US theatre shooting: 3 dead, 9 hurt

In yet another mass shooting at a US movie complex, a gunman opened fire in a packed theatre in lafayette, louisiana on Thursday evening, killing two people and injuring nine others before turning the gun on himself.The gunman, identified later as John Russel Houser, a 59-year-old white male “drifter” from Alabama, struck 20 minutes into the screening of the movie “Trainwreck”. He tried to escape after the indiscriminate firing by rushing towards his car parked close to the exit door, but the presence of police officers prompted him to turn back and take his own life, police said.

“It looks like he spotted the officers coming in and he turned around and went against the crowd and he fired a single gunshot,” lafayette Police Chief Jim Craft said. The motive behind the shooting was still to be established. The shooter had been living in a lafayette hotel since early July.The conditions of the nine wounded “range from non-life-threatening to critical”, Craft said. The dead were identified as Mayci Breaux, 21, who died on the spot, and Jillian Johnson, 33, who died later at a nearby hospital.

Initially, the people at the theatre thought the shooting was part of the film. “But when the firing resumed, everyone started climbing over the seats,” NBC quoted a witness as saying.The rampage, during which the shooter fired at least 13 rounds, brought back memories of the Colorado massacre in July 2012, when a gunman killed 12 people and injured 70 others at a movie theatre in Aurora during a midnight screening of the film, “The Dark Knight Rises”. Only last week, the gunman in this case, James Eagan Holmes, was convicted and his sentencing proceedings are currently on.

 Hours before the louisiana shooting, President Barack Obama voiced his anguish at the US’s continuing failure to enact gun control laws, despite repeated mass killings.“If you ask me where has been the one area where I feel that I’ve been most frustrated and most stymied, it is the fact that the United States of America is the one advanced nation on Earth in which we do not have sufficient common-sense gun-safety laws,” Obama said in an interview to BBC, in a clear reference to the predominantly-Republican blocking of his gun control proposals in the Congress.

“If you look at the number of Americans killed since 9/11 by terrorism, it’s less than 100. If you look at the number that have been killed by gun violence, it’s in the tens of thousands. And for us not to be able to resolve that issue has been something that is distressing. But it is not something that I intend to stop working on in the remaining 18 months (of my presidency),” he said.