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After the worst massacre in the history of Los Angeles County, the governor of California visited a gunshot victim in the hospital when he was pulled over and briefed on the mass shooting at the other end of the state.
The news that a gunman has killed seven people in a mushroom farm on the beautiful coast of northern California came just hours after Governor Gavin Newsom said he was tired and frustrated with mass shootings.
“I can’t keep doing it,” he told reporters Monday in Monterey Park, where 11 people died at a dance studio. “Talking like that all the time, crazy”.
But Newsom was in Half Moon Bay on Tuesday to address the third mass shooting in a week in a state with some of the nation’s toughest gun laws and the lowest gun death rate.
‘What happened?’
At times his voice was angry and emotional, Newsom said he questioned the records used in mass shootings: the killing of 12 in the country of Thousand Oaks and west bar in 2018; killing three and wounding 17 at the 2019 Gilroy Garlic Festival; killing nine workers at the San Jose railroad yard in 2021.
“I started writing in ‘Monterey Park,'” Newsom said. “And now I have to write in, ‘Half Moon Bay.’ What’s wrong?”
In Half Moon Bay, a 66-year-old farm worker was booked on murder and attempted murder charges after he shot eight people, killing seven, in a crime authorities said was a case of workplace violence in the rich agricultural region of the Pacific. Ocean and coastal mountains.
WATCH | 11 blue hearts mark Chinese New Year shooting victims:
Outside the city hall in Monterey Park, California, the names of the 11 victims of the Lunar New Year shooting are written on a sign with blue hearts, where passers-by can leave messages of comfort and consolation.
In Monterey Park, a 72-year-old gunman opened fire at a dance hall in an Asian American community celebrating Chinese New Year on Saturday night, killing nine people in addition to 11 others. The gunman then killed himself.
A week earlier, at least two assailants shot a 16-year-old mother who was holding her 10-month-old baby and killed four others in a brutal attack in a central California farming community that remains unsolved.
“Our hearts are with the people of California,” US President Joe Biden said Tuesday during a meeting with Democratic congressional leaders. “He’s been hard, he’s been hard for a few days.”
‘Fucking weapons of war’
Biden noted that Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, introduced the assault weapons ban, and she urged lawmakers to pass it.
Newsom also called for stronger gun safety laws and aimed specifically at large-capacity magazines — like the ones in the gunman’s dance studio — and what he called “damn weapons of war.”
“It says all the time: ‘Only in America,’ he said. “No. 1 in gun ownership, No. 1 in gun death. It’s not even complicated.”
This graphic counts any incident where four people were shot, not including the gunman. Numbers elsewhere in this story record mass killings (four or more dead, not including gunmen):
The new slayings moved California up five slots to 26th place in the number of fatal mass shootings per capita in the US since 2006, according to the USA TODAY / AP / Northeastern University killing database. The database only counts the murders of at least four people.
While California has had the highest number of mass shootings — 49, including three new ones — it had previously ranked 31st when it was organized as the nation’s most populous state with nearly 40 million residents.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists California as having the 7th highest gun death rate in the country per 100,000 residents, according to the most recent statistics available from 2020. It is the 20th lowest in terms of homicide rate, which is not limited to shootings. .
Ballroom gunman a ‘crazy man’: sheriff
With repeated killings, detectives at both ends of the country try to answer the often unanswered question in the face of senseless violence: Why?
Los Angeles Sheriff Robert Luna called the dance hall gunman, 72-year-old Huu Can Tran, “a crazy person” and said investigators were looking into whether he had a relationship with the people who were shot at the Star Ballroom Dance Studio.
Tran fired 42 rounds in a ballroom popular with older Asian Americans. He then drove to another dance hall where an employee seized a modified 9 mm submachine gun-style weapon from him, Luna said.
WATCH | 7 killed in mass shooting at northern California ranch:
California is grappling with its second mass shooting in three days after a man with an automatic pistol shot and killed seven people at a mushroom farm south of San Francisco on Friday.
Tran shot himself on Sunday as officers surrounded the van he was in.
A mound of flowers, including dozens of yellow and white mums, was left in front of the closed studio door on Tuesday. On the brick column next to the gate someone had pasted a blue piece of paper with the words “Ban Semi-automatic Rifles” written on it and underneath it was a translation in Chinese.
Hundreds of people turned out Tuesday evening for a candlelight vigil at Monterey Park City Hall. A wooden heart bearing the victim’s name. A woman helped her young daughter lay flowers at the memorial. “There’s a lot,” he said, his voice shaking. “We will never have enough.”
6 US mass murders in 2023 so far
There have been six mass murders this year in the US so far, and the Monterey Park shooting is the deadliest since May 24, when 21 people were killed at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
The Half Moon Bay killings came less than 48 hours later when 66-year-old Chunli Zhao shot five people at the mushroom farm where he worked, killing four, authorities said. He then drove to a nearby farm where he once worked, and shot three other people.
The victims were Asian and Hispanic, and some were migrant workers.
One of the workers who died was Marciano Martinez Jimenez, 50, his brother, Servando Martinez Jimenez, told The Associated Press. He is from the Mexican state of Oaxaca and has lived in the US for 28 years.
“He’s a good person,” Martinez Jimenez said in Spanish. “He was polite and friendly to everyone. He never had a problem with anyone. I don’t know why all this happened.”
The farm shooting is the largest mass killing in San Mateo County.
“We’ve never had so many deaths in one scene or one time in this county,” District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe said.
Zhao was arrested after officers found him in a car in a sheriff’s station parking lot.
An 8-year-old boy is traumatized
Newsom said he deliberately avoided a news conference in Los Angeles to meet with residents of the community, people wounded by guns and the hero of the Monterey Park shooting, Brandon Tsay, who disarmed Tran.
When she was in Monterey Park, a crying mother got into the car and asked her three daughters that everything would be OK. His eight-year-old son had heard the gunshots and knew it wasn’t fireworks. He didn’t sleep at night and was afraid to go to school, his mother said.
Newsom told the girl, “It’s going to get better.”
But in front of a group of dozens of politicians, law enforcement officers and journalists gathered in Half Moon Bay, he said he was relieved that he did not make him lock his pinky finger and promised that his eight-year-old daughter would.
“Because I’m not sure.”
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