The United States is picking up the pieces from a weekend of gun violence that has refocused the country's leadership on the toxic interplay of political ideology and easy access to guns, British newspaper The Guardian said on Monday.

Incidents included a shooting in Buffalo, New York that left 10 people dead, as well as shootings in the cities of Houston, Los Angeles and Chicago that killed eight and injured many more.

The shootings have caused a variety of reactions in public figures and organizations.

'This should not be our new normal'

After a shooting at an Orange County church killed one individual and injured five others on Sunday, California federal and state lawmakers say they will not accept these acts of violence as the "new normal" and vowed to support the victims, according to a report by The Center Square on Monday.

The shooting in Laguna Woods prompted responses from several federal lawmakers who represent the region in Congress, offering prayers for the victims and promising support, the Chicago-based news website said.

"This is upsetting and disturbing news, especially less than a day after a mass shooting in Buffalo," US Rep. Katie Porter said in a statement, adding "this should not be our new normal."

California State Sen. Dave Min, said on Sunday "We should refuse to accept these tragedies as the new normal in our schools, our houses of worship, or anywhere."

Gun violence should be treated as a public health epidemic

Among modern industrialized nations, only the United States has this level of firearm-assisted injury and death, the Chicago Tribune reported on Thursday.

"Gun deaths have now surpassed auto accidents as the leading cause of death in children," wrote Charles Nozicka, clinical professor of emergency medicine at Rosalind Franklin University, on the website of the daily newspaper.

"We want our families to be safe and live in a country where they do not have to fear some crazed shooter with a self-destructive agenda. We all want to stop avoidable accidental firearm injuries. Only by studying the epidemiology of firearm morbidity and mortality, as any other public health issue, will we decrease firearm injury and associated mortality."

Nozicka provided suggestions for policy improvements, but also went deeper in diagnosing underlying causes.

"Universal background checks and mandatory safe firearm storage would be a good start for guns," Nozicka said. "However, there is much more to this issue. What motivates someone to stalk strangers with an assault-style rifle? Hatred, racism and political polarization are certainly fueling the violence.

It is time for a bipartisan federal task force to examine this national epidemic of firearm violence. We must study the root causes and approach it as any other national epidemic."

'This is something you could have forecasted'

"This is something that, in any decade, you could have forecasted, and that we could still forecast in the future if we, as a nation, cannot get a grip on our racial tensions and our racial philosophies and really tackle those issues that are there every day," said Michael McIntyre in an interview with WTOV NBC 9, an Ohio-based television station.

Handling those problems starts at the ground level, said McIntyre, who is the president of Steubenville National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

"As Martin Luther King Jr. says, 'love is the only thing that can conquer hate.' The problem is we have to unpack what that means," said McIntyre. "We need to have love in our budgets, we need to have love in our policy, we need to love equality, inclusion, diversity and all the things we do to create a sense of we are all in the same country. We are all in the same neighborhoods."

Social dislocation and 'ghost guns'

More than 45,000 Americans died from guns -- slightly over half by suicide -- in 2021, up from just over 39,000 in 2019, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

As of May 16, some 7,000 people have already died from shootings in the US this year, both in homicides and in accidental discharges, with shootings in public places an almost daily occurrence, AFP News Agency reported on Monday.

Per the GVA, there have been 202 mass shootings, defined as an incident in which four or more people are injured or killed, in 2022 already.

Experts say the rise in gun crime is being fueled by social dislocation caused by the pandemic and the proliferation of so-called "ghost guns" which can be assembled at home and are virtually impossible to trace, Paris-based news agency AFP said.

US firearms makers produced over 139 million guns for the commercial market over the two decades since 2000, including 11.3 million in 2020 alone according to a report recently released by the US Justice Department.

Another 71 million firearms were imported in the same period -- compared to just 7.5 million exported -- underscoring how the country is swimming in personal weapons that have stoked a surge in gun violence, murders and suicides.