The shootings happened in cities and rural areas alike. The toll included a state trooper who was ambushed in central Pennsylvania.
Mass shootings and violence killed and wounded people across the United States this weekend, including four people found dead of gunshots in a small Idaho town, a Pennsylvania state trooper killed in an ambush, multiple people firing guns into an Illinois holiday crowd and bullets flying among teenagers partying in Missouri.
The shootings happened in cities and rural areas alike, following a surge in homicides and other violence over the past several years that accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic. This weekend also brought mass shootings in Washington state, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Southern California and Baltimore.
“There’s no question there’s been a spike in violence,” said Daniel Nagin, a professor of public policy and statistics at Carnegie Mellon University. “Some of these cases seem to be just disputes, often among adolescents, and those disputes are played out with firearms, not with fists.”
Researchers disagree over the cause of the increase. Theories include the possibility that violence is driven by the prevalence of guns in America, or by less aggressive police tactics or a decline in prosecutions for misdemeanor weapon offenses, Nagin said.
Only the Idaho killings fit the definition of a mass killing in which four or more people die, not including the shooter. However, the number of injured in most of the weekend cases matches the widely accepted definition for mass shootings.
Here’s a look at the shootings this weekend:
Police in Idaho arrested a suspect in a shooting that killed four people on Sunday at a home behind a church.
Responding officers found four people, all dead from gunshot wounds, at a residence in Kellogg, according to the Shoshone County Sheriff’s Office and news reports. Idaho State Police said a 31-year-old man was detained, KXLY-TV reported.
A neighbor at the scene told the TV station that there had been an ongoing dispute between neighbors at the location. It happened behind the Mountain View Congregational Church, the Shoshone News-Press reported.
At least 23 people were shot, one fatally, early Sunday in a suburban Chicago parking lot where hundreds of people had gathered to celebrate Juneteenth, authorities said.
The DuPage County sheriff’s office described a “peaceful gathering” that suddenly turned violent as a number of people fired multiple shots into the crowd in Willowbrook, Illinois, about 20 miles (32 kilometers) southwest of Chicago.
A motive wasn’t immediately known. Sheriff’s spokesman Robert Carroll said authorities were interviewing “persons of interest,” the Daily Herald reported.
“We just started hearing shooting, so we dropped down until they stopped,” a witness, Markeshia Avery, told WLS-TV.
The White House issued a statement calling the violence a tragedy and saying the president was thinking of those killed and injured. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker said in a statement that he was monitoring the investigation.
