Three students were killed and five others injured Monday night by a shooter who committed suicide on a college campus near Detroit in the northern United States. A new massacre denounced Tuesday by the authorities of this State of Michigan and an organization against gun violence.
In a country plagued daily by shootings and where firearms proliferate, White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre assured on Twitter that President Joe Biden spoke “last night with the governor [démocrate du Michigan] Gretchen Whitmer” and that “additional federal law enforcement personnel had been dispatched” to the scene.
During an emotionally charged press conference, from Lansing, capital of Michigan, a Great Lakes state bordering Canada, police, academic and political authorities first confirmed that “the 43-year-old suspect had no affiliation with the university. He was neither a student nor an employee of the faculty, now or in the past”.
One of Michigan State University’s (MSU) police chiefs, Chris Rozman, released a toll of “three people dead and five victims [blessées] to the hospital “. He specified that “the three deceased persons were students of MSU and that the five injured were all also students” of this university, one of the most prestigious in the country with some 50,000 students.
During this press briefing where officials burst into tears, Governor Whitmer, also very moved, denounced a “new place of community and living together broken by bullets and bloodshed”.
“American Problem”
“We know this is only an American problem. […] We cannot continue to live like this, ”lashed the elected head of Michigan.
On her Twitter account, Shannon Watts, founder of the association Moms Demand Action, founded after the massacre of schoolchildren in Sandy Hook in December 2012 (26 dead, including 20 children aged 6 to 7), posted a TikTok video of a student claiming to be a survivor of the massacres at this school more than a decade ago and of Monday’s at MSU.
“I am 21 years old and this is the second mass killing I have experienced. We can no longer content ourselves with expressing our love and our prayers. We can’t let this go any longer, ”said this young person facing the camera, but without giving his name.
A survivor of the Sandy Hook School mass shooting in 2012 is a student at Michigan State University: “I am 21-years-old and this is the second mass shooting I’ve lived through. We can no longer allow this to happen. We can no longer be complacent.” pic.twitter.com/Jcafl57tmZ
—Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) February 14, 2023
The shooter had opened fire around 8:30 p.m. Monday at a university building, before heading to another building where gunshots were also heard, according to campus police.
Hundreds of law enforcement officers then embarked on a manhunt, quickly releasing photos of the suspect: a short black man wearing a denim jacket, red shoes and a baseball cap. baseball, whose face is half-hidden in the footage.
Around midnight, the police announced that he had committed suicide not far from the scene of the murders.
Police officer Rozman praised the responsiveness of campus residents: “Thanks to the quick release of the photo from the surveillance cameras and the help of the whole community — this is a tip from someone who called — [qui] led law enforcement to the suspect in Lansing,” he thanked, revealing the name of “Anthony McRae,” but saying he had “no idea of the motive” for his crime.
Law enforcement on Monday ordered students and campus employees to confine themselves. The university suspended all activity for two days.
50,000 deaths per year
The United States pays a very heavy price for the spread of firearms in its territory and the ease with which Americans have access to them. The country has more individual weapons than inhabitants, ie approximately 400 million: one in three adults owns at least one weapon and nearly one in two adults lives in a home where there is a weapon.
The consequence of this proliferation is the very high rate of gun deaths in the United States, nearly 50,000 each year, about half of which are suicides.
President Biden unsuccessfully calls on Congress to restore a ban on assault rifles in the United States, as it existed between 1994 and 2004, but he comes up against opposition from the Republican Party, which poses as a defender of the constitutional right to own arms and has controlled the House of Representatives since January.