Bloody Saturday night in the US: eight mass shootings claim the lives of at least 11 people | International

Bloody Saturday night in America. The epidemic of mass shootings that has spread throughout the country in recent weeks has registered eight new outbreaks in the last few hours, which have claimed the lives of at least 11 people (and 53 injured). The most serious have occurred in Chattanooga (Tennessee) and in Philadelphia (Pennsylvania), where a group of shooters has opened fire on the crowd in a popular entertainment area in the center of the city; at least three people have died and 11 others have been injured. In the town of Tennessee, a confusing incident outside a nightclub has ended with the death of three people (one of them, by being run over) and 14 injured.

According to the Gun Violence Archive website, a reference on this topic, there have already been 243 mass shootings so far this year in the United States. In addition to those in Chattanooga and Philadelphia, only this Saturday, the most fertile day of the week for this type of incident, such events have also been recorded in Summerton (South Carolina; one dead and seven injured), Mesa (Arizona; two killed and two wounded), Phoenix (also in Arizona; one dead and eight wounded), Macon, Georgia; one dead and three wounded), El Paso, Texas; no dead and five wounded) and Ecorse, Michigan; four wounded.

To be considered massive, a shooting must involve a minimum of four people, not including the attacker, and they must not be members of the same family.

In Philadelphia, a group of armed men fired on the crowd on South Street, one of the main entertainment areas of the largest city in the State of Pennsylvania, according to authorities. A police officer who was at the scene opened fire on one of the shooters, who dropped his gun and fled. The identity of the attackers, who managed to escape, has not yet been specified.

The names of the deceased have not been revealed either, although it is known that they are two men (one of them 25 years old) and a 22-year-old woman. “There were hundreds of people walking down South Street at that time, like all weekends,” a Philadelphia police spokesman told local WCAU television. “It was chaos,” a witness told the city newspaper The Philadelphia Inquirer. “People came in from the street with blood stains on their shoes. We were gathering napkins, wetting them and passing them around to clean the wounds.” Another witness, Joe Smith has commented to the Inquirer: “When it started, I thought it was not going to stop.” Smith was at the door of a theater when the salvo of shots began to rain at around 11:30 p.m. local time (05:30 a.m. on Sunday in mainland Spain).

In Chattanooga, a fight with firearms and several cars involved has ended with two people shot dead (and 14 people with gunshot wounds). Another person who was run over has also lost his life (and three others have been injured when they were run over by one or several vehicles, when they fled). According to police, there was more than one shooter. Chattanooga Sheriff Celeste Murphy appeared on Sunday morning, with little information to share: she said the reasons that led to the brawl are still unknown and she took the opportunity to ask for citizen help to obtain information. The identities of the victims and suspects are also not yet known.

It rains on wet in this town of 180,000 inhabitants in southwest Tennessee; Last Saturday, six teenagers, aged between 13 and 15, were involved in another similar incident. There were no deaths then. There have also been no arrests.

other attacks

The bloody Saturday night comes three days after four people were killed by a guy who broke into Saint Francis Hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma, looking for the doctor who had operated on his back, and who, apparently, had not been able to mitigate the pain of the intervention. With an assault rifle that he had bought that same day, last Wednesday, he also killed another doctor, a receptionist and a patient who was waiting in the consultation room. He later committed suicide.

But above all, the memory of two other mass shootings in Uvalde (Texas) and Buffalo (New York) is recent. In the Texas town, an 18-year-old Salvador Ramos killed 19 Robb Elementary School students and two of their teachers before taking his own life.

In the city of western New York State, Payton Gendron, a young man of the same age, intoxicated by theories of white supremacism, showed up at a popular supermarket in an African-American neighborhood with the intention of “killing as many people as possible.” blacks”. He killed 10 with an AR-15 style weapon. Gendron is in jail awaiting trial. Despite being arrested at the scene and with a gun in his hand, the boy, who faces more than two dozen crimes, pleaded not guilty before the judge on Thursday.

A ban on such weapons, designed for war and highly lethal, is one of the measures that President Joe Biden demanded of lawmakers in a dramatic prime-time address to the nation last Thursday. He also called for the sale of high-capacity cartridges to be restricted and for the federal legal age to purchase a gun to be raised from 18 to 21. Statistics indicate that many of these events, to which a powerful contagion effect is attributed, are carried out by young men. All these legislative changes depend on the Senate, where the Democratic Party does not have a sufficient majority.

After the one in Tulsa, there have been seven such attacks. If the account is made from the mass shooting of Uvalde, the one with the greatest media prominence in recent times, the statistic has been reproduced 27 times.

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