With a nation still mourning the Sandy Hook school shooting, Americans across the country continued to deal with even more public gunfire this weekend, including another shooting at a late night moving screening. Police in San Antonio say a man fired several shots at a multiplex theater on Sunday night, wounding one person before being shot by an off-duty sheriff's deputy. On Saturday afternoon, a man fired 50 shots in the parking of a California mall, and on Saturday morning a police officer and two employees were shot at a Birmingham, Alabama, hospital. Other than the gunman in the Alabama incident, who fatally wounded by police, no one was killed in any of the shootings.

However, in addition to those seemingly random mass shootings, two police officers in Topeka, Kansas, were shot and killed outside a grocery store, after responding to a call of a suspicious vehicle.

Coming just hours after one of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history, another weekend of public gunfire incidents will only add more fuel to the growing debate over gun control. At the very least they further underscore the difficult of task of not just regulating guns, but overcoming the national obsession with turning to them so quickly and wielding them so openly. (The man in Newport Beach, California—who had no criminal record and was a licensed security guard—appears to have not even targeted other people, but merely fired his bullets into the air and into the ground, until police arrived and he surrendered peacefully.) No matter your stance on new regulations or new approaches to helping those in trouble, it's obvious that the task of cutting down on gun violence in this country will not be an easy one.

and yes, in 3 days since Newtown massacre, 250 Americans have died from gun fire; 500+ have been wounded; bit.ly/U4h710 #USgunstats

— Eric Boehlert (@EricBoehlert) December 17, 2012

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Dashiell Bennett