Obama Visits Families of Oregon Shooting Victims Hours After Latest School Shooting

Less than 24 hours after the latest fatal school shooting on a US college campus, President Barack Obama arrived in Roseburg, Oregon on Friday to discuss the last school shooting that took place at a community college there eight days ago.

Obama is meeting privately with the families of victims of last week's shooting attack at Umpqua Community College. The gunman killed nine people before shooting himself during a firefight with police using one of the six guns he used to carry out the attack. Nine more people were injured in the incident.

Early Friday morning, Arizona officials reported another fatal shooting at Northern Arizona University's Flagstaff campus. One person died and at least three others were injured in the attack. The suspected shooter has been detained.

Later Friday, another shooting occurred at Texas Southern University that left at least one person dead.

Related: Gunman Among At Least 10 Dead in Oregon Shooting

The incident took place at 11:30 am at a student apartment complex near the university in southeast Houston, according to the Houston Police Department. The campus was quickly put under lockdown as the police searched for the suspect.

TSU spokesperson Eva Pickens said classes were canceled today.

Today's shootings were the 46th and 47th school shootings in 2015, according to an organization that tracks gun violence, Everytown for Gun Safety.

Ahead of Obama's arrival to Oregon, the White House said on Friday that the Administration is considering taking executive action on gun control to put a stop to more mass shootings. The order would create more stringent background checks for people buying weapons from gun dealers who sell large quantities of guns. That number is yet to be defined, but the White House is considering the sale of 50 or 100 guns a year as a possible limit, sources told NBC News.

"As I said last night, this will not change until the politics change and the behavior of elected officials changes," Obama said on Friday. "I will talk about this on a regular basis and I will politicize this.

At a press conference following the Oregon attack, Obama said that mass shootings and "carnage" have become "routine" and that Americans are becoming "numb to this" phenomenon.

"It cannot be this easy for somebody who wants to inflict harm on other people to get his or her hands on a gun," he said.

"It's fair to say that anyone who does this has a sickness in their minds, regardless of what they think their motivations may be," Obama added. "But we are not the only country on earth who has people with mental illnesses or who want to do harm to other people. We are the only country on Earth who sees these mass shootings every few months."

Related: Oregon Authorities Say Campus Gunman Died by Suicide After Police Shootout

Although some local lawmakers and shooting victims welcomed the president's meeting Friday, some members of the community have protested the visit, accusing Obama of using the incident as a way to leverage his agenda on gun control.

Michelle Finn, who lives near Roseburg and attended Umpqua Community Colleg, told the Oregonian newspaper that many locals are not happy with Obama's visit.

"He already says he's going to politicize this — he's already going to push his agenda," Finn said. "And if he knew Roseburg and Douglas County, he'd know these are the wrong people to be doing that with."

Stacy Bolan, a mother of one of the victims who survived the shooting, told Fox News, "On principle, I find that I am in disagreement with his policies on gun control, and therefore, we will not be attending the visit."

Meanwhile, an increasing number of state legislatures have introduced laws to allow open-carry of firearms on campuses. In the past two years, dozens of states have introduced legislation allowing guns on campuses in some manner. Eight states currently allow concealed weapons on public college campuses, including Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Oregon, Texas, Utah, and Wisconsin.

Guns are banned on the majority of campuses in the US, but the two most recent school shootings in Arizona and Oregon demonstrate that making schools "gun-free zones" has little effect on school shootings. Concealed carry is allowed in both Arizona and Oregon, although it was prohibited on both campuses where the shootings took place.

Related: Everyone Responded to the Latest Mass Shooting Exactly as You'd Expect

Mass shootings — defined as an incident in which four or more people were killed with a firearm — are on the rise. A 2013 report by the FBI showed that the average number of mass shootings in the US increased from 6.4 shootings per year between 2000 and 2006 to more than an average of 16 annual shootings in the last 7 years of the study. Research from Harvard University also shows that mass shootings have tripled between 2011 and 2014.

According to a recent study, when a mass shooting occurs, the likelihood of another one to happen is significantly higher in the following two weeks. The study said that school shootings occur on average about once a month, and that mass shootings occur every two weeks in the US.

The first time Obama attempted to pass the measures he is now considering taking executive action on was in 2012, after a gunman massacred 20 children and six adults at the Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. The proposal was blocked by Congress.

There have been 144 mass shootings since the Newtown massacre, according to Everytown.

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