Police responded to a shooting at a suburban Dallas mall on Saturday that left several people injured, authorities say.
The Dallas area news outlet WFAA he quoted a local sheriff as reporting that the shooter was dead at the scene and that children were among the victims. There was no immediate word on additional deaths or the exact number of people injured inside the Allen Premium Outlets shopping center where the shooting occurred.
Video footage from local media showed police officers leading shoppers out of the mall, with patrol cars and emergency vehicles parked near the entrances.
Allen, Texas, is a community of 100,000 people about 20 miles (32 km) north of Dallas.
Mass shootings have become common in the US, with at least 198 so far in 2023, the most at this point in the year since at least 2016, according to the gun violence file. The nonprofit group defines a mass shooting as any in which four or more victims are injured or killed.
Congress has been unable to pass substantial gun control despite constant deadly mass shootings.
Texas allows its residents to legally carry guns without a license or training. Last August, a federal judge struck down a Texas law that raised the legal age to carry firearms from 18 to 21.
In 2019, a shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, killed 23 people. A shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, last year left 19 students and two teachers dead.
The state’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, has supported keeping guns as accessible to the public as possible. That’s the case, even as a recent poll commissioned by Fox News, whose viewers are mostly Republicans, found that American voters favor gun control measures and fear they will fall victim to gun violence. .