ARKABUTLA, Miss. (REUTERS) – On Friday, a shooter murdered six people in the southern US state of Mississippi, leading President Joseph Biden to call for tighter gun regulations only days after urging action in the wake of a fatal campus shooting.
According to local media, a guy shot and murdered a person at a business in the tiny hamlet of Arkabutla, Mississippi, before proceeding to a neighbouring residence and killing a lady.
According to a subsequent CNN story quoting the county sheriff, the lady was his ex-wife.
Sheriff Brad Lance told CNN that police traced down the suspect’s car to a residence that was ultimately proven to belong to the suspect, where they discovered two more victims.
Lance said that the fifth and sixth victims, a man and a woman, were discovered shot to death at an adjacent residence and were potentially linked to the suspect, who was apprehended as he tried to leave.
In a Facebook post, the Tate County Sheriff’s Office named the suspected gunman as Richard Dale Crum, 52, and said that he was in arrest and charged with first-degree murder.
Governor of Mississippi Tate Reeves tweeted that he has been informed on the situation.
“We now think he acted alone. “His motivation is unknown,” Reeves said.
Please pray for the victims and families of this awful atrocity at this time. The sheriff of Tate County, where Arkabutla is situated, and the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation took up the investigation.
‘Enough’
The Friday shooting comes days after a man with no apparent purpose assaulted a university campus in Michigan’s upper peninsula and killed three people.
In a statement posted Friday night, Biden echoed the frustrated emotion he voiced following the massacre in Michigan by declaring, “Enough.”
48 days into the year, at least 73 mass shootings have already occurred in the United States. Thoughts and prayers are insufficient. “Gun violence is a pandemic, and the Legislature must act immediately,” added Biden.
Two tragic mass shootings impacting the Asian American community happened in California in less than a week last month.
“We need common sense adjustments to gun laws,” Biden stated Friday night.
His appeals for Congress to impose a nationwide ban on assault weapons, which existed from 1994 to 2004, have been met with resistance from Republicans, who have had a tiny majority in the House since January and are fervent advocates of the constitutional right to carry guns.
According to the Gun Violence Archive database, there were an estimated 44,000 gun-related fatalities in the United States in 2017; about half of them were homicides, accidents, and self-defense, while the other half were suicides.