The Shooting Gallery: Three people are dead and 14 wounded, during a shooting incident at 2 am yesterday in Chattanooga. Two people died of gunshot wounds and a third died after being hit by a car escaping the melee.

  The city’s mayor called for “common sense” gun regulations saying, “That doesn’t mean taking guns away from responsible gun owners, but it does mean mandatory background checks and prohibiting high capacity magazines that allow shooters to hurt dozens of people without even having to reload.”

 It wasn’t the only mass shooting over the weekend. Three people were killed and 11 wounded Saturday night in a shooting possibly involving several gunmen in downtown Philadelphia. It happened in South Street, a popular area of restaurants and bars. 

  The cops fired at the gunmen, but don’t know whether they hit any of them. At least two guns were recovered from the scene, one with an extended magazine.

  While Republican legislators across the country call for “thoughts and prayers”  over the dead, the carnage rages on. Weekend shootings in Phoenix, Chester, Virginia, and Summerton, South Carolina added three killed and  22 injured to the weekend toll.

  Last Thursday a convicted murderer with ties to a Mexican drug cartel who had escaped from a prison bus killed four Houston-area children and their grandfather before police shot him dead. 

  The country had two mass shootings Thursday in which four or more people were hit, seven on Saturday, and four yesterday.

  In a recent radio interview, Republican Rep. Billy Long of Missouri blamed gun violence on the legality of abortion. He said, “When we decided it was okay to murder kids in their mother’s wombs, life has no value to a lot of these folks.”

The War Zone: Kyiv was hit by missiles for the first time in a month, destroying tanks supplied to Ukraine by western allies, according to Russian claims.  At least five missiles hit the capital city.

  Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that he will start hitting targets he has so far avoided if Western nations begin delivering longer-range missiles to Ukraine.

  The Ukrainians claim in vicious street fighting to have taken back as much as half the eastern city of Sievierodonetsk, which is considered vital to control of the region. Russian state media admits that another of the army’s generals has been killed.

  Russian artillery hit the Svyatogorsk Lavra, an Orthodox religious compound in the eastern Donetsk region, destroying the log structure with onion domes of the All Saints’ Hermitage. 

  The hermitage was first destroyed during the Soviet era then rebuilt. It’s clear that the strike was not accidental. President Volodomyr Zelensky said, “The occupiers know exactly which object is being shelled. They know that there are no military targets on the territory of the Svyatogorsk Lavra.”

  On the diplomatic front, French President Emmanuel Macron appears to have shot himself in the foot with his assertion that France and its allies should refrain from humiliating Moscow to improve the possibility of a negotiated settlement.  Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said such statements “can only humiliate France and every other country that would call for it.”

Center Court: Rafael Nadal yesterday won the French Open for the 14^th time, making it his  22nd Grand Slam title overall. The 36-year-old Spaniard first won the French Open in 2005 at age 19. No man has won more Grand Slam titles than Nadal.

The Obit Page: Ann Turner Cook, a retired schoolteacher whose charcoal portrait drawn as a baby has been the face on Gerber baby food for more than 90 years, died at her home in St. Petersburg, Florida. She had been a retired school teacher.

  The portrait drawn by a neighbor in Westport, Connecticut when Cook was four or five months old won a national contest run by the Gerber company.

  Neither Cook nor her family were paid for the likeness that the company copyrighted. In 1951 Cook squeezed a $5,000 settlement out of Gerber that she used for a down payment on a house.

  Gerber just announced that they are introducing a new baby face to sell their stuff. 

The Spin Rack: As many as 50 people were killed when gunmen opened fire on worshippers and detonated explosives at a Catholic church in southwestern Nigeria yesterday. Authorities say they do not know who carried out the attack. — President and Mrs. Biden were briefly evacuated from their Delaware beach home Saturday when an airplane entered restricted air space. — Study results say that people who drink up to 3 ½ cups of coffee a day, sweetened or unsweetened, have about a 30% lower death risk from cancer compared with non-coffee drinkers.  — Speaking of coffee, Starbucks announced it is closing its shop on College Avenue in Ithaca, NY near Cornell University after its workers voted to unionize. The company said the decision had nothing to do with the union vote and of course we believe that.

Boris on the Line: As the country wrapped up its 70^th year jubilee for Queen Elizabeth, Britain’s tousled hair Prime Minister Boris Johnson faces a “confidence” vote tonight that could end his time in office. Members of Johnson’s Tory party are angry about parties he threw at 10 Downing Street breaking covid lockdown rules and they express general discontent with his leadership, which one former ally branded a “charade.”