A father killed his three minor children and a fourth person Monday before killing himself inside a church in Sacramento, California's capital, police said.
"At 5:07 p.m. we received a call involving gunfire inside a church," said Rod Grassman, a Sacramento police officer, during a news conference.
When officers arrived on scene "we found an adult, a father who opened fire and killed his three children, all under the age of fifteen," he continued, adding that "a fifth person was also killed," without being able to say at this time if he was related to the other victims.
After the massacre, the gunman turned his gun on himself.
Sacramento sheriff's departments were unable at this stage to explain why the gunman and his victims were inside the church, or what the motive was for this mass shooting, the firearms attack that has at least four victims in the terminology of U.S. authorities.
Attacks using firearms, mostly inside schools, shopping malls, workplaces and places of worship, are a perennially recurring scourge in the US, where the right to bear arms is constitutionally guaranteed. Efforts by one government after another to control their sale usually end up in the wastebaskets of Congress, where the powerful gun lobby, the NRA, has great influence.
Violent incidents involving firearms increased after the outbreak of the pandemic. In 2021, they claimed the lives of nearly 45,000 people in the US, including 24,000 suicides. Among the victims were more than 1,500 minors, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
Source: Cyprus Times
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