Europe 1 with AFP // Photo credits: Jakub Porzycki / NurPhoto / NurPhoto via AFP 23:16 p.m., December 06, 2023

Las Vegas police reported Wednesday that a gunman was found dead on the campus of the University of Nevada, minutes after he opened fire on people on campus. In 6, the gambling capital of the world had already experienced one of the worst gun massacres in the country.

A gunman opened fire on a campus in Las Vegas, hitting several people, and was later found dead, said local police and the university, which is located a stone's throw from the city's major casinos. "The suspect has been located and died," the Las Vegas Police Department wrote on X, which had previously written that it was responding to "preliminary evidence of a shooter in action on campus."

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Multiple Affected Individuals

"There appear to be multiple people affected," she wrote. The alert system of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas had reported gunfire on campus and asked everyone to "evacuate the area", located two kilometers from the famous "strip" of this huge city in the American West known for its casinos. Once the police declared the event over, the university asked everyone to "self-isolate" so that the police could "evacuate the buildings one by one."

In 2017, the gambling capital of the world experienced one of the country's worst gun massacres. A man opened fire from the 32nd floor of a hotel on a crowd below attending a country music concert, killing 58 people and injuring hundreds, before killing himself. The United States is paying a very heavy price for the spread of firearms on its territory and the ease with which Americans have access to them. There are more individual guns in the country than there are people: one in three adults owns at least one gun and nearly one in two adults live in a home where there is a gun.

The consequence of this proliferation is the very high rate of gun deaths in the United States, which is not comparable to that of other developed countries. About 49,000 people died from gunshot wounds in 2021, compared to 45,000 in 2020, which was already a record year. That's more than 130 deaths a day, more than half of which are suicides.

However, it is the tragedies with many victims that make the most impression, while illustrating the ideological divide between conservatives and progressives on the question of how to prevent such tragedies. Recent American history is indeed punctuated by killings, without any place of daily life seeming to be safe, from the company to the church, from the supermarket to the discotheque, from the public road to public transport.