An unidentified gunman shot and killed five people in a series of shootings on Wednesday in southern California before taking his own life, Reuters reports, citing local police.
The shootings began shortly before 5:30 p.m. local time in Bakersfield, about 200 kilometers north of Los Angeles.
According to Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood, the man first killed his wife and a man at a trucking company in Bakersfield.
He then chased another man from the trucking company before he shot and killed him in front of a nearby sports store.
The gunman later killed two men at a residence. He then commandeered a vehicle from a woman and her child before he killed himself when he was confronted by a sheriff's deputy.
"This is the new normal, if you look across the country,"
Youngblood said, describing the incident as a mass shooting.
Authorities were working to determine "why this started and why so many players were involved and the connection because obviously these are not random shootings," he added.
It is the latest chapter of America's epidemic of gun violence. Americans make up only four percent of the global population but they own 40 percent of the world's firearms, according to a recent study published by the Graduate Institute of International Development Studies in Geneva.
