Mass Shooting in Houston Leaves Several Casualties

Date: 11 June 2023 - 22:13

News ID: ۱۱۵۹۷۸

HOUSTON (Dispatches) -- A mass shooting in a parking lot outside a Houston club left at least 6 people injured, one in critical condition, police said early Sunday.
“Somebody fired into a crowded parking lot,” Houston Police Department Chief Troy Finner told a news conference outside the Tabú club in west of the city where the shooting took place.
He added that investigators didn’t know how many people might have been responsible for the shooting and that no suspects were in custody.
“We had 6 victims here in a shooting. Apparently there was some kind of disturbance in the club that came out into the parking lot,” Finner said.
Finner added that one of the victims, a man, was in critical conditions and underwent surgery.
The victims’ ages ranged from their late 20s to early 30s, Finner said, adding that they had been transported to several hospitals in the area.
Investigators were examining surveillance footage to try and establish who was behind the shooting, Finner said.
Police advised partygoers to leave bars and clubs prior to closing and to avoid large crowds trying to leave venues at the end of the night.
On Friday night, nine people were wounded in a mass shooting in San Francisco’s Mission District in what police said appeared to be a “targeted and isolated” incident.
The San Francisco Police Department initially said that all of the victims were “expected to survive their injuries.” But a statement from the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital said one of the victims remained in critical condition as of Saturday afternoon.
Another was said to be in serious condition, four were in fair condition and three had already been discharged. The victims were eight men and one woman ranging in age from 20 to 34, the hospital said.
Earlier Tuesday, an 18-year-old graduate, Shawn Jackson, and his 36-year-old stepfather, Renzo Smith, were killed in a shooting after a high school commencement ceremony in Richmond, Virginia, that left five others injured.
The shooting in Houston is one of at least 281 mass shootings in the United States so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
Deaths from mass shootings this year are the highest since at least 2006. The atrocities have been driven almost exclusively by gun violence.
Mass shootings account for the vast majority of mass killings, though there are examples where the perpetrator used knives or other weapons as well.
Experts point to a few contributing factors: a general increase in all types of gun violence in recent years; the proliferation of firearms amid lax gun laws; the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, including the stress of long months in quarantine; a political climate unable or unwilling to change the status quo in meaningful ways; and an increased emphasis on violence in U.S. culture.
Such explanations are little comfort not only to the families ripped apart by the killings but to Americans everywhere who are reeling from the cascading, collective trauma of mass violence.
This year’s killings have happened in different ways, from family and neighborhood disputes to school and workplace shootings to explosions of gunfire in public spaces. They’ve taken place in rural as well as urban settings. Sometimes people knew their killers; sometimes they did not.
The bloodbaths are defined by the FBI as mass killings when the events involve four or more fatalities within 24 hours, not including the perpetrator.
Contributing to 2023′s steady drumbeat of death: the grisly murder-suicide in Utah that left five children, their parents and their grandmother dead just days into the new year; the fatal shooting of six people, including three 9-year-old children, at an elementary school in Nashville; back-to-back rampages in California at dance studios and mushroom farms; and the mall shooting in Allen, Texas, last month, when authorities say a gunman stepped out of a car and immediately started firing at people.
Yet while these tragic events garner an outsize amount of attention in the news media and the public’s mind, they represent only a tiny fraction of overall gun deaths.
Far more frequent are fatal shootings involving fewer than four people and deaths from domestic violence. And then there are the suicides,

which make up more than half of the 14,000 gun deaths so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which monitors news media and police reports to compile data.
Still, mass killings spark the deepest fear in most people’s hearts.
“People around the country all send their kids to schools — and they worry about if they send their kid to school, are they going to get shot?” said Daniel Webster, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions.
The fact is, though they are less common than other gun deaths, the mass killings keep happening — 20 years after Columbine, 10 years after Sandy Hook, five years after Las Vegas, and less than one year after massacres at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, and an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
People who study such violence are also perplexed by the sustained pace of the brutality.
“We have plenty of examples of things that seem to be at the breaking point in this country,” said Katherine Schweit, a former FBI executive who created the agency’s active shooter protocol after Sandy Hook. “When I was asked to work on this in 2013, I didn’t ever imagine 10 years later I’d still be working on the same thing.”
It will take years — if it’s even possible — for researchers to pinpoint what’s behind the drastic increase in gun violence. Advocates say there are measures that could perhaps avert such crimes — firearms reform and weapons bans among them — but note there is little appetite on Capitol Hill to implement them.
“I think the United States has a relationship with guns unlike any other country in the world,” said Kelly Drane, research director for the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. “These events are a consequence of our failure to put in place prevention measures.”