(KERO) — Around the nation, we continue to see mass shootings. In the last 24 hours, two shootings happened: one in South Carolina and another in Texas.
Deputies in York County, South Carolina say five people -- including two children-- are dead and another person was wounded. This all happened late Wednesday night when deputies responded to reports of a shooting inside a home. That's where they found a well-known doctor in the area, his wife, and their grandchildren shot to death.
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The suspect, former NFL player Phillip Adams, shot himself to death early Thursday with a .45 caliber weapon.
An investigation into the motive behind the shooting is still underway.
Meanwhile in Texas Thursday afternoon one person is dead after a shooting at a cabinet store. Police there say the shooter was an employee at the store.
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Four other people were taken to the hospital but it's not clear what condition they are in. The suspected gunman remains missing as investigators try to determine a motive.
These are just the latest in other mass shooting incidents we've seen over the last few weeks:
- Back on March 17th, a gunman killed eight people at several different locations in Atlanta, Georgia. Most of those victims were Asian-American.
- Ten people were killed inside a grocery store in Boulder, Colorado. Those victims ranged in age from 20 to 65 years old, including a police officer who leaves behind a wife and five children.
- Then days later on March 31st a gunman killed four people inside an office building in Orange, California. Investigators say that the shooter knew the victims, including a 9-year-old boy killed that night.
Data shows that more people in the United States die at the hands of firearms than any other nation. In 2019 more than 14,000 people were killed in gun-related homicides.
Other nations fall far behind the U.S. based on this metric but that does not mean other countries are free of violent crimes. In countries where gun ownership is more rare reports of beatings, stabbings, and rapes are far higher than those of the United States.
Bakersfield Congressman Kevin McCarthy weighed in on the Biden Administration's plans to enact stricter gun control laws saying Democrats are taking the wrong approach. He said in part:
"Instead of targeting criminals, they passed legislation that adds more hurdles for Americans to keep themselves and their families safe. Penalizing common private transfers, creating a de facto national gun registry, and ending the three-day-process-to-sale. These actions, like Biden's executive orders, are not in response to the facts. Instead, they are obvious attempts to cater to gun control activists."
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Congressman McCarthy also said Thursday that with new gun regulations comes the infringement of 2nd Amendment rights. But despite pushes to restrict ownership over the years Americans still own a lot of guns.
The United States has the highest rate of gun ownership compared to other nations. Americans own roughly 90 guns per 100 people. Even in California, the state with the strictest gun control laws in the nation, roughly 4.2 million adults own guns. That's about 14 percent of the state's population.
The new changes the Biden Administration is set to roll out won't have much of an impact on gun owners in California since most of those measures are already in place here.
