United States

The Orlando nightclub shooting, the shooting of Dallas police officers, and the shootings in Baton Rouge

Meanwhile, the epidemic of gun violence in the United States persisted. Mass shootings at a community college in Oregon in October 2015 and a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado in November were followed by another in early December at a social services centre in San Bernardino, California, in which a husband and wife with militant Islamist sympathies killed 14 people and injured 22. On June 12, 2016, the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history occurred at a nightclub in Orlando, Florida, that was a centre for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) social life. Forty-nine people were killed and 50 others wounded in the attack by a lone gunman.

In July more police shootings and the shooting of police officers took the Orlando event’s place in the headlines. On the evening of July 7, a sniper shot and killed four police officers and a rapid transit officer and wounded several others in downtown Dallas at the close of a peaceful protest against the shootings earlier in the week of African American men by police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and suburban Saint Paul, Minnesota. Before being killed by a robot-detonated explosive, the shooter told negotiators that he was upset by recent police shootings. Later in July three law-enforcement officers were shot and killed and three more wounded in Baton Rouge in another retaliatory incident.