KANSAS CITY, Mo. (Dispatches) — Three people were killed and two more were wounded in a shooting at a Missouri nightclub early Sunday, marking one of at least three mass shootings in the U.S. this weekend.
The killings at the Klymax Lounge in Kansas City, Missouri, and a separate shooting in Birmingham, Alabama, helped bring the number of mass shootings in the U.S. so far this year to about 230, data from the Gun Violence Archive shows.
In the Alabama shooting, which happened about the same time as the slayings in Kansas City, four people were wounded outside a bar.
The shooting in Birmingham came after yet another separate shooting in that city on Friday victimized four people at a birthday party, including one who was killed.
The bloodshed comes as the U.S. remains on track to have its deadliest year in terms of mass shootings in recent memory.
The Gun Violence Archive defines a mass shooting as one in which four victims are killed or wounded, and the great number of such cases in the country has led to persistent but unheeded calls for Congress to enact meaningful gun control.
According to police, one of those shot to death there on Sunday was found outside the club. Another was found dead inside the club, and the third died after being brought to a hospital.
One of the two people wounded was in critical condition.
In Alabama on Friday, one person died and three others were injured when someone began shooting at them at a birthday celebration in front of an apartment, Birmingham police said in a statement.
One woman who was injured was not struck by any bullets but was counted as a victim because she was hurt during the attack.
On Sunday, less than an hour before the Kansas City shooting, another shooting outside a bar in Birmingham wounded four people in what was described as “an exchange of gunfire”.
The U.S. is seeing on average more than one mass killing weekly.
The incidents have spanned the country, from Chicago to Mississippi and Tennessee to Texas. They have occurred at shopping malls, schools and parties and in countless neighborhoods.
They have also sparked a bout of soul-searching in a country where scores of millions of guns are in public hands and there is little political prospect of meaningful gun control of the type common in many other countries.
Mass shootings have attracted the most attention in the U.S. and overseas. No other industrialized country outside war and conflict zones experiences such habitual gun violence in civic life.
In Texas, gun laws were repeatedly loosened after mass shootings.
Five of the 10 deadliest mass shootings in America over the past eight years have been in Texas. It has not even been one year since 19 children and two teachers were killed in a shooting at Robb elementary school in Uvalde, the deadliest shooting in the state and the third-deadliest school shooting in the U.S.
At more than 1 million, Texas is also the state with the most registered guns.