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Topics: News
Emma Guinness
The Independence Day shooting on 4 July at Highland Park, Illinois, marks the 309th mass shooting in the US in 2022 and the loss of at least another six lives to gun crime.
Gun Violence Archive, a non-profit organisation, reports that there have been an average of 11 mass shootings in the US every week of this year.
Their definition of a mass shooting is an incident that claims the lives of four or more people, and this does not include the shooter themselves.
This year, a staggering 22,417 people have died in the US as a result of gun violence, which is already an increase on the 19,411 who died in 2020.
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To put the scale of the growing problem into further context, 15,448 died from gun violence in 2019 and and 12,418 died in 2012.
The Washington Post found that since the Columbine High School massacre of 1999, a whopping 310,000 American children have witnessed a school shooting.
Robert 'Bobby' Crimo III, 22, also known as 'Awake the Rapper', is suspected of carrying out the shooting at Highland Park, with CNN reporting that he allegedly climbed onto the roof of a nearby business and began shooting shortly after the Independence Day parade began.
Christopher Covelli, spokesperson for the Lake County Major Crime Task Force, said: "This individual is believed to have been responsible for what happened and the investigation will continue."
Covelli added that there was also 'a significant amount of digital evidence today which helped lead investigators in this direction'.
This included scenes of gun violence in Crimo's rap music, such as a music video titled 'Are you Awake', which sees a stick figure character in his image carrying out an attack.
He narrates: "I need to just do it. It is my destiny."
Mayor Rotering of Highland Park told Today that the online evidence 'reflected a plan and a desire to commit carnage for a long time in advance.'
She added: "And it's one of those things where you step back and you say, what happened? How did somebody become this angry and hateful to then take it out on innocent people who literally were just having a family day out?"
Rotering knew the suspect as a child and she explained that she has no idea what got him to a place where he decided to carry out such an atrocity.
"It breaks my heart. I see this picture and through the tattoos, I see the little boy," she said. "I don't know what got him to this point."