Face of Nation : An active shooter near the area of a shopping mall in El Paso is drawing a response from multiple law enforcement agencies, including the FBI. El Paso police tweeted at about noon local time that they have “reports of multiple shooters.”
In several earlier tweetsSaturday, police urged people to stay away from the area near the Cielo Vista mall due to an “active shooter.” The police tweeted that the shooter was in the area of Hawkins and Gateway East boulevards, which is the location of a Walmart.
The gunfire that tore through a Walmart jammed with back-to-school shoppers on Saturday marked another bleak milestone in a nation pocked by gun violence: the 250th mass shooting of 2019. And the rampage in El Paso, which left 20 dead and 26 injured, notched an even darker statistic: It occurred on the 215th day of the year, meaning there have been more mass shootings than days so far this year.
The massacre at the Walmart near the Cielo Vista Mall became the nation’s latest mass shooting as defined by the Gun Violence Archive, a not-for-profit organization that provides online public access to information about gun-related violence.
The archive categorizes mass shootings as incidents in which four or more people were shot or killed, not including the shooters. So far this year, 522 people have died in mass shootings and 2,040 have been injured, according to the data.
The incident also came in a particularly painful week: Two people were shot and killedat a Walmart store in Southaven, Mississippi, south of Memphis on Tuesday, and three people were killed by gunfire Sunday at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in northern California.A longtime city worker opened fire in a building that houses Virginia Beach government offices on May 31, killing 12 before he was gunned down by police.
