Vigil for the Orlando nightclub shooting back in 2016. Source: Kaldari, Wikimedia Commons
A man has shot and killed at least 10 people, injuring around 10 others, at a Lunar New Year ballroom dance in Monterey Park near Los Angeles.
Eyewitnesses have described the shooter as being a 30 to 50 year old Asian male, according to law enforcement officials.
On Sunday morning (local time) police surrounded a white cargo van at a park in Torrance, California, that may be linked to the suspect. Robert Luna, Los Angeles County Sheriff, said that a man who resembled the suspect was seen inside the van.
“We need to get this person off the street as soon as possible,” Mr Luna told reporters at a news conference on Sunday morning.
The Los Angeles sheriff’s department said that the suspect should be considered “armed and dangerous” and that it remains unknown whether the attack was racially motivated.
“We don’t know if this is specifically a hate crime defined by law,” Mr Luna said, “but who walks into a dance hall and guns down 20 people?”
Gun violence in the United States continues to grow at an alarming rate, with this attack being the deadliest in the country since the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, in May just last year, where 19 children and two teachers were killed.
This shooting is also the second major attack in under a week in California alone. Just last Monday, gunmen killed six people in Tulare County, California, including a young mother and her 10-month-old baby.
The non-profit organisation Gun Violence Archive defines a mass shooting as involving at least 4 people being killed or injured. By this definition, there have been 33 mass shootings in the US this year. That’s more than one a day.
