#Dozens of shootings across US mark bloody July 4th weekend

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Fireworks go off in the background as NYPD officers investigate a crime scene.
Seth Gottfried

The nation’s 4th of July weekend was marred by the wrong kind of fireworks.

A spate of shootings throughout the US left more than 150 people wounded and nearly a dozen dead so far this weekend, including 67 gunshot victims in Chicago over a blood-splattered weekend, according to reports.

Police said 13 people were killed in separate shootings in the Second City, including a 7-year-old girl who was at a Fourth of July party in the city’s Austin neighborhood and a 14-year-old boy, the Chicago Sun-Times reported Sunday.

“Tonight, a 7-year-old girl in Austin joined a list of teenagers and children whose hopes and dreams were ended by the barrel of a gun,” Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said on Twitter.

“As families gather to commemorate the founding of our nation, we must ask ourselves: Is this who we are as a city or a county? We cannot grow numb like this,” Lightfoot wrote. “We are making progress in slowing shootings, but we have to do better, every single one of us.”

Chicago’s gun tally topped the Big Apple, where police said nearly 30 people were shot and two were killed over the holiday.

But other cities throughout the nation, both big and small, saw a spike in gun violence over the weekend, including Atlanta, where authorities said 14 people were wounded — two critically — on Saturday and early Sunday, WSB-TV reported.

Seven people were shot and one stabbed in Cleveland, WOIO-TV reported, while two people were killed and six wounded in three separate shootings in Baton Rouge, according to a report in The Advocate.

Not even smaller cities were spared. Police in Omaha, Nebraska, reported eight people wounded in six separate shootings, KPTM-TV said, and Memphis, Tennessee, saw at least seven shootings over a 24-hour period, WREG-TV reported.

In one of the weekend’s bloodiest single incidents, eight people were wounded and two killed at a Greenville, South Carolina, nightclub during a rap concert early Sunday morning.

“I don’t know if we have multiple shooters at this time, or one that initiated it and one that may have shot back, we’re not sure,” Greenville County Sheriff Hobart Lewis said. “There are a lot of shell casings inside.”

With Post Wires