Forty-four hours in America. Three mass shootings. Nineteen lives wiped out. All in California.

The victims in suburban Monterey Park included people between the ages of 57 and 76, ringing in the Lunar New Year Saturday night, Jan. 21, at a dance studio in the heart of the city’s Asian American community.

Then it happened again.

Before authorities had released all of their names, another seven people were gunned down on Monday afternoon in a rural seaside town in northern California. The victims were immigrant laborers who toiled the land on a mushroom farm where some also lived in mobile homes and trailers.

And then again, this time in Oakland.

Communities in big cities and small towns across the U.S. are being upended nearly every day as mass shootings in workplaces, schools and houses of worship become commonplace.

Gov. Gavin Newsom had been at a hospital with victims of the Monterey Park massacre on Monday when he was pulled away for a briefing on the rampage in Half Moon Bay.

“Tragedy upon tragedy,” Newsom tweeted.

The Democrat could have been referring to the first weeks of 2023 in America, which has already suffered 40 mass shootings this month – more than in any other start of the year on record.

A few threads connected the violence in California – elderly Asian gunmen in two of the cases, many victims were Asian American, as well as proximity and time. However, the greatest common denominator is a gun violence epidemic the United States seems incapable of eradicating.

“Only in America,” Newsom said of the bloodshed. “The devastation is felt for generations in some cases. Communities being torn asunder. No one feeling safe.”

What motivated Saturday night’s shooting at the Star Ballroom Dance Studio in Monterey Park is still unclear.

The city’s majority Asian community had gathered on the eve of the Lunar New Year when 72-year-old Huu Can Tran opened fire, authorities said.

A search of the suspected gunman’s home turned up “hundreds of rounds” of ammunition as well as evidence that led officials to believe he was “manufacturing homemade firearm suppressors,” according to Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna.

The gunman unleashed 42 rounds from a semi-automatic handgun at the dance hall before heading to a second dance studio in nearby Alhambra, where a civilian charged him and wrestled the gun away from him, Luna said.

“Lunar New Year for many of our Asian American communities is the most important and celebrated holiday we have,” said Connie Chung Joe, CEO of Asian Americans Advancing Justice – Los Angeles. “We come together with families. We eat well. We have parades. (The shooting) is equivalent to having, in many parts of America, somebody gunned down at a Christmas Day parade.”

Eleven people died.

• Eleven people killed after a gunman opened fire at a dance studio in Monterey Park, near Los Angeles;

• Seven people killed Monday in the Half Moon Bay area near San Francisco;

• One person killed and seven others wounded Monday evening in Oakland.