Oregon shooting: Sheriff withholds gunman's name, refuses to immortalise him

The Oregon sheriff investigating the mass shooting that killed nine people at a U.S. college campus took the unusual step of refusing to publicly identify the suspect, insisting on Friday he would do nothing to glorify the gunman or his cause.

A day after the shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, local and federal investigators struggled to determine a motive. The gunman, described as shy and socially awkward by neighbours, also wounded seven people in the rampage and died in an exchange of gunfire with police. Law enforcement sources confirmed reports identifying the suspect as Chris Harper-Mercer, 26, who lived with his mother in nearby Winchester, about 273 km south of Portland.

In a blog post linked to Harper-Mercer, he said he relished the headlines garnered by Vester Flanagan, who was largely unknown before he shot dead two TV journalists during a live broadcast in Virginia in August and then killed himself. "Seems the more people you kill, the more you're in the limelight," the post read.

With the investigation entering a second day, authorities in Oregon had yet to release any information about the suspect, including his identity.

In a highly unusual step, Douglas County Sheriff John Hanlin vowed never to utter the gunman's name and said he would let the coroner identify the gunman. "I don't want to glorify his name. I don't want to glorify his cause," Hanlin, an outspoken defender of gun ownership, told CNN on Friday. "You won't hear his name from me or this investigation."

Still, little was clear about what may have pushed Harper-Mercer to open fire at the college.

A man identifying himself as the gunman's father Ian Mercer told reporters outside his home in Los Angeles on Thursday night, "It's been a devastating day, devastating for me and my family."

At some point of his life, Harper-Mercer appears to have been sympathetic to the Irish Republican Army, a militant group that waged a violent campaign to drive the British from Northern Ireland. On an undated Myspace page, he posted photos of masked IRA gunmen carrying assault rifles. Harper-Mercer was born in the United Kingdom and arrived in the United States as a young boy, his stepsister Carmen Nesnick told CBS Los Angeles.

Students ordered to state their religion 

The gunman stormed into a classroom at the college in the former timber town, shot a professor at point-blank range, then ordered cowering students to stand up and state their religion before he shot them one by one, according to survivors' accounts.

The violence, the latest in a series of high-profile mass killings across the country, has fueled demands for stricter gun control in the United States.

Not counting Thursday's incident, 293 US mass shootings have been reported this year, according to the Mass Shooting Tracker website, a crowd-sourced database kept by anti-gun activists that logs events in which four or more people are shot.

Hours after Thursday's shooting, a visibly angry President Barack Obama urged Americans to press their elected leaders to enact tougher firearms safety laws. "Somehow this has become routine. The reporting is routine. My response here, at this podium, ends up being routine," he said. "We've become numb to this."

Gun control advocates say easy access to firearms is a major factor in the shooting epidemic, while the National Rifle Association and other pro-gun advocates say the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees Americans the right to bear arms.

Oregon Governor Kate Brown declined in television interviews on Friday morning to discuss gun control, as did the sheriff, and both said it was a time for healing the community.

A month after the December 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, Hanlin wrote a sharply worded letter to Vice President Joe Biden saying he would never enforce a federal law that violates the Constitution. "Gun control is NOT the answer to preventing heinous crimes like school shootings," Hanlin wrote in the letter, dated Jan. 15, 2013.

Read: Oregon shooter came from California, described as shy and skittish

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