California: More Dead in 3rd Mass Shooting in 3 Days

Facts

• Oakland police have confirmed that another man was killed and seven people injured on Monday in California's third mass shooting in three days.
• According to the Oakland Police Department, the third shooting took place at approximately 6 p.m. local time in the 5900 block of Macarthur Boulevard. Officers haven't yet disclosed a possible motive for the shooting.
• This comes hours after a man shot dead seven former co-workers in the coastal city of Half Moon Bay, south of San Fransisco. Four victims were found at a mushroom farm, while three more were found at a nearby trucking business. An eighth is currently in critical condition.
• The second and third shootings occurred only days after 11 people were killed in the city of Monterey Park on Saturday. The perpetrator was identified as 72-year-old Huu Can Tran, who later died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.
• Officers have arrested a suspect in the second shooting, having been found in his car at the parking lot of a sheriff's substation: a 67-year-old man named Chunli Zhao, according to San Mateo County Sheriff Christina Corpus.
• According to data from the Gun Violence archive, at least 70 people have been killed and 167 injured in 39 mass shootings across the US since the beginning of the year.

Sources: CNN, ABC, BBC News, Reuters, Associated Press, and NBC.

Narratives

• Republican narrative, as provided by The Washington Examiner. Gun control groups and politicians are quick to use these incidents to garner political points rather than wait for the details of a shooting to emerge. The identified weapon of the shooting in Monterey Park, for example, was a handgun, which would render the heavily demanded "assault weapon" ban useless. More must be done to target the root cause of this violence; simply curbing the rights of law-abiding gun owners — as California is renowned for doing — clearly isn't the answer.
• Democratic narrative, as provided by Press Democrat. While critics will argue that California — which has some of the nation's strictest gun laws — is proof that gun control doesn't work, this isn't true. It isn't possible to prevent every shooting, and California has some of the lowest rates of gun-related deaths in the nation. These latest tragedies are proof that more red flag laws, more background checks, and more gun control laws must be enforced nationwide.