A team of reporters from the South China Morning Post was weeks into a three-month assignment at the paper's Washington bureau when they heard gunfire just around the corner from their apartment building. The journalists, who usually hear only trucks passing and noise from a ventilation system several storeys below, were getting ready for work at 8am on Thursday when they heard a sound that was unusual for their street: "bang, bang, bang".

The gunfire sounded as if it was right outside their apartment. Soon after, they heard fire alarms and police sirens, a sequence that made clear the shooting was not a distant event but one happening on their doorstep. The account frames the episode as a personal confrontation with the grim reality of gun violence in the US capital.S1S2