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- cross-posted to:
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Seven minors were hospitalized with injuries late Saturday night after a mass shooting broke out in downtown Indianapolis, police said.
The children and teenagers, who were between the ages of 12 and 17 years old, each sustained gunshot wounds in the shooting, which happened just after 11 p.m. local time outside of the city’s Circle Centre Mall. CBS affiliate WTTV shared images from the scene.
No suspects have been arrested, but investigators believe more than one weapon was used to carry out the shooting, according to the Indianapolis Metro Police Department. A police report filed after the incident identified four boys and three girls as victims, all of whom were stable when Indianapolis Deputy Police Chief Tanya Terry gave preliminary details about the incident at a briefing early Sunday morning.
Mass shooters are the cause of relatively few deaths compared to the “accidental” or “spur of the moment” deaths the prevalence of guns in American households causes. I am not trying to downplay mass shootings, because they are absolutely loathsome and should be enough for any sensible person to realise that something is terribly wrong, but they tend to overshadow the much higher mortality rate which the prevalence of guns in the US are causing.
The US statistic of toddler shootings, as in toddlers shooting other persons, is above 0 each year. That alone is a pretty telling figure.
Gun safety is huge and no kids should have access to guns, but mental health is by and large a much bigger issue.
“In 2021, 54% of all gun-related deaths in the U.S. were suicides (26,328), while 43% were murders (20,958), according to the CDC. The remaining gun deaths that year were accidental (549), involved law enforcement (537) or had undetermined circumstances (458).”
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/26/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/