A girl among victims of another US shooting

A 12-year-old girl appears today among the victims of gun violence in the United States, after eight people, including her, were shot in a neighborhood of this capital.

The mass shooting that occurred the night before in the southeastern part of the city had two main scenes, which police believe are connected.

The deputy chief of the Metropolitan Police Department, Andre Wright, mentioned in a press conference that in the first of those points seven adult men were shot, though injuries were not life-threatening.

The second location was less than a mile from the first, where officers found a 12-year-old girl with a lower extremity injury.

Fortunately, “she is also stable and her injuries were not life-threatening,” Wright said.

The authority stressed the information is still “very preliminary” and the investigation is ongoing.

“It is possible that the two scenes are not actually connected, but due to the proximity of the places and the time between incidents, the police currently believe that they are related,” explained the source quoted by the CBS News channel.

The deputy chief also mentioned they do not know the possible motive for the shootings, neither how many suspects may be involved.

“One thing we know for sure is that we were looking for a black sedan, possibly a Mercedes, which witnesses say drove across the block and fired at people indiscriminately,” Wright added.

Americans have the guarantee to keep and bear arms enshrined in the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which is criticized by those who say it threatens the right to life.

The United States has suffered 169 mass shootings so far this year (those in which at least four people were shot, excluding the attacker), and more than 12,900 people have been killed by firearms, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

Of the total number of fatalities due to armed violence in 2023, 79 were children under 11 years of age, while 462 were 17 or older.

Just this month, an African-American teenager was shot for knocking on the wrong door in Missouri, while in Texas, a girl nearly died after mistaking her car for someone else’s who chose to shoot her, and in North Carolina a six-year-old girl sustained a gunshot wound to her face for going into her neighbor’s yard to get a ball.