Shootings | featured news

... spike in murders and shootings — much of it gang-related — shocked Chicagoans, spurred new crime-fighting strategies and left indelible images: Mayor Rahm Emanuel voicing outrage about gang crossfire that killed a 7-year-old named Heaven selling candy in her front yard. Panicked mourners scrambling as shots ring out on the church steps at a funeral for a reputed gang leader. Girls wearing red high school basketball uniforms, filing by the casket of a 16-year-old teammate shot on her porch.

New York City expects to record all-time lows in 2012 for fewest number of homicides and the fewest number of shootings, officials said Friday.

Three police officers in New Jersey were shot early on Friday, and one is in surgery for his wounds, a hospital official said.

Police in Webster, N.Y., say the man who shot four firefighters before killing himself on Monday left a typewritten note saying he wanted to burn down the neighborhood.

This normally quiet town has been flooded by reporters, caregivers and well-wishers from out of town who have come to report Friday's mass school shooting, offer counseling to residents and pay their respects at makeshift memorials.

The nation's largest gun-rights lobby called Friday for armed police officers to be posted in every American school to stop the next killer "waiting in the wings."

While guns have been a common denominator in mass slayings at schools by teens, there’s another familiar element that seems increasingly to be minimized. Some 90 percent of school shootings over more than a decade have been linked to a widely prescribed type of antidepressant called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors or SSRIs, according to British psychiatrist Dr. David Healy, a founder of RxISK.org, an independent website for researching and reporting on prescription drugs.

A family acquaintance says Adam Lanza, who killed 26 at Sandy Hook Elementary School, had not seen his father for two years, despite the father's efforts.

An 11-year-old Utah boy who said he brought a gun to school to protect himself from a Newtown-style attack, then brandished the pistol at three classmates during recess, has been detained on assault and weapons charges, a school spokesman said on Tuesday.

President Barack Obama would actively support an impending proposal next year to reinstate a ban on assault weapons as part of the wide-ranging effort the president promised to initiate in response to mass shooting incidents this year.