No fewer than five people were killed and two dozen others were left wounded in a pair of weekend mass shootings in the United States, becoming the latest in a string of deadly gun attacks that have left lawmakers scrambling to tackle the crisis.
The shootings in Philadelphia which happened early Sunday in Chattanooga, Tennessee further jolted a country facing a gun violence epidemic that has already claimed several thousand American lives this year and shows no signs of abating.
And they come as polarized US senators find themselves under pressure to craft a measure that codifies at least basic, preliminary steps to help reduce the carnage.
In Philadelphia, two men and a woman were killed when multiple people opened fire on a crowd at a popular nightlife area, Police Inspector D.F. Pace told reporters.
He said officers ‘observed several active shooters shooting into the crowd” of “hundreds of individuals enjoying South Street, as they do every single weekend.’
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A chaotic eruption of violence in Chattanooga resulted in 14 people shot including two killed, while another person died and two more were injured after they were struck by vehicles fleeing the scene, police chief Celeste Murphy told reporters, adding “several” victims remained in critical condition.
The pre-dawn incident occurred near a nightclub in a downtown section of Chattanooga, a city of 180,000.
As of mid-Sunday, no arrests had been made in either case, Murphy and Philadelphia media said.
Such gun violence has become almost commonplace in America, but the shock felt over recent mass shootings at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York and an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas have spurred ardent cries for action.
Democratic Senator Chris Murphy has been working with a bipartisan group of senators on reform measures — a heavy lift with Republicans routinely rejecting most forms of gun control.
Senator Murphy said Sunday the group hoped to hammer together a legislative package that draws at least 10 Republican votes on top of expected support from nearly every Democrat.
Numerous Philadelphia officers were patrolling South Street when the first shots were heard, a police deployment that Pace described as “standard” for the popular area on summer weekend nights.
But investigators still had “a lot of unanswered questions,” Pace said.
Warmer weather tends to bring a spike in US violence, and in addition to the massacres in Texas and New York, recent weeks have seen mass shootings at a hospital in Oklahoma and a church in California.