The Justice Department Continues to Roll Back Civil Rights Protections 20NOV17

AG jeff sessions, not something that rolls off the tongue, more likely to make you throw up a little bit in your mouth whenever you say it or even think it. How can he expect to be respected as AG when he deliberately lied during his US Senate confirmation hearings? Still, for the neo-nazi fascist pigs in the drumpf/trump-pence administration he is doing his best to follow the example of hitler's first minister of justice, franz gurtner, who coordinated jurisprudence in the third reich. gurtner provided official sanction and legal grounds for a series of actions under the hitler administration, this article from the ACLU shows how sessions is doing the same for NOT MY pres drumpf/trump and NOT MY vp pence. 

The Justice Department Continues to Roll Back Civil Rights Protections

By Jesselyn McCurdy, ACLU Washington Legislative Office

NOVEMBER 20, 2017 | 3:45 PM

On Friday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions strongly hinted that he isn’t done trying to roll back the civil rights gains made during the Obama administration.

In a speech before the conservative Federalist Society's National Lawyers Convention, Sessions described an internal Justice Department memo he signed prohibiting his department from issuing “improper” guidance documents. According to the document, “Effective immediately, Department components may not issue guidance documents that purport to create rights or obligations binding on persons or entities outside the Executive Branch (including state, local, and tribal governments). The document also stated the Justice Department will no longer issue guidance that “effectively bind private parties without undergoing the rulemaking process.”

Behind this bureaucratic language is an attack on the civil rights legacy of the Obama-era Justice Department. Throughout the Obama administration, the Department of Justice worked with state and local governments to protect civil rights and liberties by suggesting practical ways, for example, to eliminate gender bias in policing, legally enforce fines and fees, and dismantle the school to prison pipeline. Sessions has indicated that he may “repeal and replace” these policies, which will roll back important efforts to ensure equal protection for all under the law.

Sessions’ repudiation of the Obama-era guidances isn’t shocking. After his confirmation, Sessions quickly rescinded Obama-era guidances on issues such as federal contracts with private prisons, federal prosecutors abusing their discretion in drug cases, and treatment of transgender students. Put simply: Expect more rescissions of Obama-era guidance.

Here are the ones we believe are in Sessions’ crosshairs.

Racial profiling

The ACLU worked for many years with the Obama administration to issue new guidance to curb racial profiling by law enforcement agencies. That guidance, announced in 2014, addressed the use of other characteristics as well, including national origin, gender, gender identity, religion, and sexual orientation. Although it was a step in right direction, it did not fully respond to the crisis of racial profiling in America. Now, even this modest guidance is in jeopardy.

Gender-biased policing

With advocacy from the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project, the Obama administration made significant strides in helping state and local law enforcement agencies address gender bias in their response to sexual assault and domestic violence. A Justice Department guidance issued in 2015 highlighted the need for clear policies, robust training, and responsive accountability systems so that women and men will not end up like our client Jessica Lenahan.

Jessica’s estranged husband, Simon Gonzales, kidnapped their three daughters from the front yard in Castle Rock, Colorado, in violation of a domestic violence order of protection. Jessica called and met with the police numerous times in the immediate hours after the kidnapping, but they told her to call back later if the children hadn’t come home. Early the next morning, Simon drove up to the police station and started shooting. The police fired back, killing him and later discovered Jessica’ three daughters dead in the cab of his truck.

This work to advise local police departments on how to improve domestic violence investigations, treatment of survivors, and accountability for officers who commit domestic violence and sexual assault may no longer be supported by Sessions’ Justice Department.

Fines and fees

After the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the Justice Department launched a six-month investigation and found a “pattern or practice” of police misconduct in Ferguson that violated the First, Fourth, and 14th Amendments of the Constitution and federal law. The report concluded that Ferguson police engage in racially biased policing, regularly targeting and harassing African-Americans.

The report also found that the Ferguson municipal government prioritized city revenue over public safety. Too often citations for minor traffic offenses in Ferguson snowballed into jail time if people missed court dates or didn’t pay fines. African-American residents paid the heaviest price in this debtors’ prisons scheme.

For one African-American resident, a $151 parking ticket turned into six days in jail and a $1,091 fine. In 2013, over 9,000 arrest warrants were issued in Ferguson for parking infractions, traffic tickets, or housing code violations. All told, the city collected nearly $2.5 million in revenue from fines and fees.

In response to these findings, the department issued a “Dear Colleague” letter in 2016 to state and local courts to ensure that fines and fees were not being enforced illegally. The Justice Department’s work on the issue of illegal enforcement of fines and fees is now in danger of reversal under the Trump administration.

School discipline

In 2014, the Justice Department and the Department of Education issued very detailed guidance to help states, school districts and schools develop practices and strategies to improve school environments. Each year, significant numbers of students are suspended and expelled for minor infractions of school rules. Students of color and with disabilities are disproportionately subject to school suspensions. This guidance gave schools resources to create safe and positive school settings. Now this guidance may also be in jeopardy.

Sessions’ memo is nothing less than an agenda to wipe out progress made in recent years in protecting the rights of people of color, those with disabilities, and women who are survivors of domestic violence among others. We can’t let that happen with these hard-earned improvements.

Jeff Sessions Cracks Down on Racism Against White People: The Daily Show

web17-SessionsDOJ-1160x768.jpg

Texas Shooter's History Raises Questions About Mental Health And Mass Murder & I’m a Psychiatrist. Making Gun Violence About Mental Health Is a Crazy Idea. &Trump Signs Bill Revoking Obama-Era Gun Checks for People With Mental Illnesses 7&9NOV&28FEB17

NOT MY pres drumpf's/trump's comments blaming mental illness for the mass shooting in Texas is amazing because one of his first actions as NOT MY pres was to"repeal an Obama administration rule that blocked gun sales to some people with mental health diagnosis". Those who continue to support and vote for the politicians who have been bought by the nra are as responsible as the murderers who commit these heinous crimes. One can only hope they have the courage to accept the responsibility for their actions if their families become victims of gun violence. From NPR, NBC News and Politico......

Texas Shooter's History Raises Questions About Mental Health And Mass Murder

November 7, 20176:17 PM ET

Heard on All Things Considered

ALISON KODJAK

Twitter

Devin Kelley, the man we now know killed more than two dozen people at a Texas church on Sunday, escaped a mental health facility before the Air Force could try him on charges that he beat his wife and baby stepson back in 2012.

And President Trump, like many people before him, is pointing to mental health — not guns — as the cause of the church massacre.

"Mental health is your problem here. This was a very, based on preliminary reports, this was a very deranged individual, a lot of problems over a long period of time. We have a lot of mental health problems in our country, as do other countries," he said in a news conference in Japan on Monday.

SHOTS - HEALTH NEWS

Shooting Unfairly Links Violence With Mental Illness — Again

And yet the statistics don't bear this out. Yes, some people with mental illness become mass shooters but most people with mental health problems — which is estimated to be up to 18 percent of adults, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation — do not.

All Things Considered host Kelly McEvers talked with NPR health policy correspondent Alison Kodjak about the Trump administration's record on mental health care.

McEvers: So I want to start first with a fact check on what President Trump said — and other politicians too — that there's a direct link between gun violence and mental health. What do the experts say?

Actually, most mental health professionals would dispute that, says Kodjak.

In fact, "there is no real connection between an individual with a mental health diagnosis and mass shootings. That connection according to all experts doesn't exist," says Bethany Lilly of the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law.

"Having all of our attention focused on mental illness is not particularly helpful," Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research in Baltimore, Md., told NPR Monday.

An issue brief from the Bazelon Center, written back in 2013 after the Newtown, Conn., massacre, says it's unfair to tie the two. "We know how to enable individuals with significant psychiatric disabilities to succeed," the paper says. It says services such as supported employment and housing, are very effective at keeping people with mental illness out of emergency rooms, psychiatric hospitals and jails.

"Affording people with serious mental illnesses the services they need is a critical goal, but it is not a solution to gun violence," the report says.

That's not to say that people who commit mass shooting never suffer from mental health issues, Kodjak points out, in Texas and in other shootings.

But research shows that people who suffer from mental health issues such as bipolar disorder or anxiety are no more likely than the average person to become violent. And people with mental illness are ten times more likely to be victims of violent crime, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

McEvers: So what about the record of this White House on mental health?

One of the first thing President Trump did after taking office was to repeal an Obama administration rule that blocked gun sales to some people with mental health diagnoses.

As far as mental health care goes — the president's record isn't very strong if you measure it by where he puts federal money, Kodjak says.

He supports repealing the affordable Affordable Care Act, which for the first time required insurance companies to cover mental health care. The law also expanded that coverage to millions of people who didn't have it before.

McEvers: So a repeal of Obamacare could reduce access to mental health care. What other policies are being considered that might affect those who need mental health services?

The biggest is the proposed cuts to Medicaid that have been in all the GOP health care bills. They would reducing future Medicaid spending by hundreds of billions of dollars.

Today Medicaid pays for about 27 percent of mental health services, according to Lilly of the Bazelon Center, so cutting the program that much is likely to take money away from mental health care for the poor, Kodjak says.

I’m a Psychiatrist. Making Gun Violence About Mental Health Is a Crazy Idea.

First, the policy solutions don't work. And mentioning the link is becoming a crutch for politicians who refuse to do their jobs.

By JONATHAN M. METZL

 

November 09, 2017

Before the initial shock wore off in the aftermath of yet another horrific American mass shooting—before we knew about the extent of the injury and death, or the events that transpired or the biography and motives of yet another angry white male armed with a semi-automatic rifle and a grudge—before we really knew anything, President Donald Trump jumped into the fray with a diagnosis. “Mental health is your problem here,” Trump opined from Tokyo in his first comments after 26 people died when a gunman opened fire on a church service in Sutherland Springs, Texas. “This isn’t a guns situation,” he said. “This is a mental health problem at the highest level.”

Respectfully, Mr. President: It’s not that easy. As a psychiatrist who’s taken a hard look at the connection between mental health and gun violence, I’ve seen where this conversation leads, which usually involves trying to prevent “mentally ill” people from buying guns and involving mental health practitioners in that effort. I’ve also seen mental health invoked as an argument against gun control, because who can stop a crazy person from killing people anyway?

What I haven’t seen is a serious attempt to grapple with just how complex and fraught it is to come up with a policy that works. For example, there’s accumulating evidence that psychiatrists can’t predict violence from their patients. How are we supposed to intuit when someone with, say, severe depression is capable of mass murder? More broadly, I think I speak on behalf of many experts on mental health when I say I wish politicians and other public figures would stop using mental illness as a shield against talking about the complex social issues related to gun violence—mass shootings and also the everyday gun violence to which we’ve become accustomed—in America.

The mental health claim comes from both ends of the political spectrum. National Rifle Association President Wayne LaPierre faulted “delusional killers” for gun violence in the United States immediately after the school shooting at Sandy Hook, while calling for a “national registry” of persons with mental illness. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo told reporters after the Sandy Hook school shooting, “People who have mental health issues should not have guns.” Cuomo backed a bill in the New York Senate that would have required mental health professionals to report “dangerous patients” to local officials. But defining a “dangerous patient” is a lot harder than it might seem.

Assailants in many high-profile U.S. mass shootings do have psychiatric histories. Alleged Texas shooter Devin Kelley once escaped from a mental health facility. James Holmes “was seeing a psychiatrist specializing in schizophrenia” before he opened fire in a crowded movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. Jared Loughner, Adam Lanza, Isla Vista, California, shooter Elliot Rodger—all of these shooters, too, had histories suggestive of mental illness. In hindsight, these people should not have had access to weapons, and one would hope that a functioning system of background checks or registries might have raised more red flags.

But there are reasons why we psychiatrists so rarely endorse the simplistic “mental health problems cause mass shootings” argument, or its logical policy extension: that our mental health expertise should therefore be able to predict gun crime before it happens, and that psychiatrists should be a part of some sweeping dragnet to catch potential shooters or mass killers.

First, and perhaps most important, very little evidence supports the notion that mental illness in and of itself causes assaults on other people, let alone gun crimes or mass shootings. This makes sense when you think about it. No current psychiatric diagnosis manifests itself in core symptoms that include aggression toward others, and many mental illnesses in fact produce the opposite effect. Schizophrenia, for instance, is frequently marked by what are called negative symptoms, such as apathy and social withdrawal. Depression often produces low mood and low energy—sufferers fail to find enjoyment in things, and frequently just stay home. In this sense, many of the most common mental illnesses cause patients to withdraw from society, rather than violently attack it.

These kinds of symptoms help explain why national surveys of everyday U.S. gun violence frequently show persons diagnosed with mental illness vastly under-represented as perpetrators when compared with a far more volatile population: the sane.

If there were a Propensity to Mass Violence disease, perhaps it would make a little more sense to involve psychiatrists in identifying potential mass murderers. But absent a formal means of assessing predictive violence, such as a diagnosis, mental health practitioners are often left to trust the power of their observations when asked to gauge which one of the thousands of patients they see might go on to commit a violent act such as a mass shooting. And, unfortunately, we’re not that great at it. As gun expert Jeffrey Swanson succinctly puts it when summarizing a great deal of research, “psychiatrists using clinical judgment are not much better than chance at predicting which individual patients will do something violent and which will not.” Tragically, such knowledge is often gained only after the fact. And programs that attempt to force psychiatrists to report potential shooters—such as the one supported by Governor Cuomo in New York and similar programs in other states—often result in dramatic over-reporting of psychiatric patients, who are then added to government surveillance lists.

This is not to suggest that mental health practitioners are completely in the dark about risk factors for gun violence or mass shootings. But more often than not, a number of extra-clinical, societal factors are far more predictive of gun violence than is mental illness alone. Substance use, male gender, past histories of violence including domestic abuse, social networks and the availability of firearms all correlate with nonsuicide gun violence more strongly than does psychiatric diagnosis; and of course, these factors can affect all populations, not just psychiatric ones. Gun violence is often a problem of us rather than a problem of them, and should be addressed as such.

In the broader sense, asking us to diagnose mass shooters in isolation feels impossible without addressing the larger contexts that surround the rise in mass shootings in the United States, like the dramatic increase in civilian owned assault rifles and other weapons of mass casualty. Many current analyses link this expansion to trends in mass shootings. As the New York Times recently put it, “the only variable that can explain the high rate of mass shootings in America is its astronomical number of guns.” Yet this expansion of guns in everyday life has gone hand in hand with a narrowing of the rhetoric through which U.S. culture talks about the role of guns and shootings. Insanity in the aftermath of mass shootings then becomes the only politically safe place to discuss charged issues such as gun violence prevention or strategies for public safety.

For these and other reasons, psychiatrists like me often cringe when we hear statements like Trump’s, and hem and haw when asked by journalists whether particular mental illnesses lead to specific mass shootings. It’s not that we don’t think that a person’s psychological history is important to understanding their actions—quite the opposite. Rather, it’s often our sense that reducing gun crime solely to a “mental health problem at the highest level,” as the president did with the Texas shooting, dangerously oversimplifies the questions we ought to be asking about mass shootings.

As such, I believe there are more meaningful ways for psychiatrists to help in the effort against gun violence and mass shootings: by also addressing shifting American beliefs and attitudes around guns, and about our increasingly polarized reactions to mass shootings. As but one example, in 1999, far more gun owners cited hunting, rather than self-protection, as the main reason they owned guns. By 2013, those attitudes had shifted: 48 percent said protection was the main reason to own a gun, while 32 percent pointed to hunting. The question of why Americans feel so unsafe around, and mistrustful of each other seems like a pressing one for mental health experts. Mental health expertise might also help us step back from the highly polarized conversations that emerge after mass shootings, and allow people of differing ideologies to find common ground.

Despite the mental health-gun violence dichotomy offered to us by politicians looking for easier answers, the Texas shooting was both a “guns situation” and a “mental health problem.” A problem brought about by the actions of an immensely troubled individual, and a reflection of increasingly lethal realities of everyday life in America. Psychiatrists are eager to help reduce gun violence. But when politicians ask us to predict the impossible, or reduce complex social phenomena into “mental health” issues, it’s often just an excuse for their own failure to address the problem.

Jonathan M. Metzl is a professor of sociology and psychiatry, and director of the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society, at Vanderbilt University. With Ken MacLeish he is author of “Mental Illness, Mass Shootings, and the Politics of American Firearms.”

Trump Signs Bill Revoking Obama-Era Gun Checks for People With Mental Illnesses

FEB 28 2017, 8:39 PM ET

by ALI VITALI

President Donald Trump quietly signed a bill into law Tuesday rolling back an Obama-era regulation that made it harder for people with mental illnesses to purchase a gun.

The rule, which was finalized in December, added people receiving Social Security checks for mental illnesses and people deemed unfit to handle their own financial affairs to the national background check database.

Had the rule fully taken effect, the Obama administration predicted it would have added about 75,000 names to that database.

President Barack Obama recommended the now-nullified regulation in a 2013 memo following the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, which left 20 first graders and six others dead. The measure sought to block some people with severe mental health problems from buying guns.

Related: Assault Weapons Not Protected by Second Amendment, Federal Appeals Court Rules

The original rule was hotly contested by gun rights advocates who said it infringed on Americans’ Second Amendment rights. Gun control advocates, however, praised the rule for curbing the availability of firearms to those who may not use them with the right intentions.

Both the House and Senate last week passed the new bill, H.J. Res 40, revoking the Obama-era regulation.

Trump signed the bill into law without a photo op or fanfare. The president welcomed cameras into the oval office Tuesday for the signing of other executive orders and bills. News that the president signed the bill was tucked at the bottom of a White House email alerting press to other legislation signed by the president.

The National Rifle Association “applauded” Trump’s action. Chris Cox, NRA-ILA executive director, said the move “marks a new era for law-abiding gun owners, as we now have a president who respects and supports our arms.”

Everytown For Gun Safety President John Feinblatt said he expected more gun control rollbacks from the Trump administration. In a statement to NBC News, he called the action "just the first item on the gun lobby’s wish list" and accused the National Rifle Association of "pushing more guns, for more people, in more places."

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., a leading gun control advocate in Congress, called out Republicans over the move.

"Republicans always say we don’t need new gun laws, we just need to enforce the laws already on the books. But the bill signed into law today undermines enforcement of existing laws that Congress passed to make sure the background check system had complete information," he said in an emailed statement. 

Investigators hunt for motive in Texas church shooting as the grieving spans generations 6NOV17

MORE from the Washington Post on the slaughter of worshipers at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas by a  lone gunman with an automatic weapon (according to latest reports). The Post also notes the difference in reactions to recent mass shootings and acts of terrorism from NOT MY fascist, racist, bigoted pres drumpf/trump. So many are "appalled"and "horrified" by this latest mass shooting and will continue to oppose sane gun control legislation because that is what the nra tells them and the politicians they have bought to do. Hypocrites with bloody hands folded in hypocritical prayers for the victims and their families.
Investigators hunt for motive in Texas church shooting as the grieving spans generations

SUTHERLAND SPRINGS, Tex. — Investigators on Monday scoured the background of the lone gunman who opened fire on the pews of the First Baptist Church, searching for answers on a possible motive while the stories of those massacred began to emerge.

Authorities said 26 people were killed in the Sunday rampage, the latest eruption of violence in a seemingly safe public space. The dead included eight relatives spanning three generations in a single family. While officials had said the victims ranged in age from 5 to 72, one family said a 1-year-old girl was also killed, part of the eight family members slain in the attack.

The gunman — described as a former member of the Air Force — fired upon the services with a Ruger assault-style rifle before he came under fire from a local man and fled in car chase. The attacker eventually ran off the roadway and apparently took his own life.

“There was some gunfire exchanged, I believe, on the roadway also, and then [the gunman’s vehicle] wrecked out,” Joe D. Tackitt Jr., the Wilson County sheriff, said in an interview with CBS News. “At this time we believe that he had a self-inflicted gunshot wound, after he wrecked out.”

[ Death sweeps across 3 generations of a single family gathered at church ]

Texas officials on early Monday identified the attacker as Devin Patrick Kelley of New Braunfels, about 35 miles north of Sutherland Springs.

Kelley, a 26-year-old former Air Force member, was court-martialed in 2012 and sentenced to a year in military prison for assaulting his spouse and child, making him the latest mass attacker or suspect with domestic violence in his past. He was reduced in rank and released with a bad-conduct discharge in 2014.

Few clues were initially made public on a possible motive or what made Kelley target a church in tiny Sutherland Springs. His in-laws had attended the church at some point, Tackitt told reporters early Monday, although they were not present Sunday; they only came to the scene later after hearing the news.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) suggested Monday morning that “there may have been a reason why this particular location was targeted,” though he did not go into detail, saying that the details could emerge in the coming hours or days.

“I don’t think this is a random act of shooting, a randomly chosen location, but obviously someone who is very deranged,” Abbott said in an interview on the “Today” show.

[ The persistent crime that connects mass shooters and terror suspects: Domestic violence ]

The attack left a staggering hole in a Texas town of fewer than 700 people located about 30 miles southeast of San Antonio.

“Nearly everyone [inside] had some type of injury,” Tackitt said. “I knew several people in there. It hasn’t really hit yet, but it will.”

All of the bodies were removed from the church overnight, Tackitt said, and were en route or already at the Bexar County Medical Examiner’s office in San Antonio. Inside the church, which remained cordoned off, was “a horrific site,” he said, adding “you don’t expect to walk into church and find mauled bodies.”

Tackitt said between 12 and 14 of the people killed or injured in the attack were children.

For some, the church massacre also reinforced a sense of unease that no place could be considered immune from possible violence after a concert ground in Las Vegas, a Walmart in Colorado, a Nashville church and a bike path in New York all became scenes of death and bloodshed over the past six weeks.

President Trump appeared to try to preemptively steer the debate away from gun control after the slayings. At a news conference in Tokyo, Trump said he thought “mental health” was a possible motive, adding that it appeared the shooter was “a very deranged individual, a lot of problems for a long period of time.” He did not provide further explanation.

The incident “isn’t a guns situation,” Trump said. “Fortunately someone else had a gun that was shooting in the opposite direction,” he added, or it “would have been much worse.”

Bailey LeJeaune, 17, and David Betancourt, 18, hold candles during a vigil in Sutherland Springs for the victims of a deadly shooting at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, on Nov. 5, 2017. (Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman via AP)

Trump’s reaction contrasted with his unrestrained calls for a death sentence for the Uzbek immigrant accused of killing eight people in an apparently Islamic State-inspired attack in Lower Manhattan last week. 

Witnesses said the gunman in Texas, dressed in all black and wearing a tactical vest, began firing an assault rifle as he approached the church. Police said the gunman killed two people outside before entering the church and spraying bullets at the congregation during morning worship.

After the exchange of gunfire with an armed civilian, the gunman drove away with two local men in pursuit.

It was “act now, ask questions later,” said the truck’s driver, Johnnie Langendorff. By the time they caught up with him, however, the fleeing man had crashed his SUV into a ditch. “He might have been unconscious from the crash or something like that, I’m not sure,” Langendorff told reporters.

“The local citizen pursued him,” said Freeman Martin, a regional director for the Texas Department of Public Safety.

The attack targeted young and old, tearing apart families. Joe and Claryce Holcombe lost children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren all at once, a total of eight extended family members, the couple said in a phone interview with The Post.

Their son, Bryan Holcombe, 60, and his wife, Carla Holcombe, 58, were killed. Bryan was associate pastor for the church and walking to preach at the pulpit when he was shot, Joe Holcombe told The Post.

Among the dead was also their granddaughter-in-law, Crystal Holcombe, who was pregnant. She died along with her unborn child and three of her children, Emily, Megan and Greg, according to Joe Holcombe. She had been at church with her husband, John Holcombe, who survived along with two of her other children.

Their grandson, Marc Daniel Holcombe and his infant daughter, who is about a year old, also died, Joe and Claryce Holcombe said.

Kevin Jordan, 30, was changing the oil in his Ford Focus ahead of a family road trip when he heard the pops of gunfire. When he stood up and turned his head, he saw a man wearing body armor, a vest and a mask walk down the sidewalk toward the church about 50 yards from his home.

“He was just spraying at the front of the church,” Jordan said. “He was shooting outside at first, and then he walked to the door and started shooting inside.”

[ An unlikely hero describes gun battle and 95 mph chase with Texas shooting suspect ]

After spotting the shooter, Jordan said, he ran inside his home, scooped up his son, alerted his wife and rushed his family into their bathroom, where they crouched and hid while calling 911. He said the shooter spotted him as he fled and took a shot that went through his front window, nearly hitting his 2-year-old son.

“I looked at the shooter, and he looked right at me,” he said. When the shooting stopped, Jordan, who works as a medical assistant, ran to the church, hoping to help.

“I walked inside and just walked out. I couldn’t handle it,” he said. “It was bad. A lot of blood and bodies. The pews were knocked over. I’m a medical assistant and medical assisting does not prepare you for this.”

Tucked a few hundred yards off Highway 87 amid scrubby farmland, the dusty and usually quiet streets of Sutherland Springs, lined with modest one-story family homes and trailers. A town with few streetlights that typically goes dark after sundown flashed red and blue with police lights on almost every block.

In a matter of minutes, Sutherland Springs was transformed into the latest community riven by grief after a mass attack. In late September, a masked gunman stormed into a small community church outside of Nashville and shot seven people, including the pastor, killing one. Authorities said the suspect in that shooting, Emanuel Kidega Samson, might have been motivated by a desire for revenge for a 2015 shooting that targeted black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C. — an attack that left nine people dead.

[ Trump suggests “mental health” issues, not “gun situation,” at root of Texas attack ]

The Texas attack also came just over a month after 58 people were killed at a Las Vegas country music festival, in what was the deadliest mass shooting in recent U.S. history. The gunman in Las Vegas, Stephen Paddock, killed himself after a lengthy shooting spree from his 32nd-floor Mandalay Bay hotel suite, and authorities have still not determined a possible motive.

Frank Pomeroy, the pastor of First Baptist Church, told ABC News that he was not present during the church service but that his teenage daughter, Annabelle Pomeroy, 14, was among the dead.

“She was very quiet, shy, always smiling, and helpful to all,” Cynthia Rangel, 50, a resident of nearby Stockdale, said of the teenager. Rangel, a local emergency medical technician, said she knew three individuals who were hospitalized after the shooting and were undergoing surgery. “This just all seems like it’s not real.”

Dana Fletcher, who owns a business a quarter-mile from the church, said she and her family just moved to Sutherland Springs. She said she was first alerted to the shooting by a call from a reporter.

“My husband and I both are still in shock,” she said. “It’s a little tiny church that was targeted. It’s shocking. It’s a bit frightening because it’s a little bit close to home.”

The church is a part of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the country, with about 15 million members. First Baptist reported an average estimated attendance of 100 in 2015. The church is affiliated with the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention, considered one of Texas’s more theologically conservative groups of Southern Baptists.

Berman and Phillips reported from Washington. Mary Lee Grace in San Antonio; Eva Ruth Moravec in Sutherland Springs; and Wesley Lowery, Brian Murphy, Sarah Pulliam Bailey, Ed O’Keefe, Alex Horton, Samantha Schmidt and Devlin Barrett in Washington contributed to this report, which will be updated throughout the day.

Tennessee church-shooting suspect had note referencing Dylann Roof attack

Masked gunman rampages through Nashville church; usher uses personal weapon to subdue shooter

Las Vegas shooting motive eludes investigators as new details emerge about gunman Stephen Paddock

Peter Holley is a technology reporter at The Washington Post. He can be reached at peter.holley@washpost.com.

  Follow @peterjholley

Kristine Phillips is a general assignment reporter for The Washington Post. Contact her at kristine.phillips@washpost.com.

  Follow @kristinegWP

Mark Berman covers national news for The Washington Post and anchors Post Nation, a destination for breaking news and stories from around the country.

  Follow @markberman

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