A Deadly Week in Louisiana
On April 19, a shocking case of gun violence shook Louisiana and the nation. On an otherwise quiet Sunday morning in Shreveport, a Louisiana man shot and killed eight children between the ages of 1 and 12—seven of them his own children—and seriously injured two women, including his wife. He then turned the gun on himself. It was the deadliest mass shooting the country has seen in more than two years. The shooter had recently admitted to a family member that he was struggling with “dark thoughts” and suicidal ideation.
Investigators soon discovered that the gun used in the shooting belonged to another man, himself a felon barred from owning a firearm, who claimed the shooter stole it from his vehicle. That man is now facing federal charges for illegally owning a gun and lying to law enforcement. The charges call to mind recent efforts to hold the enablers of mass shootings accountable—and are a stark reminder of the critical importance of safe storage in preventing tragedies like this one.
The Shreveport massacre was just the beginning. Four days later, a shootout between two groups at the Mall of Louisiana in Baton Rouge left one person dead and at least five others injured, including students from a school on a field trip. And on the same day, a former law enforcement officer was arrested in Florida after authorities determined he had been traveling toward New Orleans with a handgun and roughly 200 rounds of ammunition, allegedly intending to carry out a mass shooting at a festival that draws hundreds of thousands of attendees each year.
In less than a week, Louisiana had become a grim emblem of how pervasive and varied gun violence in America is. The two tragedies and one almost-tragedy weren’t similar in nature—a domestic shooting, a conflict that turned publicly violent, and a foiled hate-motivated plot—but each one illustrates a different dimension of the gun violence crisis that 97Percent exists to address. We don’t write about these events to overwhelm or distress anyone but because the family members in Shreveport, the shoppers in Baton Rouge, and the festivalgoers in New Orleans who were almost victims deserve more than headlines. They deserve a country that takes this seriously enough to act.