Chicago hospital stops accepting patients after being overwhelmed with shooting victims

The hospital was overwhelmed after a series of gang-related shootings
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Megan White5 August 2019

A hospital in Chicago was forced to temporarily shut its doors after multiple gang-related shootings put it at full capacity.

Mount Sinai Hospital was overwhelmed with patients on Sunday, and at one point was treating 12 victims of gun crime.

Ambulances were turned away at the doors after the spate of violence in the west side of the city, with three separate shootings affecting the hospital.

In total, seven were killed and 44 wounded in a weekend of gunfire across Chicago, with another eight dead and 40 injured the previous weekend.

Police Chief Eddie Johnson told a press conference: “You have to stop yourself and ask what will it take before we get a handle on what's going on.

“Not only in Chicago, but across the country.

"From police departments to the court systems to prosecutors to legislators -- we have to come together and figure out more common-sense solutions to these problems because clearly too many of our citizens are being shot and killed."

The shootings came amid a deadly weekend of mass shootings in the US.

Nine people died when a gunman opened fire at a bar in Dayton, Ohio, while twenty people were killed and dozens more injured when a gunman began firing in a shopping centre El Paso, Texas 13 hours later.

Speaking for the first time since the attacks, Mr Trump conceded that “perhaps more has to be done” to stop the bloodshed.

But critics complained that the president’s “racist” stance on immigration and his avowed opposition to gun control have fanned the flames of violence in the United States.

“This has been going on for years, for years and years in our country and we have to get it stopped,” said Mr Trump, who promised to take action, adding that “a lot of things are in the works”.

Both gunmen, he said, were “very serious mentally ill”.

But Democrats were quick to condemn the president’s policies and his anti-immigration rhetoric for inciting racial divisions in the US.

Former Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, accused the president of encouraging the “open racism and intolerance and hatred” behind the attacks.

“I’m saying that President Trump has a lot to do with what happened in El Paso yesterday,” he added.

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