Police cordon off the area where at least one person was killed and 22 others wounded in a shooting just after midnight Sunday at a large Juneteenth celebration in a strip mall parking lot in Willowbrook, Illinois, on June 18, 2023. (Photo by Jacek B A spate of weekend mass shootings and violence across the U.S.
killed at least six people, including a Pennsylvania state trooper, and left dozens injured.The shootings follow a surge in homicides and other violence over the past several years that experts say accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic.
They happened in suburban Chicago, Washington state, central Pennsylvania, St. Louis, Southern California and Baltimore."There’s no question there’s been a spike in violence," said Daniel Nagin, a professor of public policy and statistics at Carnegie Mellon University. "Some of these cases seem to be just disputes, often among adolescents, and those disputes are played out with firearms, not with fists."Researchers disagree over the cause of the increase.
Theories include the possibility that violence is driven by the prevalence of guns in America, or by less aggressive police tactics or a decline in prosecutions for misdemeanor weapon offenses, Nagin said.As of Sunday evening, none of the weekend events fit the definition of a mass killing, because fewer than four people died at each location.