The armed man who killed two people Monday, October 24 in a high school in Saint-Louis, (State of Missouri, in the center of the United States), before being shot by the police, was “heavily armed19-year-old Orlando Harris killed a sports teacher and a 16-year-old girl and injured seven others, said St. Louis Police Chief Mike Sack.
The teenager was indeed equipped with an AR-15 type semi-automatic rifle and in possession of several magazines attached to his chest in addition to those he had stored in his bag.“It looks like he entered the building with over 600 rounds of ammunition on him”said Mike Sack. The responsiveness of the police officers, who said they arrived on the scene four minutes after an emergency call, made it possible to avoid an even more “horrible” tragedy, he said.
A letter to explain his attack
Local police officers found a letter in the shooter’s car, which outlined the motives for his attack. “I have no friends. I have no family. I have never had a girlfriend. I have never had a social life. I have been lonely and isolated all my life”, he wrote in this document. An investigation to assess the psychological profile of the young man and his environment is underway, said local authorities.
On Tuesday, US President Joe Biden expressed his thoughts and those of his wife Jill towards “all those affected by the senseless shooting in St. Louis”.“As we mourn (high school), we must take action, starting with banning assault rifles”he wrote in a message on Twitter.
Mass shootings, especially in schools, plague the United States almost every month. Last May, a teenager had for example killed 19 schoolchildren and two teachers in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. Since 2012 in the country, there have been more victims in killings than in the thirty previous years. Over the last decade, between 2012 and 2022, there have been 539 victims, against 437 deaths over the three decades preceding this period.
Over the past forty years, the shooters have proven to be almost exclusively men (107 of the 109 perpetrators). As for the shootings perpetrated in schools, they were all committed by young men, even young boys. More than half of the young men who opened fire in establishments were almost all (17 out of 19 perpetrators) under 30 years old.