AUSTIN (Dispatches) – At least 13 people were wounded in a shooting in the U.S. state of Texas on Saturday morning, while the suspected shooter was not immediately arrested, local media reported.
Gunfire erupted at about 1:30 a.m. local time (0630 GMT) in a busy entertainment district in downtown Austin city. Two victims were in critical condition but as of 4 a.m. local time (0900 GMT) no one died, interim Austin Police Chief Joseph Chacon told a media briefing.
Eleven injured people were taken to a local hospital, one to a different hospital and the other to an urgent care facility with gunshot wounds.
“It’s not clear at this point what sparked this off, but out of an abundance of caution, we have notified the FBI’s joint terrorism task force,” said Chacon.
Meanwhile, the Savannah Police Department was investigating a shooting that left one person dead and nine injured in an incident that took place around 9 pm local time on the 200 block of Avery Street on Friday night, local media WTOC reported.
One of the nine people shot, an adult, reportedly died. A 2-year-old was struck near the ankle and foot area. And another victim, a 13-year-old, suffered injuries that are not life-threatening. Although initial reports indicated that two people had died, later the media was told by police that there was only one fatality.
According to media reports, the city mayor said that the shooting was related to the gang or drug gangs fighting.
Nearly 20,000 Americans died from gun violence in 2020.
U.S. President Joe Biden says gun violence has turned into an “epidemic” in the country.
A new study suggests that a large majority of assailants behind mass shootings in the U.S. have had untreated psychiatric disorders, primarily schizophrenia, while treating such patients in time could decrease the risk of violence.
The major psychiatric analysis by researchers from the Stanford University School of Medicine studied U.S. mass shootings spanning decades. Having identified 115 persons behind such crimes committed between 1982 and 2019, based on “the most comprehensive listing available”, the Mother Jones database, they mainly concentrated on the study of surviving assailants.
“We found that most mass shooters in our study experienced undiagnosed and unmedicated psychiatric illness,” the specialists revealed, describing their findings as “striking”.
Symptoms of serious brain illness that can be diagnosed as clinical psychiatric disorders were identified in 32 of 35 perpetrators. Most of the shooters – 18 – had schizophrenia, while 10 more were diagnosed with bipolar, delusional and personality disorders. Those with schizophrenia had typical psychotic symptoms such as demons’ messages, paranoid delusions, and command hallucinations to “kill, burn or destroy”.