There Was Another Massacre This Weekend That Deserves Your Attention

Impact

On Saturday — during the same weekend of America's deadliest shooting, which left at least 49 victims dead and 53 wounded at Florida's gay nightclub Pulse — was another, less-publicized mass shooting in Roswell, New Mexico, in which a man named Juan David Villegas-Hernandez is suspected to have shot and killed his wife and their four daughters. 

On Sunday, officials caught and arrested Hernandez, who had fled the country in a red Ford pickup truck, in the Mexican city of Arizpe. A medical examiner will be conducting autopsies to confirm the cause of death and identities of the victims, who are aged 34, 14, 11, 7 and 3 years old.

A relative had found the five victims' bodies with gunshot wounds in the Hernandez home on Saturday evening after the Hernandez's phone continued to be unanswered. 

The Federal Bureau of Investigation calls it a mass shooting when at least four people are shot in a single attack. 

Both the New Mexico and Orlando massacre come at a time when the dialogue on gun violence is arguably reaching its peak. About one in six mass shootings are public, like the Orlando one — over half are family killings, like the Hernandez one.

"The big ones, of course, attract the national media, comments from the president, cries of terrorism," Danielle Paquette wrote for the Washington Post. "The small ones ... well, they have become just another police report in the United States."

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