Bloody weekend!Deadly shootings take place in U.S.
NEW YORK (AFP) – A racist mass shooting at a supermarket in upstate New York has become the worst of many gun violence incidents over the past weekend. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the scourge of gun violence has continued to intensify.
In Buffalo, a white supremacist teenager shot and killed 10 African-Americans, grabbing headlines. But at the same time, smaller shootings were reported elsewhere, demonstrating how common public shootings are in the United States.
A shooting at a church near Los Angeles on Sunday left one dead and four wounded. The team canceled a party after a shooting outside the Milwaukee Bucks stadium on Friday injured 20 people.
More than 45,000 Americans will die at gunpoint in 2021, with slightly more than half of them by suicide, up from 39,000 in 2019, according to the latest data from the nonprofit Archives of Gun Violence.
As of May 16, about 7,000 people have died in homicide or unintentional shootings in the U.S. this year, with shootings in public places occurring almost every day.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, as of 2022, there have been 202 mass shootings in the U.S. — incidents in which four or more people were injured or killed.
Experts say the rise in gun crime is due to the social disruption caused by the pandemic and the proliferation of so-called “ghost guns”. The “ghost gun” can be self-assembled at home and is almost impossible to trace.
“Unless the U.S. is truly committed to creating a unified process for regulating, licensing and monitoring gun possession, these kinds of incidents will continue to occur and will increase,” Taylor, a gun violence expert at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, told AFP. .”
Also this past weekend, a shootout broke out at a flea market in Houston, Texas, killing two people and injuring three others.
New Jersey Gov. Murphy tweeted: “A weekend in America,” before citing a spate of shootings over the weekend.
“The time for anger and action is long overdue. Congress is long overdue to step up and pass true national gun safety legislation,” he wrote.
But past efforts by Congress to tighten U.S. gun legislation have often failed to cross the threshold in the face of the influential pro-gun lobby, even in the wake of horrific shootings.
Under pressure to crack down on gun violence, U.S. President Joe Biden will visit Buffalo on Tuesday “to mourn with the community that lost 10 lives in a ruthless, horrific mass shooting.”
Since Sunday, residents of the city have been holding vigils and laying flowers in memory of the dead.
The 18-year-old suspect Zandron drove 322 kilometers from his home to the African-American community near the Tops supermarket in Buffalo. Officials declared that he was “obviously trying to take as many African-American lives as possible.”
Wearing a heavy body armor and armed with an AR-15 assault rifle, he live-streamed the shooting on the streaming platform Twitch. The site removed the video within two minutes.
The shooter was reportedly linked to a 180-page manifesto describing white supremacist ideology and laying out plans to target the predominantly African-American community.
Gendron was charged with one count of first-degree murder late Saturday and is being held without bail.
“This murder is being investigated as a racial hate crime,” Erie County District Attorney Flynn said.
The incident brought back memories of some of the most devastating attacks in recent U.S. history, including the massacre of nine worshippers at a predominantly African-American church by a white man in 2015, and the 2019 massacre of nine worshippers at a predominantly African-American church in South Carolina. Twenty-three people, most of them Latinos, were killed in an attack in Texas by a white man.