Congregants jumped in and subdued the attacker, believed to be an Asian man in his 60s.
Amid a nationwide explosion in gun violence that shows few signs of easing, a gunman opened fire inside an Orange County church on Sunday and killed one person and critically injured four others. The attack in the quiet city of Laguna Woods came just one day after the deadliest mass shooting of 2022, a racist massacre in a supermarket in Buffalo that killed 10 people. Also over the weekend, a man was fatally shot outside of Grand Central Market, downtown Los Angeles’s popular food hall, and 17 people were wounded in a shooting in Milwaukee. Gun deaths in the United States in 2020 reached the highest levels ever recorded, with gun-related homicides jumping 35 percent, my colleagues reported last week. And in many places, including Los Angeles, those trends have not yet reversed. That has raised concerns about what will happen over the next few months, as homicides typically increase in the summer in the United States.
“June, July, August are always the biggest shooting months,” said Christopher Herrmann, an assistant professor in the department of law and police science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. The Laguna Woods shooting took place just before 1:30 p.m. on Sunday, as a largely Taiwanese congregation gathered for a lunch banquet at Geneva Presbyterian Church after a service, law enforcement officials said. Thirty to 40 people were there. One man died on the scene, four were critically injured and another person sustained minor injuries, said Jeff Hallock, Orange County undersheriff. But there probably would have been far more devastation if churchgoers had not fought back, he said.
