Just two days after a gunman killed 11 people at a Los Angeles-area dance studio, seven more victims were shot dead in an agricultural area near San Francisco, as California suffered one of its bloodiest spates of mass gun violence in decades.
Authorities said they had not identified the motive for either of the rampages, which seemed especially baffling in part because the suspects in each were men of retirement age, much older than is typical for perpetrators of deadly mass shootings that have become numbingly routine in the United States.
California Governor Gavin Newsom said he was visiting wounded survivors from Saturday night’s massacre in the Los Angeles suburb of Monterey Park when he was informed of Monday’s killings in northern California.
“Tragedy upon tragedy,” Newsom wrote on Twitter.
Otherwise, the back-to-back shootings appeared to have little in common.
The latest spasm of gun carnage struck the coastal town of Half Moon Bay, about 30 miles south of San Francisco, where a gunman opened fire on groups of farm workers at two locations, leaving a total of seven dead and one badly wounded, then fled.
