SEATTLE (Dispatches) -- Three people are dead and six others wounded after a shooting Sunday at a hookah lounge in south Seattle, authorities said.
City police didn’t immediately release any information about a possible suspect or suspects in Sunday’s early morning shooting in the Mount Baker neighborhood.
Officers responded to the scene around 4:30 a.m. Sunday after receiving multiple 911 calls, police said.
A 22-year-old man and a 33-year-old man died at the scene, and a 30-year-old woman died at Harborview Medical Center, officials said. The names of the victims weren’t immediately released.
Of the six people wounded, a 23-year-old man was in critical condition and the other five were in satisfactory condition, police said. They ranged in age from 21 to 38, officials said.
Police are still investigating what led to the shooting. Five guns were recovered at the scene, police said.
Seattle Police Department Adrian Diaz said during a press conference that police was not only investigating the cause of the hookah lounge incident, but also, why so many shooting incidents took place, in general, and how to prevent them.
“That’s really what we’re also trying to figure out. How do we

stop this? How do we make our communities safer?” Diaz said at the press briefing.
“It seems like every incident that we’re coming across, people are having a gun. Whether it’s, you know, whether it’s drug-related, whether it’s conflict-related, sometimes it’s drive-by, sometimes it’s road rage, sometimes it’s domestic violence, but it seems like everybody is carrying a gun,” Diaz pointed out. “And that is something that we got to figure out how to address.”
Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell said in a statement that even as Seattle police “keeps up a rapid and record pace of recovering guns — 869 through July — there are still more illegal guns in the wrong hands that could be used to incite another tragedy like this one.”
According to The Gun Violence Archive, a non-advocacy organization that keeps a running tally of gun violence in the nation, there have been more than 27,400 gun violence deaths in the U.S. so far this year.
The United States has been struggling with a large number of mass shootings and incidents of gun violence.
Mass shootings — in which at least four people are shot, not including the shooter — have more than doubled in the U.S. over the last five years, with 151 mass shootings recorded at the midway point in 2018.
Gun violence is a daily reality across the U.S., but an emerging body of research indicates the most risky day for mass shootings in the nation is the Fourth of July, when Americans celebrate their independence from Britain.
The heated political debate surrounding gun violence and gun ownership in America has sparked limited action, despite the large number of mass shootings in America.
Many Republicans have argued the rise in mass shootings is a “mental health problem” not a gun issue. Despite passing the then Democratic-controlled House in July 2022, a proposed assault weapons ban failed to earn enough support in the Senate in November. An assault weapons ban continues to be a point of disagreement between Democrats—who say a ban is necessary in order to reduce the number of mass shootings—and Republicans—who disagree with removing weapons from Americans who they say use them for self-defense.