Aside from those two facts the details were common enough as to be banal. A man – it is always a man – opened fire on strangers for no apparent reason, seeking to kill as many of them as possible. Franklyn police chief Sabria McGuire hugs Christian Wise as Britney Landry looks on outside a rosary service for Mayci Breaux in Franklin, Louisiana, on Friday. Credit:Reuters According to one crowd-sourced count by Mass Shooting Tracker up until Thursday there had been 204 mass shootings in the United States in 2015, and as The Washington Post notes, the shooting took place on the 204th day of 2015. The Mass Shooting Tracker uses a broader definition of a mass shooting than most. The FBI considers a mass shooting an event in which four or more people are shot dead in an attack that is not drug or family related. Mass Shooting Trackers counts all those incidents in which four people are shot, regardless of whether they are killed.

Either way they are not the only organisation to note that there appears to be an epidemic of this savagery. Louisiana governor and presidential hopeful Bobby Jindal, does not support changes to gun laws. Credit:AP Last year a study by Harvard University using data compiled by the investigative journalism magazine Mother Jones found that the incidence of mass shootings had trebled in the US since 2011. It found that in the 29 years leading up to September 6, 2011, a mass shooting occurred at an average interval of less than 172 days. A shirt with a message dedicated to shooting victim Jillian Johnson hangs on the storefront window of Johnson's store Parish Ink in downtown Lafayette. Credit:The Daily Advertisers/AP

Between that date and publication in October last year, shootings had occurred every 64 days on average. The other common thread between the shootings is political inaction on gun control. Alabaman John Houser turned his gun on himself after killing two and injuring several others. Credit:Lafayette Police "If you ask me where is the one area where I feel that I have been most frustrated and most stymied, it is the fact that the United States of America is the one advanced nation on earth in which we do not have sufficient, commonsense, gun-safety laws even in the face of repeated mass killings," President Barack Obama told the BBC after this week's killings. Louisiana's Republican governor, Bobby Jindal, who is also running for the party's presidential nomination, called for prayers, but he will not be backing gun control.

After the killing of eight congregants and a pastor in a South Carolina church last month Mr Jindal attacked President Obama for calling for action on gun-law reform. "I think it was completely shameful," he told Fox News. "Within 24 hours we've got the President trying to score cheap political points." Mr Jindal enjoys an A+ rating from the National Rifle Association. Last year he loosened Louisiana's gun control laws to allow people with concealed handgun permits to carry their weapons into licensed premises, the other to broaden the state's "shoot first" self-defence laws. Follow FairfaxForeign on Twitter Follow FairfaxForeign on Facebook