Seven Killed, Injured in Philadelphia Shooting

Date: 22 November 2023 - 21:50

News ID: ۱۲۱۷۸۸

PHILADELPHIA (Dispatches) — A shooting in Philadelphia killed two men and wounded five others Tuesday night and police said the violence may have been drug-related.
Reports of shots being fired sent police to Fairhill Street in North Philadelphia at about 8:30 p.m., where they found four wounded men on the ground, interim Police Commissioner John Stanford told reporters.
All were taken to a hospital, where two were pronounced dead, Stanford said.
Three other wounded men walked into three hospitals but there was no immediate word on their conditions.
The men ranged in age from about 19 to 32 or 33, Stanford said. At least 70 shots were fired, Stanford said.
Four handguns and a long gun along with narcotics were found at the scene, and investigators believe several shooters were involved, he said.
The U.S. has one of the highest rate of deaths from gun violence in the world: 4.31 deaths per 100,000 people in 2021. That was more than seven times as high as the rate in Canada, which had 0.57 deaths per 100,000 people — and about 340 times higher than in the United Kingdom, which had 0.013 deaths per 100,000.
On a state-by-state calculation, the rates can be even higher. In the District of Columbia, the rate is 13.93 per 100,000 — the highest in the United States. The second-highest is in Louisiana: 10.91 per 100,000. In Maine — scene of the deadliest recent mass shootings — the rates are much lower than the national average: 1.15 per 100,000. But five other states that were the site of mass shootings over Halloween weekend – Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana and Texas – have rates that are higher than the national average.
The numbers come from a massive database maintained by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which tracks lives lost in every country, in every year, by every possible cause of death.
The 2021 figures paint a fairly rosy picture for much of the world, with deaths due to gun violence rare even in many lower-middle income, and even low-income countries — such as Bangladesh and Burundi, which saw 0.06 deaths and 0.14 deaths, respectively, per 100,000 people.
Prosperous Asian countries such as Singapore (0.003), Japan (0.005) and South Korea (0.01) boast the absolute lowest

rates — along with China, at 0.013.

“It is a little surprising that a country like ours should have this level of gun violence,” Ali Mokdad, a professor of global health and epidemiology at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, told NPR. “If you compare us to other well-off countries, we really stand out.”

Mokdad said a major driver is the large presence of gangs and drug trafficking. “The gangs and drug traffickers fight among themselves to get more territory, and they fight the police,” Mokdad said. Citizens who are not involved are also often caught in the crossfire.