A gunman was arrested Thursday in Raleigh, in the southeastern United States, after killing five people, including an off-duty police officer, authorities in that city said.
The suspect, on whom no details have yet been given, also injured several people, including a police officer from a canine squad. His vital prognosis is however not engaged, had indicated a few minutes earlier the mayor of the municipality, Mary-Ann Baldwin, deploring a “sad and tragic day”.
The first shots rang out shortly after 5 p.m. (9 p.m. GMT), on a walking path in this city of nearly 500,000 inhabitants, capital of North Carolina.
A large contingent of security forces was then deployed to find the perpetrator of the shooting, local media reported.
“I saw him pass in front of my house, in the garden. He had a long-barreled shotgun and was dressed in camouflage,” Robert, a witness who declined to give his name, told local channel WRAL.
At a press conference that evening, Ms Baldwin detailed that “at approximately 8 p.m., Raleigh police [avait] indicated to have surrounded a suspect in a residence of the zone”.
“The suspect has been taken into custody,” the city police tweeted shortly after.
Shootings regularly mourn the United States, which pays a very heavy price for the dissemination of firearms on its territory and the ease with which Americans have access to them.
Faced with this scourge, “we must do more,” called the mayor of the capital of North Carolina, visibly upset.
“We need to put an end to this wanton violence in America. We must respond to gun violence. Our task is immense. And tonight our mourning is immense.”
About 49,000 people died from firearms in the United States 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 shootings with many victims that mark the spirits the most, while illustrating the ideological gap between conservatives and progressives on the question of how to prevent such tragedies.
Recent American history is indeed punctuated by killings, without any place of daily life seeming safe, from the company to the church, from the supermarket to the discotheque, from the public highway to public transport common.
A massacre committed in a high school in Florida, on February 14, 2018 in Parkland, had sparked a vast national movement, with young people at the forefront, to demand stricter supervision of individual weapons in the United States.
But, despite the mobilization of more than a million demonstrators, the United States Congress did not pass ambitious legislation, many elected officials being under the influence of the powerful National Rifle Association (NRA), the first American arms lobby.
In fact, in a country where the possibility of owning a firearm is considered by millions of Americans as a fundamental constitutional right, the only recent legislative advances remain marginal, such as the generalization of criminal and psychiatric background checks above all weapon purchase.