Rare mass shooting in Britain leaves 6 dead, including a child

Six people were fatally shot in Plymouth, England, on Thursday, a rare occurrence in a country that has some of the world’s strictest gun control laws and had not endured a mass shooting since 2010.

The gunman was one of the six people killed, the police said. One of the victims was under 10 years old, according to Luke Pollard, a member of Parliament whose constituency includes Plymouth.

The Devon and Cornwall Police said they were called to Keyham, a district of Plymouth, at 6:10 p.m. and found five people — including the gunman — dead from gunshots. An additional person was treated for gunshot wounds at the scene and died later at a hospital. There were both male and female victims, the police said.

The authorities did not offer a motive but said the shooting was “not a terrorism-related incident.”

Plymouth is a port city in the county of Devon in southwestern England, almost 200 miles from London.

Gun deaths are extremely rare in Britain, where strict laws against firearms are in place and few people, including police officers, carry them. In England and Wales, homicides committed with firearms average about 30 per year, less than those by strangulation and slightly more than those by burning, according to figures compiled by the government.

The kind of mass shooting seen hundreds of times each year in the United States rarely happens in Britain, making the incident on Thursday a grim outlier. The last one was in 2010, when a taxi driver killed 12 people and wounded 25 others in the Lake District, a tourist destination in northwestern England.

The last one before that was in 1996, when a 43-year-old man stormed a schoolhouse gym and killed 16 children and their teacher before killing himself. Within a year, the public outcry from the massacre led the British government to drastically toughen its gun laws, though some are still lawfully owned. Guns can be purchased through an extensive process that requires character references, a background check and a police interview.

Priti Patel, Britain’s home secretary, said on Twitter that the shooting was “shocking.” Keir Starmer, the leader of the opposition Labour Party, said his “thoughts are with the families and neighbors of those caught up in this nightmare.” (New York Times)