Amid mounting national concern about gun violence in America, authorities in Louisiana say they were called to the scene of a 12-year-old’s birthday party on Saturday where six people were shot following an argument.
Authorities were called to a neighbourhood in LaPlace, located just west of New Orleans, around 8:30pm Saturday after a report of gunfire, the St John the Baptist Parish Sheriff’s Office said in a statement.
No arrests had been made as of late Sunday morning. Additional details on the victims, including their ages and conditions, were not available, the sheriff’s office said.
The gunfire comes amid a particularly violent year for shootings across the country, with CNN tallying at least 45 mass shootings ― incidents where four or more people, excluding the gunman, are wounded or killed by gunfire ― since March 16. That’s when eight people were killed by a gunman at three Atlanta-area spas.
This rise in violence comes after 2020, which saw the start of the pandemic and the smallest number of mass killings in more than a decade, according to a database compiled by The Associated Press, USA Today and Northeastern University.
Most recently, a man on Thursday killed eight people at a FedEx facility in Indianapolis before also killing himself. This attack follows a former NFL player fatally shooting six people in Rock Hill, South Carolina, on April 7 before turning the gun on himself, as well as a third gunman killing four people and critically wounding a fifth at a Southern California office building on March 31. Just before that, a fourth gunman killed 10 people at a supermarket in Boulder, Colorado, on March 22.
US President Joe Biden earlier this month announced a half-dozen executive actions to combat what he called an “epidemic and an international embarrassment” of gun violence in America. His actions include cracking down on so-called “ghost guns” that can be assembled at home and lack a federally required serial number for tracing.
He has also announced the nomination of David Chipman to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The federal agency, which is tasked with enforcing existing gun laws, has not had a Senate-confirmed director since 2015.
Dr Anthony Fauci, Biden’s chief medical adviser, said Sunday that there’s no dispute that gun violence has become a public health emergency in the US.
“Myself, as a public health person, I think you can’t run away from that,” he told CNN’s Dana Bash during an interview on “State of the Union.” “When you see people getting killed, in this last month it’s just been horrifying what’s happened. How can you say that’s not a public health issue?”