California shootings spark renewed gun control debate

US still trying to make sense of past tragedies

Standing in a parking lot, tears streaming down her face, Susan Orfanos looked straight at the camera, visibly shaken but clearly determined.

"I want gun control and I hope to God nobody else sends me any more prayers. I want gun control. No more guns," the devastated mother told the media.

Her 27-year-old son, Telemachus Orfanos, survived a shooting in Las Vegas in October last year that left 58 dead, but died at the hands of a gunman during a rampage late on Wednesday in Thousand Oaks, a city about 65 kilometers from downtown Los Angeles.

Consistently rated by the FBI as one of the safest cities in the United States, the upscale area joined an array of other places in the nation to be hit by mass shootings.

The latest incident, which came when Ian David Long stormed into the Borderline Bar and Grill and fatally shot 12 people before killing himself, jolted a nation still trying to make sense of past tragedies.

Just two weeks earlier, a gunman opened fire in a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, killing 11 people.

On February 14— Valentine's Day in the West-an attacker gunned down 17 students and teachers at a high school in Parkland, Florida, prompting a nationwide movement against gun violence.

Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that collects data about gun-related incidents, defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more victims are injured or killed, excluding the perpetrator.

The organization has marked the Thousand Oaks killings as the 307th mass shooting in the US this year. The incidents have resulted in a total of 328 deaths and 1,243 injuries.

There were 346 such cases last year, 382 in 2016, 335 in 2015 and 270 in 2014, data from the archive show.

The number of incidents fluctuates every year, but it means that an average of one mass shooting has occurred every day in the US in the past four years.

According to a 2016 study cited by CNN, nearly one-third of the world's mass shootings took place in the US from 1966 to 2012.

Some people have argued that the prevalence of weapons in the nation and its lax gun laws have played a role in the string of fatalities.

Analysis by the Small Arms Survey, an independent research project in Geneva, Switzerland, shows that the US has the highest number of civilians who own guns. It estimated that there were 120.5 firearms per 100 residents last year.