Former student kills six at Nashville school
In Nashville, a young woman burst into the Covenant School on Monday before opening fire. Three students died in hospital, along with at least three school employees.
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Nashville police quickly occupied the Covenant School, the school where the shooting took place.
REUTERS
A heavily armed young woman opened fire Monday at an elementary school in Nashville, in the southern United States, killing three children and three adults, before being shot dead by police. The drama immediately reignited the debate about the ravages of guns, the leading killer of minors in the United States.
The assailant, a 28-year-old woman, was armed with “at least two assault rifles and a pistol,” local police spokesman Don Aaron told a news conference. . In the middle of the morning, she entered through a secondary door into the premises of a small private Christian school, “The Covenant School”, of which she would be, according to the first elements of the investigation, a former student. She crossed the ground floor, then headed for the first floor firing numerous shots.
“Three children were fatally affected, as well as three adults”, and there are no other victims, detailed Don Aaron. Officers were quickly dispatched to the scene. After hearing shots upstairs, they “immediately” went there and “killed” the assailant, who was pronounced dead at 10:27 a.m., a quarter of an hour after the first call for help, a he continued. Local television channels showed the images of ambulances and a procession of parents coming to pick up their children sheltered in a church.
“Enough is enough”
While praising law enforcement for their quick response, President Joe Biden expressed his shock at the “repugnant” crime. Gun violence “rips at the very soul of our nation,” he commented from the White House, calling again on Congress to ban assault rifles.
The Democrat has long pleaded for the US Parliament to prohibit, or at least restrict, the possession of these weapons designed to cause a maximum number of victims, but he comes up against the refusal of elected opposition members. “How many other children will have to be killed before the Republicans in Congress” agree to ban this type of weapon, was indignant the spokesperson for the White House, Karine Jean-Pierre. “Enough is enough.”
Republican elected officials from the state of Tennessee, of which Nashville is the capital, also expressed their emotion on social networks, being careful not to raise the sensitive subject of firearms. “I am devastated and heartbroken at the tragic news from the Covenant School,” tweeted Republican Senator Bill Hagerty. Her colleague Marsha Blackburn called for “praying” for the victims.
4368 dead
About 400 million firearms are in circulation in the United States, where they caused more than 45,000 deaths in 2020, by suicide, accident or homicide, according to the latest figures published by the Centers for Prevention and diseases (CDC). And for the first time that year, weapons became the leading cause of death among young people aged 1 to 19, with 4,368 deaths, ahead of car accidents and overdoses, according to the CDC.
Bloodbaths in schools represent only a tiny portion of the total, but mark the spirits more. The United States was particularly shaken by the carnage committed in 2012 in a school in Sandy Hook, Connecticut (20 children killed), and in May 2022 in Uvalde, Texas (19 children and two teachers).
Between these two tragedies, a massacre committed in 2018 in a high school in Parkland, Florida, had triggered a vast national movement, carried by young victims, to demand stricter supervision of individual weapons. Despite the mobilization of more than a million demonstrators, Congress had not passed significant reforms, many elected officials being under the influence of the powerful pressure group National Rifle Association (NRA) and being anxious not to displease a majority still very attached to the right to bear arms.
(AFP)
