Teen kills 3 before police shoot him in New Mexico

Taos, New Mexico — An 18-year-old gunman stalked through a New Mexico neighborhood on Monday, firing randomly at bystanders, houses and cars, killing three people and wounding six before police shot him dead outside a church, authorities said.

The late-morning shooting spree unfolded in a residential area of Farmington, New Mexico, a major retail center and regional hub for the fossil energy industry about 290 kilometers northwest of Albuquerque.

Police responded "to find a chaotic scene where a male subject was actively firing upon individuals in that neighborhood", Baric Crum, deputy chief of operations for the Farmington Police Department, said in a news briefing hours later.

Three civilians were killed and six people were wounded, including two officers struck in an exchange of gunfire with the suspect before he was fatally shot by police, according to Farmington police spokesperson Shanice Gonzales.

The country yet again is caught in another spate of gun violence. The carnage was among the latest of at least 225 mass shootings recorded in the US this year, according to the nonprofit group Gun Violence Archive. The group defines a mass shooting as any in which four or more people are wounded or killed, not including the shooter.

An opinion article published on Sunday in Forbes said that gun violence is a public health emergency in the United States, but repeated attempts to introduce gun control measures have run into formidable opposition in the US Congress as well as the judiciary.

Gun violence is a leading cause of premature death in the US, and these deaths are preventable, Joshua Cohen, an independent healthcare analyst, said in the article.

"A comprehensive and multifaceted public health approach is needed to prevent gun violence, one which addresses both access to firearms and the underlying factors — societal, mental — that contribute to gun violence," Cohen said.

However, he said that "in the current political climate, it's nearly impossible at the federal level to pass even comparatively benign interventions into law, such as universal background checks, age limits, firearm licensing, and a ban on assault weapons or high-capacity magazines".

New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham said in a statement that she was praying for the families of the victims and that the incident "serves yet another reminder of how gun violence destroys lives in our state and our country every single day."

Agencies - Xinhua