Chicago (Associated Press)-Authorities said on Saturday that two people were killed and at least 30 were injured in night mass shootings in three states. Many people can socialize freely.

The attacks occurred on Friday night or early Saturday in Austin, the capital of Texas, and Savannah, Georgia, respectively.

In Austin, the authorities said they had arrested one of the two male suspects and were looking for the other after a shooting in a crowded pedestrian street full of bars and restaurants earlier on Saturday. Fourteen people were injured in the gunfire, of which two were seriously injured. The city’s temporary police chief stated that it is believed that this is a dispute between the two parties.

By late Saturday, no one had been arrested in the other two shootings.

In Chicago, two men opened fire on a group of people standing on the sidewalk of the Chatham community in the southern district of the city, killing one woman and injuring nine others. The gunman also escaped and was not confirmed before noon on Saturday.

The police said that in the southern Georgia city of Savannah, the police said that one man was killed and seven others were injured in a mass shooting on Friday night. Two of the injured were children, one was 18 months old and the other was 13 years old.

Savannah’s police chief Roy Minter, Jr. said the shooting may be related to the ongoing dispute between the two groups, citing a shooting in the same apartment building earlier this week Reports.

“The situation we have seen across the country and the level of gun violence we have seen across the country is very disturbing,” he told reporters on Saturday. “It’s disturbing, and it’s meaningless.”

When the attack occurred, most parts of the country (including Chicago) eased restrictions on the COVID-19 pandemic, and many remaining safeguards were cancelled on Friday. Many people hope that the surge in shootings and homicides in the United States last year is an abnormal phenomenon, which may be due to increased gun ownership and epidemic-related pressure caused by policing disputes. But these rates are still higher than pre-pandemic levels, including cities that refused to cut police spending after George Floyd’s death and cities that cut spending moderately.

Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Administration Research Forum, said: “People hope this may be just a statistic that is beginning to decline.” “That didn’t happen. This is what really worries the chiefs, we It may enter a new era, and we will see a reversal of the decline in these crimes over the past 20 years.”

Tracking the ups and downs of crime is always complicated, but violent crime usually increases during the summer months. Weekend evenings and early mornings are also common windows for shooting.

Many types of crime did decline in 2020 and have remained at a low level this year, indicating that the pandemic and the activism and riots in response to Freud’s death did not lead to an overall surge in crime.

According to a database compiled by The Associated Press, USA Today, and Northeastern University, out of the 19 mass shootings in 2020, only 3 mass shootings occurred in public places—the lowest total in this category in a decade.

The database tracks all mass killings, including shootings, defined as the deaths of four or more people excluding the perpetrators.

James Allen Fox, a criminologist and professor at Northeastern University, said that according to this definition, there have been 17 mass killings this year, 16 of which were shootings.

The Gun Violence Archive, which monitors media and police reports to track gun violence, defines a mass shooting as an incident involving four or more people being shot and killed, regardless of whether they died or not. Overall, according to its database, more than 8,700 people in the United States have died from gun violence this year.

GVA also found that mass shootings soared to about 600 in 2020, higher than any of the first six years it tracked. According to this year’s statistics, there have been at least 267 mass shootings in the United States so far, including the latest three incidents from Friday to Saturday nights.

“This is worrying,” Fox said. “We have a group of people starting to walk around in public. We have a lot of differences. We have more guns and warmer weather. This is a potentially deadly mixture.”

According to the database tracker, this story has been corrected in paragraph 13 that the three mass shootings in public places in 2020 are the lowest annual totals in ten years.