A gunman killed four people and wounded three others, including a police officer, in the US state of Colorado on Monday before being killed, US police said.
The attack began Monday afternoon and shots were fired at at least four locations in the cities of Denver and Lakewood, police said at an evening news conference. “There are four significant shooting locations in the city and county of Denver,” Denver Police Chief Paul Pazen told CNN.
The shooter first opened fire in Denver, killing two women and one man and wounding another. He then drove to Lakewood, where he killed one man and wounded another, according to police. Using the information from the first attack, Lakewood agents were able to identify the individual.
A shootout then began between the officers and the shooter in which “the shooter was killed,” Lakewood police spokesman John Romero said, adding that the gunman was “pronounced dead at the scene.” In the exchange of fire, a police officer was injured. The “officer is undergoing surgery at the hospital,” added Romero. The motives that led the man to perpetrate the attack are unknown.
Colorado has been the scene of some of the most shocking mass shootings in the United States in modern history. In 2012, a man broke into an Aurora movie theater in Denver, the state capital, during a midnight showing and fired at viewers of the movie Batman.
While in 1999, a pair of Columbine High School students murdered 12 of their classmates and one of their teachers before taking their own lives. In March of this year, a gunman killed 10 people at a King Soopers store, a supermarket in Boulder, Colorado.
The Gun Violence Archive has tallied 687 mass shootings in the United States this year. With all of that, some Republicans in the country continue to push laws so that there is no gun control of any kind. And if, as the data shows, increased gun circulation led to increased gun violence in 2020.