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"This is a tragic situation, maybe the worst tragic situation we’ve ever had in Shreveport," said the mayor.
This is a developing story… Please check back for updates…
Eight children were killed on Sunday morning in Shreveport, Louisiana, in what authorities described as a domestic disturbance.
Police Chief Wayne Smith reported that the victims were between the ages of 1 and 14 years old. Officials are still gathering information about the spree killing, which they say took place across three different locations. A total of ten people were shot.
"This is an extensive scene, unlike anything most of us have ever seen," Smith said.
Gunshot victims were found at two homes and at the scene of a carjacking. The suspected gunman was shot dead in nearby Bossier City by police during a car chase.
Two adult women were also reportedly shot. One of them has life-threatening injuries after being shot in the head. One of the women is believed to have had a relationship with the suspect, whose name has not yet been released.
Police said some of the children who were killed were also "descendants" of the alleged shooter.
There have been at least 114 mass shootings in the United States in 2026, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a decline from previous years. At least 65 children between ages 0-11 have been killed and 124 injured in gun violence incidents this year.
"This is a tragic situation, maybe the worst tragic situation we’ve ever had in Shreveport," said Mayor Tom Arceneaux. "So, right now we’re going to process the information, and it's in very good hands."
"This is no way for our kids to live," said one gun control advocate.
Child safety advocates renewed calls for tighter gun control measures following a Monday mass shooting at a high school hockey game in Rhode Island that left three people including the gunman dead and three others injured.
WPRI reported that the father of a North Providence High School senior shot five members of his family at a hockey game at Dennis M. Lynch Arena in Pawtucket at around 2:30 pm local time. The student's mother was killed at the rink, while his sister died after being rushed to a local hospital. Three other relatives are reportedly in critical condition at Rhode Island Hospital.
"We realized pretty quickly that it was a gunshot. It was very scary," hockey player Silas Core said during an interview with WCVB, adding that he and his teammates rushed into a locker room.
"We barricaded the locker room with our bodies. We were all pressing up against it," he said. "Everybody was, you know, worried about our parents and everybody."
Core's mother told WCVB that everything "just happened so fast."
"You don't even know. You know, you just see everybody else on the ground and you kind of get on the ground," she said. "This is really disturbing, you know? And it's the other team's senior day. Like, it was supposed to be a special day for the team."
Pawtucket Police Chief Tina Goncalves said the shooting appeared to be “a family dispute," a “tragic” but "isolated" incident.
A woman who said she was the shooter's daughter told WCVB that the man suffered from mental health problems.
"He shot my family, and he's dead now," she said.
FBI Director Kash Patel said on X that the agency "will provide state and local law enforcement any and all resources necessary and keep the public updated as we are able."
"In the meantime," he added, "please pray for the victims and their families."
Democratic Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee said that "as governor, a parent, and a former coach, my heart breaks for the victims, families, students, and everyone impacted by the devastating shooting at Lynch Arena in Pawtucket."
McKee added that he is "praying for our communities."
Gun control advocates demanded more than the customary thoughts and prayers.
People in this country should be able to enjoy school athletics without the fear of being gunned down. When will enough be enough?
— Moms Demand Action (@momsdemandaction.org) February 16, 2026 at 2:29 PM
"As a native Rhode Islander who has played many games in that very rink, this tragedy hits especially close to home," Stop Gun Violence board chair Brian Lemek said. "That space holds memories of community, competition, and joy—and now it’s filled with pain no community should have to carry."
"The only thing young athletes should worry about is the scoreboard—not their safety," he continued. "Our kids deserve spaces that bring communities together, they deserve to be safe, and they deserve a future free from this constant fear."
"This is no way for our kids to live," Lemek added. "We need to stop this madness."
Monday's incident follows December's mass shooting at Brown University in Providence—which is less than 10 miles from Pawtucket—that left two people dead and nine others wounded.
"We can and should work together to promote responsible gun ownership and pass legislation like safe storage laws and red flag laws—widely supported measures that keep guns out of dangerous situations while respecting responsible ownership," Lemek asserted Monday.
"I’m holding the victims and their loved ones in my heart," he added, "and I’m more determined than ever to build a future where our kids are safe in the places meant for joy."
Has anyone noticed how much peace has broken out in the USA ever since Donald Trump descended that golden escalator onto the stage of American politics?
This past January 15, the 2025 Nobel Laureate for Peace, Maria Corina Machado, took her prize medal, encased in a gold (of course) and glass frame, to the White House and presented it to our president. Beneath the medal, Machado had inscribed these words:
Presented as a Personal Symbol of Gratitude on behalf of the Venezuelan People in Recognition of President Trump’s Principled and Decisive Action to Secure a Free Venezuela. The Courage of America and its President Donald J. Trump, will Never be Forgotten by the Venezuelan People.
While our “peacemaker-in-chief” was no doubt gladdened by Machado’s unprecedented gesture, he still sounded a bit pouty by claiming that having “put out eight wars, in theory, you should get [a Nobel Peace Prize] for each war” in which he boasted that he had “saved millions and millions of lives.”
The eight “wars” he takes credit for ending—Israel-Hamas, Israel-Iran, India-Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo-Rwanda, Armenia-Azerbaijan, Cambodia-Thailand, Serbia-Kosovo, and Egypt-Ethiopia—on the one hand, were all short-lived ceasefires or border skirmishes rather than the end of formal wars and, on the other, are places where tensions persist and conflict continues. Bottom line regarding all these faux wars is that Trump is as entitled to claim Machado’s Nobel Peace Prize as he is to take credit for walking on the moon long before Neil Armstrong did.
Where are our patriots—progressive patriots, five, eight, ten-million strong—called to the nation’s capital, like the “patriots” of January 6, willing to take our stand and storm the White House?
Closer to home, has anyone noticed how much peace has broken out in the USA ever since Donald Trump descended that golden escalator onto the stage of American politics?
In his very first very “presidential” campaign speech, he launched his first anti-immigration salvo: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best… They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
Since Trump entered politics, a 2020 report from the FBI revealed that hate crimes increased by just under 20% in America.
According to CNN (January 26, 2026), the Obama years (2009-2016) saw 213 mass shootings at schools, churches, or shopping areas—an average of 26.6 shootings per year. Since Trump (2017-2025), the total number has risen to 556 and an average of 61.8 per year.
At Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, Trump contrasted his approach to campaigning to that of Charlie Kirk—himself no saint in the political arena:
He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That's where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent, and I don't want the best for them… maybe they can convince me that that's not right, but I can't stand my opponent.
Since Trump, instances of school bullying and antisemitic attacks have risen precipitously. These included the mass shootings in the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and in a Walmart supermarket in El Paso, Texas, conducted by white supremacists who embraced racist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theories popular in their circles. As to instances of bullying, just after Trump’s 2024 election victory an elementary school teacher in Georgia reported, “This is my 21st year of teaching. This is the first time I’ve had a student call another student the N-word.”
In 2022 a deranged attacker broke into the San Francisco home of then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). Finding her husband at home, he asked, “Where’s Nancy?” Learning she was in Washington DC, he began assaulting Paul Pelosi, beating him with a hammer and fracturing his skull. Several days later, a number of Republicans, including the president, made light of the attack.
The president’s official coin commemorating the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution bears the face of Trump on one side and on the other his post-assassination image of a bloodied but defiant Trump admonishing his fellow Americans to “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
During his 2016 campaign rallies, he urged his followers to punch protesters in the mouth, promising to pay their lawyers’ fees.
In his first term, on immigration he wondered why the US could not get more migrants from, say, Norway instead of from “shithole countries” in Africa or elsewhere.
In his first off-year election (2018) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) were all elected to the US House of Representatives and became known as “The Squad.” On July 14, 2019, Trump publicly advised them to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done.”
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) led the fight(s) to impeach Trump, one of whose followers left Schiff a warning in the congressman’s voice mailbox: “I’m gonna f-ing blow your brains out,”
As his first term was ending, Trump encouraged some 2,500 of his closest friends to march on Congress and “fight like hell” on January 6, 2021. Later, very early in his second term he pardoned them and awarded some of them the Presidential Medal of Freedom. When informed that the “patriots” had hung a noose from makeshift gallows on Capitol grounds to “hang Mike Pence,” as the chant admonished, Trump, the defender of evangelical Christians, replied, “So what?”
All through his second campaign for the presidency (2024) he centered his message on anti-immigration, frequently referring to immigrants as “not even human. They’re animals.” He warned that these newcomers would increase crime in the streets and, in a quotation from Hitler’s Mein Kampf, “poison the bloodstream” of America.
All the while, America’s megalomaniacal monster waved an imaginary Christian flag and promised to fight for it. That is one reason evangelicals were less than unenthusiastic about a potential Mike Pence presidency. As sociologists of religion Phillip Gorski and Samuel Perry explained, “[T]he fight was more important than the faith… Pence had the faith, but Trump had the fight. And the fight was really all they cared about.” (The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy, 3.)
All of which has brought us through several weeks of clashes between masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and American citizens using their First Amendment right of free speech to protest Trump’s dragnet of blue states, searching and destroying Black and brown families—some illegal, some documented, some American citizens—that have brought the nation to the boiling point.
Nowadays we have no “Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young” lamenting “four dead in Ohio.”
But we do have a president who makes Richard Nixon look like a Boy Scout. And we have Bruce Springsteen:
King Trump's private army from the DHSPeace, it would seem, is not what it’s cracked up to be. In Trumplandia, it appears, P-E-A-C-E spells MURDER.
Guns belted to their coats
Came to Minneapolis to enforce the law
Or so their story goes
Against smoke and rubber bullets
In the dawn's early light
Citizens stood for justice
Their voices ringing through the night
And there were bloody footprints
Where mercy should have stood
And two dead, left to die on snow-filled streets
Alex Pretti and Renee Good
Oh, our Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Singing through the bloody mist
We'll take our stand for this land
And the stranger in our midst
Here in our home, they killed and roamed
In the winter of '26….
Now they say they're here to uphold the law
But they trample on our rights
If your skin is black or brown, my friend
You can be questioned or deported on sight….
Oh, our Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Singing through the bloody mist
Here in our home, they killed and roamed
In the winter of '26
We'll take our stand for this land
And the stranger in our midst
We'll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis...
But where are our patriots—progressive patriots, 5-, 8-, 10-million strong—called to the nation’s capital, like the “patriots” of January 6, willing to take our stand and storm the White House?
In 1970, massive numbers of protesters marched to Kent State University. Millions of others showed America that nonviolent protest could work. So where are those of us willing to chant; spill some of our own blood, if necessary; and chant, “Hey, hey, Donald J, how many protesters did you kill today?” until “We the People” come face to face with Mr. Trump, call on Congress to invoke the 25th Amendment, and tell them all: “NO MORE KINGS!?”