A man shot and killed six people, including his girlfriend, at an early Sunday birthday party in the US state of Colorado. He then committed suicide.
Police in Colorado Springs (about 110 miles from the capital Denver) responded to an emergency call at a trailer park, where they found six people dead and one seriously injured, who was taken to hospital but did not resist.
According to a statement from the police department, the suspect, the boyfriend of one of the victims, drove to the scene and started shooting people at the party. None of the children at the scene were injured in the attack.
The identities of the dead have not been released and police are still investigating the motives behind the crime.
Filming took place at the Canterbury Manufactured Home Community, a trailer park with around 470 vehicles and a large portion of Latino residents on the southeast side of town. Police blocked off the area.
Freddie Marquez, 33, said his stepmother was one of the victims and he was at the party, but left before the attack.
Some time after midnight, he received a call from the son of one of the women at the party, who was crying on the phone. “Someone came in and shot everyone,” he said.
Colorado Springs Mayor Republican John Suthers said the “senseless act of violence” shocked the community and called for prayers for the victims and their families. State Governor Jared Polis said it was a “devastating” act.
It was the third mass shooting in Colorado Springs since October 2015, including a Halloween massacre and an attack on a family planning clinic.
The United States has been the scene of a series of mass shootings in recent weeks, including one in a FedEx unit in Indianapolis, another in offices in California, a third in a supermarket in Boulder, also Colorado. , and three other massage parlors in Atlanta. the same day.
The recent shootings have reignited the gun control debate and last month President Joe Biden announced a series of measures to contain what he called the country’s “gun epidemic”. Among the actions there is a plan to prevent the spread of so-called “ghost weapons”, kits with parts and instructions that allow the buyer to assemble their own weapons “in less than 30 minutes”, thus avoiding inspection.
The president also announced that he would increase the regulation of “seat belts”, devices that support the arm and make the shot more precise and therefore more deadly. The perpetrator of the Boulder attack, for example, used one of these devices.
Biden announced his proposals were a starting point and reinforced a call for Congress to approve more comprehensive measures. Currently, two bills approved by the House, which provide for the extension of the background checks of those who buy weapons on the Internet and the increase of the period between sale and delivery to ten days – which would give more time to analyze the history of the buyer -, awaiting a vote in the Senate.
Increased control over access to arms is, however, prohibited in the Legislature by the Republican Party, which views the right to bear arms as a symbol of the freedom it defends.
In 2020, there were more than 43,000 gun deaths in the United States, according to the Gun Violence Archive.