Three dead in cinema shooting in the US

A MAN shot dead two cinema-goers in a cinema in Louisiana on Thursday (July 23) and injured seven other people before shooting himself.
Members of the audience in the cinema in Grande Theater, Lafayette had just begun watching a screening of the film Trainwreck when the 58-year-old man started shooting just after 7pm local time. There were around 100 people in the cinema at the time and the seven other individuals who were also hurt have injuries ranging from non-life threatening to critical.
Police say they know the identity of the man but have not yet released his name, describing the shooter as simply a “lone, white male.” Later, they found suspicious items in his car, which was parked in the cinema car park, and they planned to carry out a controlled explosion.
This latest shooting has happened a week after James Holmes was convicted of the first degree murder of 12 people and the attempted murder of 70 others in a cinema theatre in Colorado. Holmes has yet to be sentenced but could face the death penalty.
US President Barack Obama has recently spoken about his concern about the scores of mass shootings that take place in the country, describing them as “distressing,” and criticised the inability of the US to implement gun safety laws. He spoke to the BBC about his “frustration” with the fact that the US lacks “common sense gun safety laws, even in the face of repeated mass killings.”
The US president also pointed out that fewer than 100 Americans had been killed by terrorism since September 2001, but tens of thousands had been killed by gun violence in North America.