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America is again reeling from the horror of its gun violence with an 11-year-old boy being charged with murder after allegedly shooting dead an eight-year-old girl in Tennessee, days after the mass shooting in Oregon and a series of drive-by murders of children in Cleveland, Ohio.
The 11-year-old boy has been charged with first-degree murder after he used his father's 12-gauge shotgun to shoot his next door neighbour, McKayla Dyer, through a window as she played outside on Saturday afternoon.
McKayla's mother, Latasha Dyer, told local media that the boy killed her because she would not let him see her puppy.
"I want her back in my arms, this is not fair. Hold and kiss your babies every night because you're never promised the next day with them," Ms Dyer told an ABC News affiliate.
Days earlier international attention was focused on the mass shooting at a small town college in Oregon in which nine people were killed and up to 20 wounded
But also on that Thursday evening a baby was shot dead in Cleveland, Ohio.
Five-month-old Aavielle Wakefield was in a car with her mother and grandmother on the way to the grocery store when five bullets struck the vehicle. One of them found its way into her chest.
"There is a hole in her shirt," a horrified woman can be heard explaining to a dispatcher in a 911 call. "Blood is coming out of her nose."
In the background you can hear a terrible keening.
"That's her mother holding her," the caller says at one point. "She won't give her up."
Another caller, his voice tight and fast, tells another dispatcher, "A little kid just got shot man, a little kid, y'all just had me on hold forever man! A little baby just got shot. Oh my God!"
How old is the baby, asks the dispatcher.
"Man, it's a baby," the caller says, crying now.
"A baby baby?" the dispatcher asks.
"A baby," the man confirms through his sobs.
Aavielle was not the only child to die like this in Cleveland in the past month, just the youngest.
Ramon Burnett, 5, was shot dead in a drive-by outside his grandmother's apartment on the afternoon September 4, the Friday of the Labour Day long weekend. Earlier that day he had been given a quarter by a family member. He used it to buy a home-made slushy from a neighbour.
Then he went out to toss a football with neighbourhood kids. That was when he was shot dead.
Three days later they buried Ramon.
Major Howard, 3, was sitting in a car when he was hit in another drive-by. He was so little there was space for only four bearers to carry his casket, which was adorned with balloons rather than flowers.
In a nation numbed either by grief, cynicism or helplessness in the relentless death toll wrought by its guns, the killings have prompted local outrage.
Cleveland's police chief, Calvin Williams, wept as he faced a press conference about the killing. "It's enough. Enough is enough," he said continued. "When are we going to stop counting babies killed out there?"
LeBron James, America's most famous basketball player and Cleveland's favourite son, called for gun law reform.
"There's no room for that," he said in an interview with AP. "There's no room for guns, first of all, but then for violence toward kids or anybody. I see the news go across my phone and I'm sitting there in front of my three kids, so it automatically just hit me. It's not just in Cleveland, it's the whole nation that goes through this as well. We all hurt from it."
