his Facebook page.
The Borderline Bar is popular with students and was hosting a line-dancing night when the attack happened.
It is close to a number of universities, one of which confirmed that a recent graduate had been killed.
Justin Meek, 23, was a keen musician. California Lutheran University president Chris Kimball said that he had "heroically saved lives".
Image copyright AFP Image caption A vigil was held to pay tribute to the victims of the shooting on Thursday
Other young people caught up in the attack include Cody Coffman, 22, and 18-year-old Alaina Housley.
Ventura Sheriff's Sergeant Ron Helus, who was due to retire next year, died in hospital after being shot several times.
How did the shooting happen?
Police say the suspect was dressed in black, and forced his way into the bar after shooting the bouncer.
He threw a smoke grenade before opening fire, witnesses say. Police say he used a legally owned .45 calibre Glock semi-automatic handgun.
But the weapon had an extended magazine, meaning it can carry more ammunition, which is illegal in California.
"It was a huge panic. Everyone got up. I was trampled," one witness told Fox News.
Media captionSurvivors of California shooting describe what they saw.
People escaped the bar by using chairs to break windows, while others reportedly sheltered inside the venue's toilets.
At least 10 people are known to have been wounded.
What else do we know?
Survivors of the Las Vegas shooting say they have used the bar as a place to meet up in recent months.
One survivor, Nicholas Champion, said a group of them were at the venue on Wednesday.
"It's the second time in about a year and a month that this has happened," he said in a local television interview. "It's a big thing for us. We're all a big family and unfortunately this family got hit twice."
"Borderline was our safe space," Brendan Kelly, who survived both attacks, told ABC News. "It was our our home for the probably 30 or 45 of us who are all from the greater Ventura County area who were in Vegas."
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption A wildfire has burned Thousand Oaks on Thursday night and throughout Friday
Media caption'How much more can this town endure?' Residents coping with the mass shooting are now fleeing a deadly wildfire
Meanwhile a quickly-moving wildfire has broken out only a few miles away from the crime scene.
At least 75 homes have been destroyed in Thousand Oaks by the so-called Woolsey Fire, and has led officials to order evacuation for 75,000 homes in Ventura and Los Angeles counties.
According to the website Gun Violence Archive, more than 12,000 people have been killed by firearms in the US so far this year, including about 3,000 people under the age of 18.
That number does not include an annual estimate of 22,000 suicides via firearms.
In the last two weeks alone, two people were shot dead by a man at a yoga studio in Florida, and another gunman opened fire on a synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing 11.
https://www.vox.com/2018/11/9/18079038/thousand-oaks-california-shooting-telemachus-orfanos
He survived the Las Vegas mass shooting. Then he died in the Thousand Oaks, California, shooting.
Telemachus Orfanos’s mother called for stronger gun laws after his death.
By German Lopez@germanrlopez[email protected] Nov 9, 2018, 11:30am EST
Share
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/62249489/Telemachus_Orfanos.0.jpg)
Telemachus Orfanos survived the Las Vegas mass shooting but died in the Thousand Oaks, California, shooting. Facebook
Telemachus Orfanos, 27, survived the Las Vegas mass shooting on October 2017, which killed 58 and injured hundreds more. A little more than a year later, Orfanos died in another mass shooting — at a bar in Thousand Oaks, California.
Orfanos was a military veteran who served in the US Navy from 2011 to 2014, according to Fox News. He moved in with his parents in California after leaving the Navy, and worked at a car dealership.
“I don’t want prayers. I don’t want thoughts,” Orfanos’s mother, Susan Schmidt-Orfanos, told reporters. “I want gun control. And I hope to God nobody else sends me any more prayers. I want gun control. No more guns.”
Orfanos’s father, Mark Orfanos, didn’t condemn the shooter, calling the shooter “as much of a victim as everybody else.”
“I’m not gonna vilify this kid because he’s got parents that are grieving, too,” the father said. “And I feel sorry for them as well. Until I find out particularly what the specifics are with this kid who did the shooting, I’m not gonna be vilifying him.”
What happened to Orfanos is, statistically, very unlikely. But the fact it can happen at all — that there are even two awful mass shootings within such a close time frame — shows how out of control these tragedies are in America
According to the Gun Violence Archive, there has been almost one mass shooting a day for the past few years. The organization defines a mass shooting as an event in which four or more people, excluding the shooter, are shot but not necessarily killed in a similar time and place.
By this definition, there have been 311 mass shootings in 2018, resulting in more than 310 deaths and at least 1,270 other injuries. There have been 313 days in 2018 so far.
In 2017, Gun Violence Archive documented 346 mass shootings. In 2016, 382. In 2015, 335. The number fluctuates from year to year, but it’s generally close to a mass shooting a day.
After these horrific events, politicians and pundits will latch onto all sorts of explanations for why these keep happening: It’s mental illness. It’s misogyny. It’s anti-Semitism. It’s some other form of extremism or hate.
In individual shootings, these all of course can play a role. But when you want to explain why America sees so many of these mass shootings in general, none of these factors in individual shootings give a satisfying answer. Only one thing does: America’s easy access to guns.
America does not have a monopoly on mental health issues, bigots, or extremists. What is unique about the US is that it makes it so easy for people with these issues to obtain a gun.
America’s gun problem
It comes down to two basic problems.
First, America has uniquely weak gun laws. Other developed nations at the very least require one or more background checks and almost always something more rigorous beyond that to get a gun, from specific training courses to rules for locking up firearms to more arduous licensing requirements to specific justifications, besides self-defense, for owning a gun.
In the US, even a background check isn’t a total requirement; the current federal law is riddled with loopholes and snared by poor enforcement, so there are many ways around even a basic background check. There are simply very few barriers, if any, to getting a gun in the US.
Second, the US has a ton of guns. It has far more than not just other developed nations, but any other country period. Estimated for 2017, the number of civilian-owned firearms in the US was 120.5 guns per 100 residents, meaning there were more firearms than people. The world’s second-ranked country was Yemen, a quasi-failed state torn by civil war, where there were 52.8 guns per 100 residents, according to an analysis from the Small Arms Survey.
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/11575915/Small_Arms_Survey_civilian_gun_ownership_by_country.png)
Small Arms Survey
Both of these factors come together to make it uniquely easy for someone with any violent intent to find a firearm, allowing them to carry out a horrific shooting.
This is borne out in the statistics. The US has nearly six times the gun homicide rate of Canada, more than seven times that of Sweden, and nearly 16 times that of Germany, according to United Nations data for 2012 compiled by the Guardian. (These gun deaths are a big reason America has a much higher overall homicide rate, which includes non-gun deaths, than other developed nations.)
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/8319829/gun_homicides_developed_countries.0.jpg)
Javier Zarracina/Vox
The research, compiled by the Harvard School of Public Health’s Injury Control Research Center, is also pretty clear: After controlling for variables such as socioeconomic factors and other crime, places with more guns have more gun deaths. Researchers have found this to be true not just with homicides, but also with suicides (which in recent years were around 60 percent of US gun deaths), domestic violence, and violence against police.
As a breakthrough analysis by UC Berkeley’s Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins in the 1990s found, it’s not even that the US has more crime than other developed countries. This chart, based on data from Jeffrey Swanson at Duke University, shows that the US is not an outlier when it comes to overall crime:
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/10328651/CRIME_15_COUNTRIES_US.jpg)
Instead, the US appears to have more lethal violence — and that’s driven in large part by the prevalence of guns.
“A series of specific comparisons of the death rates from property crime and assault in New York City and London show how enormous differences in death risk can be explained even while general patterns are similar,” Zimring and Hawkins wrote. “A preference for crimes of personal force and the willingness and ability to use guns in robbery make similar levels of property crime 54 times as deadly in New York City as in London.”
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/10325617/HOMICIDE_GUN_US.jpg)
This is in many ways intuitive: People of every country get into arguments and fights with friends, family, and peers. But in the US, it’s much more likely that someone will get angry at an argument and be able to pull out a gun and kill someone.
Researchers have found that stricter gun laws could help. A 2016 review of 130 studies in 10 countries, published in Epidemiologic Reviews, found that new legal restrictions on owning and purchasing guns tended to be followed by a drop in gun violence — a strong indicator that restricting access to guns can save lives. A review of the US evidence by RAND also linked some gun control measures, including background checks, to reduced injuries and deaths.
That doesn’t mean that bigots and extremists will never be able to
carry out a shooting in places with strict gun laws. Even the strictest gun laws can’t prevent every shooting.
And guns are not the only contributor to violence. Other factors include, for example, poverty, urbanization, alcohol consumption, and the strength of criminal justice systems. But when researchers control for other confounding variables, they have found time and time again that America’s loose access to guns is a major reason the US is so much worse in terms of gun violence than its developed peers.
So America, with its lax laws and abundance of firearms, makes it uniquely easy for people to commit massacres. Until the US confronts that issue, it will continue seeing more gun deaths than the rest of the developed world — and see more survivors escape one shooting only to die in another.
For more on America’s gun problem, read Vox’s explainer.
They survived Las Vegas. Then came a second mass shooting.
David Anderson, 23, a survivor of the mass shootings at Borderline Bar & Grill and the Route 91 music festival in Las Vegas, sits outside his home. (Philip Cheung for The Washington Post)
By Katie Zezima and
Katie Mettler
November 9 at 3:13 AM
THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. — When the first shots were fired at Borderline Bar & Grill, David Anderson immediately knew he was in the middle of a mass shooting. He had lived through one last year.
Anderson survived the attack at a country music festival in Las Vegas in October 2017 that left 58 people dead. On Wednesday, he again survived a gunman indiscriminately firing at people enjoying country music, this time at college night at a well-loved bar. Twelve people were killed.
Numerous Borderline regulars attended, and survived, the Las Vegas shooting.
“Vegas Strong” shirts were often spotted at the bar. Patrons gathered here for healing and community. The were a “family,” as Anderson described it.
Now, 13 months later, many again fled the gunshots and chaos of a mass shooting, with memories of the first terrifying experience guiding their actions in another scene of carnage.
“I was at the Las Vegas Route 91 mass shooting, as well as probably 50 or 60 others who were in there at the same time as me,” Nicholas Champion said in a television interview. “We’re all a big family, and unfortunately this family got hit twice.”
[Once again, Nashville faces horrific mass shooting involving country music fans]
Molly Maurer shared her feelings on Facebook about being a two-time survivor:
“I can’t believe I’m saying this again. I’m alive and home safe,” she wrote.
In Las Vegas, Anderson stood near the stage, on the same side of the field as the Mandalay Bay hotel, where a gunman fired shots out of the windows of his suite. Anderson saw a man next to him get shot and dove on top of his then-girlfriend to shield her. When the gunman stopped shooting, Anderson and his group of friends ran out an exit and two miles to their hotel.
On Wednesday, he stood near the bar facing the door — something he now does all the time in public, a learned behavior from the Las Vegas shooting.
He saw the gunman walk in, take a military-like stance and fire. He ducked behind the bar and, when the gunman briefly stopped shooting, ran outside with his friend.
“It was just a surreal shock, the shock factor,” he said.
When Megan Greene came home after surviving Route 91, she could not stand being in the dark. She scratched her legs raw from the anxiety.
Days later, she started participating in a weekly ritual: college night at Borderline. She was grateful to be around so many who were close to her, and many were fellow survivors. But she was also anxious; she ran into a corner, curled up in a ball and cried during a song where people clapped.
She has since moved from California, but Greene said in a text message Thursday that the shooting at the bar she frequented was “too surreal.”
Carl Edgar told the Los Angeles Times that he is a regular at the bar and knew about 20 people inside on Wednesday.
“A lot of my friends survived Route 91,” Edgar said. “If they survived that, they will survive this.”
Anderson said the Las Vegas shooting made him much more aware of his surroundings and people who might seem suspicious.
“It did change me a little bit,” he said.
It also made him more resolute in his belief that an armed, well-trained shooter could make a difference in situations like this. Anderson grew up with guns and is an avid hunter. He believes that guns, if used responsibly, could help.
“If the right people with the right training were there, it could make a difference,” he said.
[Invisible wounds of Las Vegas shooting could affect tens of thousands]
Others felt differently. Susan Orfanos said in a television interview that her son, Telemachus, was killed at Borderline after surviving Las Vegas.
“My son was in Las Vegas with a lot of his friends, and he came home. He didn’t come home last night,” she said. “I don’t want prayers; I don’t want thoughts; I want gun control, and I hope to God nobody else sends me any more prayers. I want gun control. No more guns.”
Telemachus Orfanos, 27, lived with his parents in Thousand Oaks and worked at a local Infiniti dealership. He was a veteran of the Navy.
“It’s a cruel thing to survive the worst mass shooting in the country in modern times, and then to be killed in another just a little more than a year later,” his father, Marc, said in an interview with The Post. “It defies logic.”
His son suffered PTSD from the shooting and had been in therapy, Marc Orfanos said.
“He felt fortunate but also horrified at what he had seen,” he said.
In Las Vegas, Telemachus Orfanos not only survived the massacre — but helped paramedics pull those who’d been injured by gunfire from danger.
“Tel easily saved hundreds of lives,” said Brendan Hoolihan, 21, who met Orfanos amid the mayhem at the Route 91 concert. The two young men were strangers that night who quickly became teammates, rescuing people from the field beneath Mandalay Bay and later assisting victims inside the Tropicana resort.
By the end of the night, they were covered in blood.
For the last year, Hoolihan and Orfanos developed a close friendship, talking on the phone once a month and attending other country concerts together. They’d merged friend groups and “picked each other up nonstop.”
On Thursday, Hoolihan drove several hours from his home in Santa Ana to attend a vigil at Thousand Oaks City Hall for the Borderline victims. Hoolihan wore a Route 91 T-shirt and choked up when spoke of his friendship with Orfanos.
“It’s insane the kind of bond you can have with someone instantly,” Hoolihan said, crying. “I consider him my brother.”
Though he had never met Orfanos’s mother, Hoolihan tracked down her number Thursday.
“I wanted to give her a call and tell her how much her son meant to me,” he said.
Isaac Stanley-Becker contributed reporting from Washington.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46150847
Thousand Oaks: Las Vegas shooting survivor among dead
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Media caption"No more guns" - Susan Schmidt-Orfanos' son Telemachus, 27, survived a shooting in Las Vegas last year, but died in Wednesday's attack
A man who survived a mass shooting in Las Vegas last year was among those killed in Wednesday's attack in California, his family says.
Telemachus Orfanos, 27, died alongside 11 others when a man opened fire at the Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks, north-west of Los Angeles.
He escaped death last year when a gunman killed 58 people in Las Vegas.
A number of survivors of that shooting, the worst in modern US history, have said they were at the bar on Wednesday.
"My son was in Las Vegas with a lot of his friends and he came home. He didn't come home last night," his mother told ABC News.
"I don't want prayers, I don't want thoughts, I want gun control", she said.
"It's particularly ironic that after surviving the worst mass shooting in modern history, he went on to be killed in his hometown," his father told the Ventura County Star.
- Is there a link between mass shootings and mental illness?
- Why are US mass shootings getting more deadly?
- America's gun culture in 10 charts
He served in Afghanistan from November 2010 to June 2011, officials say, and was found dead at the scene.
Who are the victims?
Media captionJason Coffman: "The last thing I said was 'Son, I love you.'"
Telemachus Orfanos was a graduate of Thousand Oaks High School and later joined the Navy, according to his Facebook page.
The Borderline Bar is popular with students and was hosting a line-dancing night when the attack happened.
It is close to a number of universities, one of which confirmed that a recent graduate had been killed.
Justin Meek, 23, was a keen musician. California Lutheran University president Chris Kimball said that he had "heroically saved lives".
Image copyright AFP Image caption A vigil was held to pay tribute to the victims of the shooting on Thursday
Other young people caught up in the attack include Cody Coffman, 22, and 18-year-old Alaina Housley.
Ventura Sheriff's Sergeant Ron Helus, who was due to retire next year, died in hospital after being shot several times.
How did the shooting happen?
Police say the suspect was dressed in black, and forced his way into the bar after shooting the bouncer.
He threw a smoke grenade before opening fire, witnesses say. Police say he used a legally owned .45 calibre Glock semi-automatic handgun.
But the weapon had an extended magazine, meaning it can carry more ammunition, which is illegal in California.
"It was a huge panic. Everyone got up. I was trampled," one witness told Fox News.
Media captionSurvivors of California shooting describe what they saw.
People escaped the bar by using chairs to break windows, while others reportedly sheltered inside the venue's toilets.
At least 10 people are known to have been wounded.
What else do we know?
Survivors of the Las Vegas shooting say they have used the bar as a place to meet up in recent months.
One survivor, Nicholas Champion, said a group of them were at the venue on Wednesday.
"It's the second time in about a year and a month that this has happened," he said in a local television interview. "It's a big thing for us. We're all a big family and unfortunately this family got hit twice."
"Borderline was our safe space," Brendan Kelly, who survived both attacks, told ABC News. "It was our our home for the probably 30 or 45 of us who are all from the greater Ventura County area who were in Vegas."
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption A wildfire has burned Thousand Oaks on Thursday night and throughout Friday
Media caption'How much more can this town endure?' Residents coping with the mass shooting are now fleeing a deadly wildfire
Meanwhile a quickly-moving wildfire has broken out only a few miles away from the crime scene.
At least 75 homes have been destroyed in Thousand Oaks by the so-called Woolsey Fire, and has led officials to order evacuation for 75,000 homes in Ventura and Los Angeles counties.
According to the website Gun Violence Archive, more than 12,000 people have been killed by firearms in the US so far this year, including about 3,000 people under the age of 18.
That number does not include an annual estimate of 22,000 suicides via firearms.
In the last two weeks alone, two people were shot dead by a man at a yoga studio in Florida, and another gunman opened fire on a synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing 11.
https://www.vox.com/2018/11/9/18079038/thousand-oaks-california-shooting-telemachus-orfanos
He survived the Las Vegas mass shooting. Then he died in the Thousand Oaks, California, shooting.
Telemachus Orfanos’s mother called for stronger gun laws after his death.
By German Lopez@germanrlopez[email protected] Nov 9, 2018, 11:30am EST
Share
Telemachus Orfanos, 27, survived the Las Vegas mass shooting on October 2017, which killed 58 and injured hundreds more. A little more than a year later, Orfanos died in another mass shooting — at a bar in Thousand Oaks, California.
Orfanos was a military veteran who served in the US Navy from 2011 to 2014, according to Fox News. He moved in with his parents in California after leaving the Navy, and worked at a car dealership.
“I don’t want prayers. I don’t want thoughts,” Orfanos’s mother, Susan Schmidt-Orfanos, told reporters. “I want gun control. And I hope to God nobody else sends me any more prayers. I want gun control. No more guns.”
Orfanos’s father, Mark Orfanos, didn’t condemn the shooter, calling the shooter “as much of a victim as everybody else.”
“I’m not gonna vilify this kid because he’s got parents that are grieving, too,” the father said. “And I feel sorry for them as well. Until I find out particularly what the specifics are with this kid who did the shooting, I’m not gonna be vilifying him.”
What happened to Orfanos is, statistically, very unlikely. But the fact it can happen at all — that there are even two awful mass shootings within such a close time frame — shows how out of control these tragedies are in America
According to the Gun Violence Archive, there has been almost one mass shooting a day for the past few years. The organization defines a mass shooting as an event in which four or more people, excluding the shooter, are shot but not necessarily killed in a similar time and place.
By this definition, there have been 311 mass shootings in 2018, resulting in more than 310 deaths and at least 1,270 other injuries. There have been 313 days in 2018 so far.
In 2017, Gun Violence Archive documented 346 mass shootings. In 2016, 382. In 2015, 335. The number fluctuates from year to year, but it’s generally close to a mass shooting a day.
After these horrific events, politicians and pundits will latch onto all sorts of explanations for why these keep happening: It’s mental illness. It’s misogyny. It’s anti-Semitism. It’s some other form of extremism or hate.
In individual shootings, these all of course can play a role. But when you want to explain why America sees so many of these mass shootings in general, none of these factors in individual shootings give a satisfying answer. Only one thing does: America’s easy access to guns.
America does not have a monopoly on mental health issues, bigots, or extremists. What is unique about the US is that it makes it so easy for people with these issues to obtain a gun.
America’s gun problem
It comes down to two basic problems.
First, America has uniquely weak gun laws. Other developed nations at the very least require one or more background checks and almost always something more rigorous beyond that to get a gun, from specific training courses to rules for locking up firearms to more arduous licensing requirements to specific justifications, besides self-defense, for owning a gun.
In the US, even a background check isn’t a total requirement; the current federal law is riddled with loopholes and snared by poor enforcement, so there are many ways around even a basic background check. There are simply very few barriers, if any, to getting a gun in the US.
Second, the US has a ton of guns. It has far more than not just other developed nations, but any other country period. Estimated for 2017, the number of civilian-owned firearms in the US was 120.5 guns per 100 residents, meaning there were more firearms than people. The world’s second-ranked country was Yemen, a quasi-failed state torn by civil war, where there were 52.8 guns per 100 residents, according to an analysis from the Small Arms Survey.
Both of these factors come together to make it uniquely easy for someone with any violent intent to find a firearm, allowing them to carry out a horrific shooting.
This is borne out in the statistics. The US has nearly six times the gun homicide rate of Canada, more than seven times that of Sweden, and nearly 16 times that of Germany, according to United Nations data for 2012 compiled by the Guardian. (These gun deaths are a big reason America has a much higher overall homicide rate, which includes non-gun deaths, than other developed nations.)
The research, compiled by the Harvard School of Public Health’s Injury Control Research Center, is also pretty clear: After controlling for variables such as socioeconomic factors and other crime, places with more guns have more gun deaths. Researchers have found this to be true not just with homicides, but also with suicides (which in recent years were around 60 percent of US gun deaths), domestic violence, and violence against police.
As a breakthrough analysis by UC Berkeley’s Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins in the 1990s found, it’s not even that the US has more crime than other developed countries. This chart, based on data from Jeffrey Swanson at Duke University, shows that the US is not an outlier when it comes to overall crime:
Instead, the US appears to have more lethal violence — and that’s driven in large part by the prevalence of guns.
“A series of specific comparisons of the death rates from property crime and assault in New York City and London show how enormous differences in death risk can be explained even while general patterns are similar,” Zimring and Hawkins wrote. “A preference for crimes of personal force and the willingness and ability to use guns in robbery make similar levels of property crime 54 times as deadly in New York City as in London.”
This is in many ways intuitive: People of every country get into arguments and fights with friends, family, and peers. But in the US, it’s much more likely that someone will get angry at an argument and be able to pull out a gun and kill someone.
Researchers have found that stricter gun laws could help. A 2016 review of 130 studies in 10 countries, published in Epidemiologic Reviews, found that new legal restrictions on owning and purchasing guns tended to be followed by a drop in gun violence — a strong indicator that restricting access to guns can save lives. A review of the US evidence by RAND also linked some gun control measures, including background checks, to reduced injuries and deaths.
That doesn’t mean that bigots and extremists will never be able to
carry out a shooting in places with strict gun laws. Even the strictest gun laws can’t prevent every shooting.
And guns are not the only contributor to violence. Other factors include, for example, poverty, urbanization, alcohol consumption, and the strength of criminal justice systems. But when researchers control for other confounding variables, they have found time and time again that America’s loose access to guns is a major reason the US is so much worse in terms of gun violence than its developed peers.
So America, with its lax laws and abundance of firearms, makes it uniquely easy for people to commit massacres. Until the US confronts that issue, it will continue seeing more gun deaths than the rest of the developed world — and see more survivors escape one shooting only to die in another.
For more on America’s gun problem, read Vox’s explainer.
