Three people were killed and 11 injured in a new shooting in the United States, after gunmen opened fire on a busy street in Philadelphia on Saturday night, police said.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, more than two dozen casualties have occurred in the United States since the May 24 school attack in Uvalde, Texas, which killed 21 people (19 children and two teachers).
“We know that fourteen people were shot and taken to hospitals,” said police inspector DF Pace.
“Three of these people, two men and one woman, died after arriving at hospitals with multiple gunshot wounds,” he said.
Pace said officers on the scene observed “several active shooters shooting at people” in Philadelphia’s busy South Street area.
He noted that “many” agents were already on the scene when the first gunshots were heard.
Pace suggested that this type of surveillance is common in that area on summer weekend nights.
Pace added that it was unclear whether a police officer had dropped his gun and fired at one of the fleeing gunmen, but whether he was shot.
According to local media, no arrests were made.
Pace said two semi-automatic weapons and a high-capacity magazine were found at the scene.
Police will review security camera footage of stores in the area.
A witness named Joe Smith, 23, told the Philadelphia Inquirer that as soon as he heard the first gunshots, he immediately thought of the recent gun attacks in the United States.
Another witness, Eric Walsh, told the Philadelphia Inquirer of people who fled “with blood on their shoes and skin on their knees and elbows.”
According to the newspaper, another person was shot and killed not far from the scene about two hours later, although police said the two incidents were unrelated.
In the United States, which has more than 393 million guns in circulation in 2020, violence tends to increase during the summer months, according to researchers.
In addition, over the years some states have eased restrictions on gun sales.
President Joe Biden on Thursday urged Congress to find a way to ban the sale of assault rifles to individuals, or at least raise the purchase age from 18 to 21.
He described Republicans’ reluctance to limit gun sales when many places such as schools or hospitals “become death camps, battlefields” as “mind-blowing”.
“In the last two decades, more schoolchildren have died from firearms than active duty military and police combined. Think about it,” Biden said in a speech at the White House.
Alongside the massacre at Uvalde, there were other armed attacks. On May 14, a white man describing himself as “racist” and “anti-Semitic” killed ten black men at a Buffalo supermarket on the US-Canada border.
Two days later, a man driven by hatred towards Taiwan and its people killed one person and injured five others at a church attended by the Taiwanese-American community in California, according to police.
On Thursday, five people were injured in a shooting at a Wisconsin cemetery during the funeral of a man killed by police in late May.
And the day before, four people were killed when a man opened fire at a hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
According to police, the attacker targeted the doctor who operated on his back, whom he held responsible for his pain.
source: Noticias
[author_name]
