The madness of mass shootings continues unstoppable in the United States. At least three people have been killed and eleven injured in a shooting recorded last night in one of the most popular entertainment areas of Philadelphia, according to the Police reported this Sunday.
The Philadelphia DF Pace police inspector confirmed that around 11:30 pm several patrols went near Second and South streets alerted by multiple shots and upon arrival they saw several shooters.
One of the officers fired at one of the shooters, who was still firing his gun indiscriminately into the crowd. The shooter dropped the weapon to the ground and fled, but it is not confirmed that he was injured. Police recovered two semi-automatic pistols from the scene of the shooting.
The injured were taken to health centers and, according to police spokesmen told the media, “two men (one of them 25 years old) and one woman (22 years old) were declared dead after arriving at hospitals with multiple gunshot wounds. “. Their identities have not yet been revealed.
chaos on saturday night
The shooting took place in one of the most popular meeting places in the largest city in Pennsylvania and, according to several witnesses, triggered chaos among the many people who were there on a Saturday night.
“There were hundreds of people walking down South Street, like every weekend,” a Philadelphia police spokesman told local television channel WCAU. “It was chaos,” a witness told 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, named Joe Smith, 23, told the Inquirer: “When it started, I thought it wasn’t going to stop.” Smith was standing outside a theater when the barrage of gunfire began to rain half an hour before midnight.
The attack comes at the end of a week in which four people were killed by a killer who stormed Saint Francis Hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma, looking for the doctor who had operated on his back, who apparently hadn’t. 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.
Memories of two other mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas, and Buffalo, New York, are also fresh.
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, intoxicated by theories close to white supremacism, showed up at a popular supermarket in an African-American neighborhood with the intention of “killing blacks”. He killed 10 with an AR-15 style weapon. Gendron is in jail awaiting trial.
Banning such weapons, designed for war and highly lethal, is one of the measures 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.
Lethal contagion effect
Statistics indicate that many of these events, to which a powerful contagion effect is attributed, are carried out by young men.
According to the Gun Violence Archive website, the one in Philadelphia is the 235th mass shooting so far this year in the United States. And it does not even count as the last: this past morning there have also been such events in Phoenix (Arizona; one dead and eight injured), El Paso (Texas; no dead and five injured) and Ecorse (Michigan; four injured).
After the one in Tulsa, this independent agency has registered six attacks of this type. If the account is made from the mass shooting of Uvalde, the one with the greatest media prominence of the last batch, the statistic has been reproduced 26 times (to appear as massive, a shooting has to reach a minimum of four people, without include the attacker, and that they are not members of the same family).
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