Police have responded to a shooting in a suburban Dallas mall on Saturday that has left multiple people injured, authorities say.
The Dallas-area news outlet WFAA cited a local sheriff in reporting that the shooter was dead at the scene and that children were among the victims. There was no immediate word on any additional deaths or the exact number of people injured inside the Allen Premium Outlets mall where the shooting took place.
Video footage from local media showed police officers hurrying shoppers out of the mall, with squad cars and emergency vehicles parked near entryways.
Allen, Texas, is a community of 100,000 people about 20 miles (32km) north of Dallas.
Mass shootings have become commonplace in the US, with at least 198 so far in 2023, the most at this point in the year since at least 2016, according to the Gun Violence Archive. The nonprofit group defines a mass shooting as any in which four or more victims are wounded or killed.
Congress has not been able to pass substantial gun control despite the constant deadly mass shootings.
Texas allows its residents to legally carry guns without a license or training. Last August, a federal judge struck down a Texas law raising the legal age for people to carry handguns from 18 to 21.
In 2019, a shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, killed 23 people. A shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, last year left 19 students and two teachers dead.
The state’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, has supported keeping guns as accessible to the public as possible. That is the case even as a recent poll commissioned by Fox News, whose viewers are largely Republican, found that American voters favor gun control measures and worry that they will be victimized by firearms violence.
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