US gun epidemic: Mass shootings in Michigan, Florida leave 1 dead, scores injured

In the latest case of gun epidemic in the US, at least one person was killed and seven others were wounded in Detroit, the largest city in the state of Michigan, on Sunday.

The mass shooting took place on Detroit’s west side early Sunday morning, police said.

In a statement posted on Facebook Sunday night, Detroit police said a suspect was taken into custody after firing multiple rounds and striking eight people at 2:40 a.m. local time (6: 40 GMT).

Preliminary reports suggested the shooter was angry about his driveway being blocked and shot bullets into a neighbor's house where they were holding a party. 

Details about the shooting, which took place on Coyle street on Detroit's west side, and the victims of the incident, were pending further investigation.

In another shooting incident in Orlando, Florida, at least seven people were injured after a large fight broke out, Orlando Police Chief Eric D. Smith was quoted as saying on Sunday.

Smith held a press conference after the overnight shooting downtown, saying an unidentified assailant pulled out a handgun and fired into the crowd.

All seven victims in the incident were taken to a nearby hospital, where they were listed in stable condition, Smith said.

He said there is still no description of the suspected Orlando shooter and he remains at large.

The US has witnessed at least 381 mass shootings this year, according to the independent data collection non-profit organization Gun Violence Archive.

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On Friday, the US House of Representatives passed legislation to revive a ban on certain semi-automatic guns, the first vote of its kind in years amid growing outrage over rising incidents of gun violence.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi pushed the vote in the Democratic-run House, saying the earlier ban “saved lives.”

President Joe Biden hailed the vote, saying the majority of the American people agree with it while urging the Senate to “move quickly to get this bill to my desk.”

Biden last month said a flood of guns was turning American communities into “killing fields” and vowed to reinstate a ban on assault rifles.

The remarks came at a White House ceremony to mark new gun control legislation that Biden signed on June 25, hailing it as the first significant progress in 30 years.

“This has taken too long, with too much of a trail of bloodshed and carnage,” Biden asserted.

“The past many years, across our schools, places of worship, workplaces, stores, music festivals, nightclubs, and so many other everyday places, they have turned into killing fields.”

Dubbed Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the bills are the most significant federal legislation to address gun violence in the US since the assault weapons ban of 1994.

The US president acknowledged that the law falls far short of what he and his party had advocated for to stop the alarming frequency of shootings in the US.

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"It will not save every life from the epidemic of gun violence, but if this law had been in place years ago, even this last year, lives would have been saved. It matters. It matters. But it's not enough and we all know that," he said.

About 40,000 deaths a year are caused by firearms in the United States, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

Last week, two top executives of gun-manufacturing companies in the US testified to Congress that they bore no responsibility for the surge in gun violence, even as their revenues from selling such weapons have soared.

“Mass shootings were all but unheard-of just a few decades ago,” Marty Daniel, the chief executive of Daniel Defense, told the House Oversight and Reform Committee. “So what changed? Not the firearms. They are substantially the same as those manufactured over 100 years ago.”

The House committee initiated its investigation of the gun manufacturing industry in May following the Uvalde massacre, which killed 19 elementary school students and two teachers, and a mass shooting in a Buffalo supermarket that killed 10 people.

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