Three people dead after shooting in Iowa church parking lot

[June 03, 2022]  (Reuters) -A man shot and killed two women in the parking lot of a church in Iowa state on Thursday and then turned the gun on himself, police said, adding three more dead to the toll in a series of recent shootings that have rocked the United States.

The Iowa shooting took place shortly after President Joe Biden delivered a major address on gun violence in the wake of mass shootings in Buffalo, New York; Uvalde, Texas, and Tulsa, Oklahoma, in recent weeks.

Meanwhile another shooting on Thursday wounded two people attending a burial at cemetery in Racine, Wisconsin.

The Iowa shooting took place outside Cornerstone Church, a fundamentalist Christian church east of the city of Ames, while a church program was on inside, said Nicholas Lennie, chief deputy of the Story County Sheriff's Office.

When deputies arrived on scene they found all three dead, Lennie said, adding that he could not provide identities nor disclose what the relationship between them may have been.

"This appears to be an isolated, single-shooter incident," Lennie said.

Moments before, Biden urged Congress to ban assault weapons, expand background checks and implement other gun control measures to address the mass shootings.

People console each other after a shooting outside Cornerstone Church in Ames, Iowa, U.S. June 2, 2022. Nirmalendu Majumdar/USA Today Network via REUTERS.

"Enough, enough!," the president said.

The United States has been shaken in recent weeks by the mass shootings that killed 10 Black residents in upstate New York, 19 children and two teachers in Texas, and two doctors, a receptionist and a patient in Oklahoma.

In Racine, Wisconsin, on Thursday, multiple gunshots were fired into a crowd of mourners attending an afternoon grave-side funeral, wounding two people, Racine police Sergeant Kristi Wilcox told reporters.

One victim was treated at a local hospital and released, the other was flown to a Milwaukee hospital, apparently suffering more serious injuries, Wilcox said. No suspect was taken into custody.

(Reporting by Daniel Trotta, Steve Gorman and Eric Beech; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)

[© 2022 Thomson Reuters. All rights reserved.]
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.  Thompson Reuters is solely responsible for this content.