(Washington) The killer accused of killing five people in North Carolina on Thursday is a 15-year-old boy, local authorities said Friday, adding that he was hospitalized and in critical condition.
Posted yesterday at 11:38
“That’s enough,” President Joe Biden reacted, renewing his call to ban assault rifles after this shooting, one of the many mourning the United States.
The victims of the shootings in Raleigh, the state capital, are between the ages of 16 and 52, city police chief Estella Patterson said. Among them is a police officer who was not on duty.
He did not specify what kind of weapon was used.
The alleged shooter also wounded two other people, “a police officer […] who was treated and discharged from the hospital “and another 59-year-old” still in critical condition, “he added at a press conference.
The killer opened fire, for an as yet unexplained reason, shortly after 5pm on a footpath in this city of nearly 500,000 inhabitants.
A large contingent of security forces was then deployed to find the perpetrator of the shooting. No explanation was given as to how he got his weapon out of him.
ALLEN BREED PHOTO, ASSOCIATED PRESS
“We have been grieved and prayed along with too many families who have had to bear the terrible burden of these mass shootings,” Joe Biden said in a statement.
“The Americans are in favor of this common sense measure of removing weapons of war from our streets,” said the US president.
The 79-year-old Democrat would like to reinstate the ban on semi-automatic weapons, as it existed in the United States between 1994 and 2004.
But this project is blocked by the republican opposition, in the name of the right to carry a gun guaranteed by the American Constitution.
About 49,000 people died from firearms in the United States in 2021, up from 45,000 in 2020, which was already a record year. This represents more than 130 deaths per day, more than half of which are suicides.
