Louisville Metro Police Deputy Chief Paul Humphrey decried gun violence and pushed for change after the city suffered its second mass shooting in a week. The two incidents have left a total of seven people dead.
A shooter killed five people and injured at least eight others after opening fire at Old National Bank in Louisville on Monday last week. On Saturday, two more people were killed after shots were fired into a crowd at Chickasaw Park.
“This is frustrating. This is very frustrating. I know that Monday was a very high-profile event, but for LMPD, for EMS, for fire, for University Hospital, for this community, this is every night. This is not okay,” Humphrey told reporters, per footage from WHAS11.
“This has to change. We can talk about the politics of guns. We can talk about mental health issues. We can talk about the breakdown of the family. It’s all of it. It’s all of it,” Humphrey said.
The Louisville shootings are among more than 160 mass shootings in the United States this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive. The shootings come shortly after another high-profile massacre left three children and three adults dead at an elementary school in Tennessee.
“We have to be dedicated to both short term and long term solutions in this problem. We cannot sit up here and continue to blame other people for the problems that we have in our own community,” Humphrey said.
“We all need to be there to take care of this problem. There is no one solution to this problem.”
A Louisville doctor involved in treating the shooting victims has also pleaded for policy makers to take action on gun violence.
“To everyone who helps makes policy … I would simply ask you to do something. Because doing nothing, which is what we have been doing, is not working,” said University of Louisville Hospital Chief Medical Officer Jason Smith at a press conference last week.
“There’s only so many times you can walk into a room and tell someone they’re not coming home tomorrow. And it just breaks your heart. When you hear someone screaming, ‘mommy’ or ‘daddy,’ it just becomes too hard day in and day out to be able to do that,” he added.