A weekend of celebrations as the US marked its semiquincentennial was marred by outbreaks of gun violence that claimed dozens of lives and left multiple other people wounded.
Those hurt included a woman and a child among four shot during a gathering of Mexico soccer supporters in Los Angeles following their team’s World Cup elimination on Sunday night.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, which keeps a running total of cases, deaths and injuries involving firearms, at least 43 people were killed since early Saturday – the 250th anniversary of the US’s declaration of independence from the UK – in a succession of shootings in numerous cities and neighborhoods.
The database has recorded 6,604 fatalities to gun violence in the year to date as of Monday morning. The database listed at least 224 mass shootings, which it considers to be cases in which at least four people were killed or injured, not including the shooter.
In one of the most prominent episodes over the weekend, four people were shot in an east Los Angeles neighborhood where soccer fans had assembled during Mexico’s World Cup defeat to England.
The Los Angeles police department said that a suspect pulled out a gun during an argument at about 9.30pm local time – after the match ended in a 3-2 eliminating defeat for Mexico – and started firing, as reported by the news channel KTLA.
The shots struck two intended victims and two bystanders, a woman and a boy who left the scene to seek help, the department said.
All four victims were treated at local hospitals for non-life-threatening injuries, the outlet said.
No other details about the victims or the age of the minor were released.
Elsewhere, two people were killed on Sunday in a shooting while in a large crowd in Batesburg-Leesville, South Carolina, authorities said.
Officers responded to reports of gunfire to find three people shot, including Ronald Cleveland Brown, 39; and Devante Elliott, 34; who were both later declared dead, according to the local ABC news affiliate WJBF.
In Austin, Texas, a man and a woman, in their late teens or early 20s, were shot dead in the parking lot of a nightclub in the early hours of Sunday, CBS Austin reported.
The shooting followed an altercation at about 4am, the local Travis county sheriff’s office spokesperson, Kristen Dark, told the outlet.
“I can’t say that it stems from the nightclub at all,” she said. “It happened in the parking lot of the nightclub, but we don’t know at this point in time what led to the altercation.”
Investigators were already working on a separate gun fatality in the city – the death of a man in a parking lot of a sports bar late on Saturday during a shooting in which another male was injured.
In Compton, California, three people were killed in incidents at separate Independence Day block parties on Saturday, the Los Angeles county sheriff’s office said. In the first shooting, a woman and a man were killed. A man was the victim in the second.
In Wilkinson county, Mississippi, the Centreville police department is investigating a mass shooting early on Saturday in which two adult men were killed and at least nine others wounded, WLBT News reported.
Constantly high rates of gun violence in the US have prompted many to call on Congress to implement more substantial federal firearms control. But Congress has been unable to implement such restrictions over the years.
The findings of at least one study suggest gun violence can be more likely to occur in US communities during major holidays than at other times.
