Hundreds of casualties in U.S. Memorial Day shootings
At least 156 Americans have been killed and 412 others injured in gun violence over the Memorial Day weekend in the U.S. from 5 a.m. on Friday to early Tuesday, just days after the Uvalde school massacre killed 19 kids.
Among the hundreds of casualties during the holiday weekend, the Gun Violence Archive, which keeps track of shooting incidents documented at least 14 mass shootings.
The monitoring group defines a mass shooting incident as one in which “four or more people are shot or killed, not including the shooter” - at least nine people have been killed in the mass shooting incidents and more than 60 injured.
Among the mass shootings, six people had sustained injuries by gunfire at a high school graduation in the state of Alabama as well as the killing of three children under the age of ten.
The other deaths and injuries have occurred from state to state including six teenagers between the ages of 13 and 15 injured by gunfire in the state of Tennessee with reports showing gun violence has not differentiated between age, race, or location.
The shootings come as President Joe Biden has just finished visiting the city of Uvalde in Texas where another shooting massacre, this time at a school, killed 19 young children and two teachers.
The murder of 19 school kids did not deter the United State’s gun industry and biggest lobby group, the National Rifle Association, from enjoying its annual celebration of the weapons that slaughtered the young students.
The Uvalde trip followed Biden’s visit to New York were a terrorist with a white supremacist ideology in military-style clothing opened fire at a supermarket in New York, an attack which officials labeled as a “hate crime and racially motivated violent extremism”, that killed ten people and wounded three others in a black neighborhood.
According to the FBI, the U.S. is experiencing its largest-ever annual increase in homicides on record.
Despite hundreds of mass shootings unfolding in the states every year, Washington has repeatedly failed to pass any genuine gun-control legislation to tackle the epidemic.
Analysts say the hurdles to congress approving stricter gun legislation are both numerous and significant suggesting gun violence-related deaths and massacres are not going to decrease any time soon.
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