Three killed and two wounded after gunman opens fire in Kansas City night club
Incident is at least the fifth mass shooting in the US this weekend
Three people were killed and two others were wounded in a mass shooting at a nightclub in Kansas City, Missouri in the early hours of Sunday.
The fatal incident is at least the fifth mass shooting in the US this weekend and brings the total number of mass shootings in America to more than 230 this year, or at least one every day in 2023, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
Police in Kansas City responded to the shooting at Klymax Lounge at roughly 1.25am during a performance by the rapper Nutty Still Gassin’, according to officials.
Three victims were transported by emergency responders to nearby hospitals, police told The Independent. Two victims were pronounced dead at the scene. One victim was found outside the lounge and the second was discovered inside, according to police.
A third victim died in hospital.
At least two other people were injured. One person remains in critical condition and another is in stable condition, police told The Independent.
Law enforcement have not publicly identified a suspect, and events surrounding the shooting were not immediately clear.
All of the victims are adults, according to police, though officials have not yet released their names and ages.
One man, identified by family members as 41-year-old Jason McConnell, was reportedly fatally shot while working as a security guard at the club, his family told The Kansas City Star.
He was remembered by his stepdaughter Honystye Chancellor as “good and nice and always trying to keep us on the right path,” she told the newspaper.
One woman who lives near the club told The Star that she woke up to the sound of 10 gunshots followed by another five.
A woman’s body could be seen at the doors to the club, and two other bodies at the base of a nearby street lamp, the woman told the newspaper.
The fatal shooting in Missouri appears to have happened at roughly the same time that four people were wounded during a shooting outside a bar in Birmingham, Alabama.
On Saturday, four people were injured in a shooting near a luxury high-rise apartment building in Los Angeles, while four others were shot at a party in Thomson, Georgia.
Three teenagers and one adult were also shot in Louisville, Kentucky on Saturday.
This weekend’s violence comes in one of the deadliest years for mass shootings in the US, according to the Gun Violence Archive. The organisation and gun reform advocacy group, Everytown for Gun Safety, consider incidents in which at least four people are killed or wounded as a mass shooting.