Thursday in the United States is National Gun Violence Awareness Day ….people across the country are being urged to wear orange items of clothing to symbolize their support for tighter gun control.
The country had a reminder of the gun violence epidemic just a few hours ago: a murder suicide at the campus of UCLA in Los Angeles left two people dead.
The shootings brought a massive emergency response to the university, with hundreds of students locked down for hours.
Our US Correspondent Simon Marks reports.
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It is a sign of the scale of America's problem with gun violence that the phenomenon even has a National Awareness Day.
And if campaigners behind it needed any kind of public reminder of the crisis, it came in Los Angeles on Tuesday morning.
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That's LA Police Chief Charlie Beck whose force responded en masse to emergency calls from the engineering complex at UCLA….one of America's most respected universities.
Students were locked down after shots rang out from one of the office buildings on the campus….tactical teams, the bomb squad, and officers with battering rams were seen, all of them bringing images of urban warfare to the streets of another American city.
Police chief Beck says they acted out an abundance of caution…and once they realized the gunman was among the 2 people killed, then began the process of allowing students to leave.
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It could then, have been much worse, and has been in so many other towns and cities.
And that's why Americans wearing orange today will be making a political statement: that events like the one in Los Angeles would happen less often if the country adopted serious gun control.
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