Another school shooting kills six in Nashville
In Nashville, a former student burst into the Covenant School on Monday before opening fire. Three students died in hospital, along with at least three school employees.
Updated
Nashville police quickly occupied the Covenant School, the school where the shooting took place.
REUTERS
Three children and three adults were shot dead Monday in an elementary school in Nashville, in the south of the United States, a tragedy that has reopened the debate on the ravages of firearms in this country. According to local police chief John Drake, the bloodbath was committed by Audrey H., a 28-year-old transgender person, who was promptly killed by law enforcement.
His services later told local newspaper “The Tennessean” that he was a transgender man — born female but who identifies as male. The assailant entered in the middle of the morning, armed with two assault rifles and a pistol, on the premises of a small private Christian school, “The Covenant School”, where he was educated.
After crossing the ground floor, he headed for the first floor firing numerous shots. Three students, aged 8 to 9, and three adults, aged 60 to 61, were killed by his bullets. Quickly dispatched to the scene, officers immediately shot the suspect, who was pronounced dead at 10:27 a.m., fifteen minutes after the first call for help, according to police spokesman Don Aaron. Local television channels showed the images of ambulances and a procession of parents coming to pick up their children sheltered in a church.
During the assault, one of the teachers managed to call her daughter. “She told me she was hiding in a closet and it was shooting everywhere,” said the latter, Avery Myrick, to the local channel WSMV4. Relieved that her mother made it out alive, Avery Myrick said she “hurts for all those” who lost their loved ones in the carnage.
“Enough is enough”
Anxious parents marched all day through a church to pick up the sheltered children. The police for their part carried out a search of Audrey Hale’s home and discovered a plan “showing access” to the school and a “manifesto”, said John Drake, which suggests that the attack was premeditated.
While praising law enforcement for their quick response, President Joe Biden expressed his dismay 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)
