A shooter opened fire on a campus in Las Vegas, hitting several people, then was found dead, said local police and the university, located a stone’s throw from the major casinos of the American city. “The suspect has been located and is deceased,” wrote on X (formerly Twitter) the Las Vegas police, who had previously written to intervene for “preliminary elements indicating a shooter in action on campus”.
Several people affected
“There appear to be several people affected,” she wrote. The alert system of the University of Nevada in Las Vegas had reported shootings on campus and asked everyone to “evacuate the area”, located two kilometers from the famous “strip” of this immense city of the American West known for its casinos. Once police declared the event over, the university asked everyone to “go indoors” so police could “evacuate the buildings one by one.”
In 2017, the gaming capital of the world experienced one of the worst gun massacres in the country. A man opened fire from the 32nd floor of a hotel onto a crowd below attending a country music concert, killing 58 and wounding hundreds, before killing himself. The United States is paying a very heavy price for the spread of firearms on its territory and the ease with which Americans have access to them. The country has more individual weapons than inhabitants: one adult in three owns at least one weapon and nearly one adult in two lives in a home where there is a weapon.
The consequence of this proliferation is the very high rate of firearm deaths in the United States, incomparable to that of other developed countries. Around 49,000 people died from gunfire in 2021, compared to 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.
However, it is the tragedies with many victims that mark people’s minds the most, while illustrating the ideological gap separating conservatives and progressives on the question of how to prevent such tragedies. Recent American history is indeed punctuated by killings, with no place in daily life seeming safe, from the business to the church, from the supermarket to the discotheque, from the public highway to public transport. common.