According to US authorities and local media in North Carolina, a man shot a six-year-old girl and her parents after a basketball the child was playing with rolled into the attacker's yard.

According to WSOC-TV, the incident occurred on Wednesday as several small children were playing with a basketball that rolled into the yard of Robert Singletary. According to online court documents, Singletary was detained near Tampa on Thursday afternoon and is set to appear in court.

It was the latest in a string of shootings around the US involving property owners who allegedly fired at young people who approached them either by accident or for an innocent purpose.

According to witnesses, Singletary raced out of his house enraged after the ball rolled into his yard and began firing a revolver at a neighbor. William White and his six-year-old daughter Kinsley were reportedly critically injured during the incident.

Kinsley required sutures due to gunshot pieces in her cheek, while White was critically injured after being shot in the back. The shootings of Kinsley and her parents occurred six days after Ralph Yarl, a Black adolescent, was shot by a white man after ringing the man's doorbell in Kansas City, Missouri.

According to accounts, Yarl, 16, was shot twice by Andrew Lester, 84, on April 13 after Yarl mistakenly knocked on Lester's doorbell thinking it was where his two younger brothers were visiting a friend.

In the United States, a country of about 330 million people and an estimated 400 million weapons, fatal shootings are common.

Last week, Kaylin Gillis, 20, was reportedly shot and killed after her friend pulled into the driveway of a house they believed belonged to a friend, according to New York authorities. 

She was pronounced dead, as confirmed by the Washington County Sherif Jeffrey Murphy in a statement, after Kevin Monahan, 65, fired at the car with four friends inside who realized they got the wrong address.

When the group realized they were at the incorrect home, they began backing out of the driveway when the occupant allegedly fired two rounds from his porch, wounding Gillis in the neck.

"I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her," Blake Walsh, 19, said of his girlfriend, Gillis, in an interview with NBC. "My whole world was taken from me."

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