Several mass shootings in Norfolk, Virginia, and Charleston, South Carolina, on early Sunday have resulted in at least two fatalities and 10 injuries, including some students.
The series of high-profile mass shootings this year, including in Buffalo, New York, Uvalde, Texas, and Highland Park, Illinois, have brought renewed attention to gun violence in the United States. The recent shootings have prompted an investigation into gun manufacturers by the House Oversight Committee.
Mass Shootings in North Carolina, Virginia
The attention also helped engender bipartisan support for the passage of the most significant federal gun legislation in nearly three decades. Police in Norfolk responded to the shooting at 12:00 a.m. on Sunday. Law enforcement personnel arrived on the scene and discovered seven people with gunshot wounds.
Officials said that two of the victims, identified as 25-year-old Zabre Miller and 19-year-old Angelia McKnight, later died of their injuries. Many of the other victims were students at Norfolk State University, the school confirmed in a Twitter post on Sunday, as per Axios.
There were two Charleston Police officers on the scene of downtown Charleston just before 1:00 a.m. on Sunday when they "observed a shooting occur in a large crowd." They also saw "three individuals running on foot, immediately where the shots came from."
Five of the people shot in the area were later brought to hospitals and treated for their injuries that were non-life-threatening. Initially, police thought that a sixth person had been injured by gunfire but it was subsequently established that they had sustained their injury as a result of a fall during the chaos in the area, the spokesperson for the Charleston Police Department said.
According to Fox News, Norfolk State University police said that they had secured the campus and that counseling was being made available for students. A police source said that Sentara Norfolk General Hospital's Trauma Center was also temporarily placed on lockdown.
Student Counseling
Norfolk emergency dispatch radio traffic also indicated that first responders rushed to several other shooting locations in the city around the same time frame. The ensuing violence and number of patients resulted in the lockdown of the local hospital. Some of the victims were diverted to other hospitals until the lockdown lifted around 5:00 a.m.
Norfolk State University posted on Facebook, saying, "Our culture of care mandates that we pull together, as our Spartan family always does, in challenging times. Counseling and support services are available today from 12:00 to 3:00 p.m. in the Student Center, Room 312. The school added that they were encouraging the campus community to remain vigilant of their surroundings.
The university is a public historically-Black university that has about 5,000 undergraduate students. The shooting occurred about 30 minutes away from the North Carolina state line and comes as the U.S. has had at least 456 mass shootings so far this year.
The statistic is based on the Gun Violence Archive and mass shootings are defined as incidents in which four or more people are shot, excluding the shooter, WRAL reported.
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