On June 11, in Annapolis a town located 30 miles away from the United States Capitol Hill, a mass shooting took place at a private residence which left at least three people dead and three others injured.
Annapolis police Chief Ed Jackson said the shooting took place in the 1000 block of Paddington Place in the state’s capital city amid an exchange of gunfire, adding that a suspect is in custody.
After initial reports said at least one person died, police said at least three have died. While the conditions of the surviving victims are not known, police said one person was flown to a trauma centre.
There is no further threat to the public, Annapolis police said at the scene and online.
Several police cars were seen in the area where the shooting happened, which is south of the city’s centre near the waterfront.
“My message to the community is this wasn’t a random act of violence,” Chief Jackson told reporters at the scene. The police chief also said a “person of interest” was in custody and a weapon was seized from the shooting, Fox News reported citing The Baltimore Sun.
State Sen. Sarah Elfreth commented on the shooting in a Facebook post, calling the incident “a tragedy beyond words.”
“Our community experienced a tragedy beyond words this evening,” she wrote. “Multiple fatalities and injuries are reported. A suspect is in custody and police are communicating that there is no broader threat to the public. Please keep the family and the first responders of the Annapolis Police Department & Annapolis Fire Department in your thoughts tonight.”
People in the area told DC News Now that there was a graduation party happening nearby. It is not clear if the shooting was related to the event.
Further details of the incident are awaited.
There have been at least 130 shootings so far this year, including a recent incident in Nashville, Tennessee, on March 27, 2023 when three children and three staff members were shot and killed at the Covenant School, a Christian school for students in preschool through sixth grade.
So far in 2023, 9,870 people have died from gun violence in the US, as of March 27, which is an average of more than 114 deaths each day, according to the non- profit research database, Gun Violence Archive.
The majority of these deaths have occurred in states like Texas, California, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Illinois and Louisiana.
In the last three years, there have been more than 600 mass shootings, almost two a day on average. While the US does not have a single definition for “mass shootings”, the Gun Violence Archive defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people are injured or killed. Their figures include shootings that happen in homes and in public places.
Deaths by suicide made up the vast majority of gun violence deaths this year – 57.9 per cent, the nonprofit gun violence tracker reports.
There’s been an average of about 67 deaths by suicide per day in 2023. Of those who died from gun violence this year, 338 were teens and 60 were children. The U.S. has surpassed 39,000 deaths from gun violence per year since 2014, according to data from Gun Violence Archive.
Still, gun deaths have been down from 2016, 2017 and 2018, when the total number of deaths each year surpassed 50,000. However, the situation remains grim. There were 44,310 such deaths in 2022.
48,830 people died from gun-related injuries in the US during 2021, according to the latest data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). That’s nearly an 8 per cent increase from 2020, which was a record-breaking year for firearm deaths.
