By Agence France-Presse

At least seven students were wounded on Tuesday in a school shooting in the US state of Colorado, police said, across town from one of the worst gun massacres in the country’s modern history.

The Douglas County Sheriff’s Office said on Twitter that “7 possibly 8 students have been injured” while two shooters were in custody.

The sheriff’s office said the attackers opened fire at the STEM School Highlands Ranch, a kindergarten through 12th grade school in central Colorado, around five miles (eight kilometers) by road from Columbine High School.

Two heavily armed teens killed 12 students and one teacher at Columbine in 1999 — at the time the deadliest such attack in US history.

School shootings have since become a frequent occurrence in the US, where firearms killed nearly 40,000 people in 2017, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Despite the scale of the gun violence problem in the country, efforts to address it legislatively have long been largely deadlocked at the federal level.