One dead, eight wounded by gunmen in Washington, DC

One person was killed and eight others wounded on Thursday in two separate shootings on the streets of Washington, DC, not far from the White House, police said.

In the first shooting, one man was killed and five other adults were wounded in the courtyard of an apartment complex in Columbia Heights, located about two miles (three km) from the White House.

Metropolitan Police were searching for two men armed with a rifle seen at that Thursday night shooting scene, said Metropolitan Police Commander Stuart Emerman.

Five victims in the Columbia Heights shooting were men and one was a woman, Emerman said.

Three others were wounded in another shooting in northeast Washington, although police didn’t know if the two shootings were related, The Washington Post reported.

In the second shootingy, two men and a woman were wounded, but an update on their conditions was not available early Friday.

Gun violence in the United States has reached the highest levels in decades and is taking a growing toll the country’s economy, costing the US nearly $230 billion in 2017, according to a new study.

Nearly 40,000 people were killed by firearms in 2017, which included around 2,500 school-aged children, according to the study released Wednesday by Democrats on Congress' Joint Economic Committee.

“It is beyond time to stop the epidemic of gun violence in this country,” DC Council Member Brianne Nadeau wrote in Twitter.

“I will not stand by while the residents of Columbia Heights are again visited by the horrible spectre of violence,” she wrote.