Four Killed, At Least 20 Injured in Alabama Shooting

DADEVILLE, Alabama (Dispatches) -- Four people have been killed and multiple people injured during a shooting Saturday night in Dadeville, the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency said.
The Alabama Law Enforcement Agency said the shooting happened at about 10:30 p.m. There was no initial confirmation about what led to the shooting. It was not immediately known if a suspect was in custody.
Officers and deputies at the scene reported at least 20 people wounded.
Pastor Ben Hayes, who serves as the chaplain for the Dadeville Police Department and for the local high school football team, said most of the victims are teenagers because the shooting occurred at a birthday party for a 16-year-old. He said the shooting has rocked the small town where serious crime is rare.
“One of the young men that was killed was one of our star athletes and just a great guy. So I knew many of these students. Dadeville is a small town and this is going to affect everybody in this area,” Hayes said.
Dadeville, which has a population of about 3,200 people, is in east Alabama, about 57 miles (92 kilometers) northeast of Montgomery, Alabama.
Gun violence is a fixture in American life - but the issue is a highly political one, pitting gun control advocates against those fiercely attached to their guns.
There have already been more than 70 mass shootings across the U.S. so far this year, with California experiencing two of the most high-profile in January.
Figures from the Gun Violence Archive - a non-profit research database - shows that the number of mass shootings has gone up significantly in recent years.
In each of the last three years there have been more than 600 mass shootings, almost two a day on average.
While the U.S. does not have a single definition for “mass shootings”, the Gun Violence Archive defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people are injured or killed.

Their figure includes shootings that happen both in homes and in public places.

The deadliest such attack, in Las Vegas in 2017, killed more than 50 people and left 500 wounded. The vast majority of mass shootings, however, leave fewer than 10 people dead.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a total of 45,222 people died from gun-related injuries of all causes during 2020, the last year for which complete data is available.

In 2020, more than 19,000 of the deaths were homicides, according to the CDC. The figure represents a 34% increase from 2019, and a 75% increase over the course of the previous decade.

The data also shows nearly 53 people are killed each day by a firearm in the U.S.

Provisional data for the following year suggests nearly 49,000 gun-related deaths in 2021.

That’s a significantly larger proportion of homicides than is the case in Canada, Australia, England and Wales, and many other countries.

While calculating the number of guns in private hands around the world is difficult, the latest figures from the Small Arms Survey - a Swiss-based leading research project - estimate that there were 390 million guns in circulation in 2018.

The U.S. ratio of 120.5 firearms per 100 residents, up from 88 per 100 in 2011, far surpasses that of other countries around the world.

More recent data out of the U.S. suggests that gun ownership grew significantly over the last several years. A study, published by the Annals of Internal Medicine in February, found that 7.5 million U.S. adults became first new gun owners between January 2019 and April 2021.

This, in turn, exposed 11 million people to firearms in their homes, including 5 million children. About half of new gun owners in that time period were women, while 40% were either black or Hispanic.

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Four Killed, At Least 20 Injured in Alabama Shooting