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The month of August ended as it began: with a shooting rampage and a significant death toll.
Five people were killed near Odessa, Texas, on Saturday as a gunman started shooting indiscriminately at cars, bringing the number of victims of mass killings by firearms to 51 for the month.
The term mass killings is defined by the Justice Department as three or more killings in a single episode, excluding the death of a gunman.
There is no legal definition for the term mass shooting, despite its frequent use by gun control groups and the news media.
Here are some of the deadliest shootings so far in 2019 based on figures from the website Mass Shooting Tracker and local news media accounts. The death tolls do not include the people who carried out the attacks, and not every episode of 2019 is listed.
The bodies of five men who had been fatally shot were discovered in an apartment building by police officers in north St. Louis County, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
The victims ranged in age from 37 to 65. Two men were arrested in the killings, which the police said were connected to “drug activity,” the Post-Dispatch reported.
June 8: 5 killed
White Swan, Washington.
Five members of the Yakama Nation were killed in White Swan, a remote community on the Yakama Indian Reservation in central Washington state.
Four people were arrested in the shootings, the latest act in a cycle of criminal activity on the reservation, which is between the Cascade mountains and the Columbia River.
Two of the men charged in the killings took a child hostage at gunpoint, the authorities said.
The gunman, a former soldier, was armed with two handguns and a cache of ammunition as he targeted his former co-workers in offices and hallways, according to the authorities.
Police rush people out of building following shooting at Virginia Beach
His victims were civil servants in the public works and public utilities departments and a contractor who was at the offices to discuss a permit.
A disgruntled employee who had been fired from his job returned to a suburban Chicago factory with a .40-caliber Smith & Wesson handgun with a laser sight, which the authorities said he used to kill five of his former co-workers.
Five women were fatally shot while they were lying on the ground in a SunTrust Bank branch by a 21-year-old man, who called an emergency dispatcher and said, “I have shot five people.”
The suspect, who was charged with five counts of first-degree premeditated murder, was wearing a T-shirt that bore the image of four scythe-wielding grim reapers on horseback.
New York Times
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