4 Dead, Several Injured Following Active Shooter Incident at Naval Air Station Pensacola

The main gate at Naval Air Station Pensacola is seen on Navy Boulevard in Pensacola, Fla., on March 16, 2016. U.S. Navy/Patrick Nichols/Handout via Reuters

Four people are dead and several were injured after an active shooter incident at Florida’s Naval Air Station Pensacola on Friday morning, officials said.

The sheriff’s office in Escambia County said the shooting is over, CNN reported. The gunman has been confirmed dead. Three other people were killed.

Two sheriff’s deputies were injured, one shot in the arm, the other in the knee, but both were expected to survive, officials said at the news conference.

Eight people were being treated at Baptist Hospital, hospital spokeswoman Kathy Bowers said.

Authorities told WEAR-TV that the gunman was shot and killed by authorities at the base.

The base’s Facebook page sent out an alert on the active shooter on Friday morning.

“Both gates of NASP are currently secured due to reports of an active shooter. More information will be provided as it becomes available,” the post read.

Emergency responders near the Naval Air Base Station in Pensacola, Fla., on Dec. 6, 2019. WEAR-TV via AP

President Donald Trump had been briefed and was monitoring the situation, a White House spokesman said.

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), whose district includes Pensacola, tweeted: “Please pray for our military service members, law enforcement, and other first responders as they work to address the situation.”

According to the Navy’s website, Naval Air Station Pensacola employs more than 16,000 military and 7,400 civilian personnel. Meanwhile, a number of families live at the base.

Naval Air Station Pensacola is seen in an aerial view in Pensacola, Fla., on August 14, 2012. U.S. Navy/Patrick Nichols/Handout via Reuters

The lockdown in Pensacola comes just a few days after a sailor killed two civilian employees before turning a gun on himself at Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard in Hawaii.

Facts About Crime in the United States

Violent crime in the United States has fallen sharply over the past 25 years, according to both the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) (pdf).

The rate of violent crimes fell by 49 percent between 1993 and 2017, according to the FBI’s UCR, which only reflects crimes reported to the police.

The violent crime rate dropped by 74 percent between 1993 and 2017, according to the BJS’s NCVS, which takes into account both crimes that have been reported to the police and those that have not.

The FBI recently released preliminary data for 2018. According to the Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report, January to June 2018, violent crime rates in the United States dropped by 4.3 percent compared to the same six-month period in 2017.

While the overall rate of violent crime has seen a steady downward drop since its peak in the 1990s, there have been several upticks that bucked the trend. Between 2014 and 2016, the murder rate increased by more than 20 percent, to 5.4 per 100,000 residents, from 4.4, according to an Epoch Times analysis of FBI data. The last two-year period that the rate soared so quickly was between 1966 and 1968.

Reuters contributed to this report.