nashville school shooting

United States sets a grim milestone with new record for the deadliest six months of mass killings

The United States has registered 28 mass killings during the first six months of this year, according to a database maintained jointly by the Associated Press, USA Today and the Northeastern University. This number sets a new grim milestone in the country’s ongoing cycle of gun violence, exceeding the previous record of 27, set in the second half of 2022.

Between January 1 and June 30, the U.S. witnessed the death of 140 people in mass killings, all but one of which involved guns. The death toll rose just about every week.

Law enforcement officials work Sunday, April 30, 2023, in the neighborhood where a mass shooting occurred Friday night, in Cleveland, Texas.
| Photo Credit:
AP

A mass killing is defined as an occurrence when four or more people are slain, not including the assailant, within a 24-hour period. A database maintained by AP and USA Today, in partnership with Northeastern University, tracks this large-scale violence dating back to 2006. The database does not include non-fatal shootings.

James Alan Fox, a criminology professor at Northeastern University, never imagined records like this when he began overseeing the database about five years ago.

“We used to say there were two to three dozen a year,” Mr. Fox said. “The fact that there’s 28 in half a year is a staggering statistic.” But the chaos of the first six months of 2023 doesn’t automatically doom the last six months. The remainder of the year could be calmer, despite more violence over the July 4 holiday weekend.

“Hopefully it was just a blip,” said Dr. Amy Barnhorst, a psychiatrist who is the associate director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis. “There could be fewer killings later in 2023, or this could be part of a trend. But we won’t know for sometime,” she added.

Experts like Dr. Barnhorst and Mr. Fox attribute the rising bloodshed to a growing population with an increased number of and access to guns in the U.S. For all the headlines, however, mass killings are statistically rare and represent only a fraction of the country’s overall gun violence.

What politicians are saying

“What a ghastly milestone,” said Brent Leatherwood, whose three children were in class at a private Christian school in Nashville on March 27 when a former student killed three children and three adults. “You never think your family would be a part of a statistic like that.” Mr. Leatherwood, a prominent Republican in a state that hasn’t strengthened gun laws, believes something must be done to get guns out of the hands of people who might become violent.

“You may as well say Martians have landed, right? It’s hard to wrap your mind around it,” he said.

Louisville Metro Police deploy for an “active police situation” that includes mass casualties near Slugger Field in Louisville, Kentucky, U.S. April 10, 2023.
| Photo Credit:
Reuters

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, a Republican, had urged the General Assembly in the wake of the Nashville school shooting to pass legislation keeping firearms away from people who could harm themselves or others, so-called “red flag laws,” though Mr, Lee says the term is politically toxic.

Getting such a measure passed in Tennessee is an uphill climb. The Republican-led Legislature adjourned earlier this year without taking on gun control, prompting Mr. Lee to schedule a special session for August.

Mr. Leatherwood, a former executive director of the Tennessee Republican Party and now the head of the influential Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy arm, wrote a letter to lawmakers asking them to pass the governor’s proposal.

Mr. Leatherwood said he doesn’t want any other family to go through what his children experienced at the time of the shooting when they were in kindergarten, second grade and fourth grade. One of his kids, preparing for a recent sleepaway camp, asked whether they would be safe there.

“Our child was asking, Do you think that there will be a gunman that comes to this camp? Do I need to be worried about that?’” Mr. Leatherwood said.

The Nashville shooter, whose writings Mr. Leatherwood and other parents are asking a court to keep private, used three guns in the attack, including an AR-15-style rifle. It was one of at least four mass killings in the first half of 2023 involving such a weapon, according to the database.

Students from the Covenant School hold hands after getting off a bus to meet their parents at the reunification site following a mass shooting at the school in Nashville, Tennessee, U.S. March 27, 2023.
| Photo Credit:
Reuters

Nearly all of the mass killings in the first half of this year, 27 of 28, involved guns. The other was a fire that killed four people in a home in Monroe, Louisiana. A 37-year-old man was arrested on arson and murder charges in connection with the March 31 deaths.

The NRA’s view

Despite the rising toll and evidence, the National Rifle Association maintains fierce opposition to regulating firearms, including AR-15-style rifles and similar weapons.

Also read | Two dead and three hurt, including suspected shooter, at Washington state music festival

“Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ constant efforts to gut the Second Amendment will not usher in safety for Americans; instead, it will only embolden criminals,” NRA spokesman Billy McLaughlin said in a statement. “That is why the NRA continues our fight for self-defence laws. Rest assured, we will never bow, we will never retreat, and we will never apologise for championing the self-defence rights of law-abiding Americans.”

Concern for the children’s future

Tito Anchondo’s brother, Andre Anchondo, was among 23 people killed in a 2019 mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. The gunman was sentenced last week to 90 consecutive life sentences but could face more punishment, including the death penalty. The prosecution of the racist attack on Hispanic shoppers in the border city was one of the U.S. government’s largest hate crime cases.

Andre Anchondo and his wife, Jordan, died shielding their 2-month-old son from bullets. Paul, who escaped with broken bones, is now 4 years old.

Law enforcement authorities removing bodies from a scene where five people were shot the night before Saturday, April 29, 2023, in Cleveland, Texas. Authorities say an 8-year-old child was among five people killed in a shooting at the home in southeast Texas late on Friday.
| Photo Credit:
AP

Tito said it felt like the country had forgotten about the El Paso victims in the years since and that not nearly enough had been done to stem the bloodshed. He worries about Paul’s future.

“I hope that things can drastically change because this country is going down a very, very slippery slope; a downward spiral,” he said. “It’s just a little unnerving to know that he’s eventually going to go to school with kids that also may bring a gun to school.”

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Josh Hawley Finds A Hate Crime He Cares About

Post By Politics alejandro mayorkas, anti-asian hate crimes, audrey hale, christian school, christianity, christopher wray, elie mystal, fbi, gun rights, guns, hate crimes, homeland security, josh hawley, manifesto, nashville school shooter, nashville school shooting, new york post, transgender rights, victimhood

Following Monday’s horrific mass shooting at a private school in Nashville, Tennessee, the rightwing outrage machine has finally decided America needs to do something about gun violence. Just kidding, they’d rather ignore the guns and continue escalating panic over transgender people to even greater levels.

Among the few things we know about the shooter, Audrey Hale, who was killed by police just 15 minutes after the attack began, is that Hale was a former student of the school, that Hale had in recent months begun identifying online as transgender, using he/him pronouns in a LinkedIn account, and that police found some writings in Hale’s house that they’re calling a “manifesto,” although whatever that constitutes hasn’t yet been released.

That was all rightwing media and politicians needed to know to proclaim not only that Hale was motivated by being trans, but also that Hale absolutely hated Christianity and Christians, because after all, the target was a Christian school. Lost in that certainty, of course, is the detail that Hale had attended that very school as a child. Therefore, like many school shooters, Hale was attacking a familiar target.

The New York Post‘s very responsible front page yesterday screamed a bunch of stuff that there’s no actual evidence for, all mostly based on unfounded speculation. It proclaimed, “TRANSGENDER KILLER TARGETS CHRISTIAN SCHOOL,” implying both that Hale’s being trans was the reason for the attack, and that their motive was to attack Christians, neither of which we actually know enough to say yet. The subhed made it even more bizarre, stating that “‘Manifesto’ leads to 6 dead, including three young kids.” These manifestos are pretty deadly things!

As The Nation’sElie Mystal points out,

The “manifesto” did not “lead” to six dead people. The two assault rifles and handgun the shooter brought with them led to six dead people. If the shooter had shown up to school armed with a manifesto, everybody would still be alive.

The people writing headlines for the Post are probably evil, but they’re not stupid. They know exactly what they’re doing. […]

As is usual for places where conservatives get their media, the Post takes real problems and inverts them to fit the white grievance narrative.

And so, as always, white Christians are justified in whatever fears they want to project on the despised minority, because for once, unlike in 98 percent of mass shootings, the shooter was not a cisgender white male with a gun. The killer was a trans person. With three guns, all of them purchased legally. (Part, we now know, of a seven gun arsenal Hale had purchased over the last few years.)

Evan has already looked at the insane persecution ravings of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson, both of whom are equally certain that the school shooting portends a coming wave of trans people attacking innocent Christians. But Sen. Josh Hawley (R- Missouri), the culture warrior who frets about how feminists are stealing men’s masculinity and hiding it in clever wooden boxes they buy on Etsy, yesterday went beyond mere rabble-rousing. Hawley sent a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to demand that the Nashville shooting be investigated as a “hate crime,” because if someone shoots up a church school, the shooter must hate Christianity. That’s just logic.

Hawley, based on a police statement that the school had been “targeted,” added his own spin, going beyond anything police have actually said. Police have not yet identified a motive for the shootings, beyond saying it appears that Hale may have felt “some resentment for having to go to that school.”

“It is commonplace to call such horrors ‘senseless violence,'” Hawley wrote, adding his very own explication that “properly speaking, that is false. Police report that the attack here was ‘targeted’ — targeted, that is, against Christians.” Which, again, police didn’t say. (Is pointing that out three times enough?)

And yes, Josh Hawley knows damn well that the standard for a hate crimes prosecution is higher than “it happened at a church school, so it was a hate crime aimed at Christians.”

Hawley’s letter cited the federal hate crimes statute, emphasizing that it includes religion-based violence, and stretched the little we know so far to come to the conclusion that the shooting had to be a hate crime, even though so far police haven’t released Hale’s writings or said anything more than that suggestion that Hale felt “resentment” toward the school. Maybe it was religious resentment, sure. Or maybe it wasn’t. But before we know any of that, Hawley wants the “full resources” of federal law enforcement thrown at investigating the attack, not only to discover the motive, but also to find out “who may have influenced the deranged shooter to carry out these horrific crimes.” Wouldn’t it be great to blame people in the LGBTQ+ rights movement, or maybe some militant atheists?

Hawley closed by solemnly stating, “Hate that leads to violence must be condemned. And hate crimes must be prosecuted.” That seems like a pretty commonplace thought, until you’re reminded that in 2021, when Asian Americans were being targeted for hate crimes during the pandemic, Hawley was the only senator to vote against a resolution calling for expedited review of those crimes by the DOJ.

At the time, Hawley warned that there was no reason to turn the “federal government into the speech police,” and also fretted about letting the government have “sweeping authority to decide what counts as offensive speech and then monitor it.”

But come now, that bill was clearly an attack on Donald Trump for calling COVID-19 the “China Virus” and the “Kung Flu,” and Donald Trump’s words are by definition not hateful, why would you even suggest such a thing?

[The Nation / Guardian / NBC News / Photo: Josh Hawley (cropped) by Gage Skidmore, Creative Commons License 2.0]

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Nashville shooter fired indiscriminately at victims, bought 7 guns before school attack: police

Post By World Audrey Elizabeth Hale, Covenant School, nashville school shooter, nashville school shooting

March 29, 2023 05:28 am | Updated 05:28 am IST – NASHVILLE, Tenn.

The shooter who killed three students and three staff members at a Christian school in Nashville legally bought seven weapons in recent years and hid the guns from their parents before carrying out the attack by firing indiscriminately at victims and spraying gunfire through doors and windows, police said Tuesday.

The violence on Monday at The Covenant School was the latest school shooting to roil the nation and was planned carefully. The shooter had drawn a detailed map of the school, including potential entry points, and conducted surveillance of the building before carrying out the massacre, authorities said.

The suspect, Audrey Hale, 28, was a former student at the school. Hale did not target specific victims — among them three 9-year-olds and the head of the school — but did target “this school, this church building,” police spokesperson Don Aaron said at a news conference Tuesday.

Hale was under a doctor’s care for an undisclosed emotional disorder and was not known to police before the attack, Metropolitan Nashville Police Chief John Drake said at the news conference.

Audrey Elizabeth Hale, 28, who is the suspect of deadly mass shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville, is seen in an undated handout image released on March 27, 2023. Photo: Metropolitan Nashville Police Department via Reuters

If police had been told that Hale was suicidal or homicidal, “then we would have tried to get those weapons,” Mr. Drake said. “But as it stands, we had absolutely no idea who this person was or if (Hale) even existed.”

Tennessee does not currently have a “red flag” law, which lets police step in and take firearms away from people who threaten to kill.

Hale legally bought seven firearms from five local gun stores, Mr. Drake said. Three of them were used in Monday’s shooting. Police spokesperson Brooke Reese said Hale bought the guns between October 2020 and June 2022.

Hale’s parents believed their child had sold one gun and did not own any others, Mr. Drake said, adding that Hale “had been hiding several weapons within the house.”

Hale’s motive is unknown, Mr. Drake said. In an interview with NBC News on Monday, Mr. Drake said investigators don’t know what drove Hale but believe the shooter had “some resentment for having to go to that school”.

Mr. Drake, at Tuesday’s news conference, described “several different writings by Hale” that mention other locations and The Covenant School.

Asked at a Senate hearing whether the Justice Department would open an investigation into whether the shooting was a hate crime targeting Christians, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said federal officials were working with local police to identify a motive.

Police have released videos of the shooting, including edited surveillance footage that shows the shooter’s car driving up to the school, glass doors being shot out and the shooter ducking through one of them.

Additional video, from Officer Rex Engelbert’s bodycam, shows a woman meeting police outside as they arrive and telling them that all the children were locked down, “but we have two kids that we don’t know where they are”.

The woman then directs officers to Fellowship Hall and says people inside had just heard gunshots. Three officers, including Mr. Engelbert, search rooms one by one, holding rifles and announcing themselves as police.

The video shows officers climbing stairs to the second floor and entering a lobby area, followed by a barrage of gunfire and an officer yelling twice: “Get your hands away from the gun”. Then the shooter is shown motionless on the floor.

Police identified Mr. Engelbert, a four-year member of the force, and Michael Collazo, a nine-year member, as the officers who fatally shot Hale. The White House said President Joe Biden spoke separately on Tuesday with Mr. Drake, Mr. Engelbert and Mr. Callazo to thank them for their bravery and quick response.

Police response times to school shootings have come under greater scrutiny after the attack in Uvalde, Texas, in which 70 minutes passed before law enforcement stormed the classroom. In Nashville, police have said 14 minutes passed from the initial call to when the suspect was killed, but they have not said how long it took them to arrive.

Surveillance video shows a time stamp of just before 10:11 a.m., when the attacker shot out the doors. Police said they got the call about a shooter at 10:13 a.m. The edited bodycam footage didn’t include time stamps. A police spokesperson didn’t respond to an email on Tuesday asking when they arrived.

During the news conference, Mr. Drake did not answer a question directly about how many minutes it took police to arrive. At about 10:24 a.m., 11 minutes after the call was received, officers engaged the suspect, he said.

“There were police cars that had been hit by gunfire. As officers were approaching the building, there was gunfire going off,” Mr. Drake said.

“We feel, our response right now, from what I’ve seen, I don’t have a particular problem with it. But we always want to get better. We always want to get there in two or three minutes,” he said, adding that traffic was “locked down” at the time.

Traffic was indeed stopped along a nearby two-lane road with a turning lane as police tried to weave their way to the school.

Police have given unclear information on Hale’s gender. For hours on Monday, police identified the shooter as a woman. Later in the day, the police chief said Hale was transgender. After the news conference, Aaron declined to elaborate on how Hale identified.

In an email on Tuesday, police spokesperson Kristin Mumford said Hale “was assigned female at birth. Hale did use male pronouns on a social media profile.” Later on Tuesday, at the news conference, Mr. Drake referred to Hale with female pronouns.

Authorities identified the dead children as Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs and William Kinney. The adults were Cynthia Peak, 61, Katherine Koonce, 60, and Mike Hill, 61.

The website of The Covenant School, a Presbyterian school founded in 2001, lists a Katherine Koonce as the head of the school. Her LinkedIn profile says she has led the school since July 2016. Peak was a substitute teacher, and Hill was a custodian, according to investigators.

Koonce was remembered as someone who would run toward danger, not away from it.

“I guarantee you if there were kids missing [during the shooting], Katherine was looking for them,” friend Jackie Bailey said. “And that’s probably how she got in the way — just trying to do something for somebody else. She would give up her own life in order to save somebody else’s.”

Founded as a Ministry of Covenant Presbyterian Church, the school is in the affluent Green Hills neighbourhood just south of downtown Nashville. It has about 200 students from preschool through sixth grade and roughly 50 staff members.

Mr. Biden, who also spoke with Tennessee elected officials, pleaded with Congress to pass stronger gun safety laws.

“The Congress has to act,” Mr. Biden said. “The majority of the American people think having assault weapons is bizarre, it’s a crazy idea. They’re against that.”

Before Monday’s violence in Nashville, there had been seven mass killings at K-12 schools since 2006 in which four or more people were killed within a 24-hour period, according to a database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University. In all of them, the shooters were males.

The database does not include school shootings in which fewer than four people were killed, which have become far more common in recent years. Just last week alone, for example, school shootings happened in Denver and the Dallas area within two days of each other.

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#Nashville #shooter #fired #indiscriminately #victims #bought #guns #school #attack #police

Tennessee Republicans Have Mass Shootings All Figured Out: More Guns, Everywhere, Always

Post By Politics 988 suicide and crisis lifeline, anti trans bills, AR-15, atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere, background checks, bans on gender-affirming care, bill lee, christmas card guns, concealed carry, constitutional carry, david hogg, drag show ban, gender affirming care, gun safety, guns, handguns, Marsha Blackburn, mass shootings, maury county tennessee, Nashville, nashville school shooting, open carry, reactions to nashville school shootings, red flag laws, rep. andy ogles, republicans and guns, roseanne cash, sanctuary for guns, social media, tennessee, tennessee republicans, thoughts and prayers, tim burchett, trans youth, trans youth suicide

Following the latest mass shooting by a responsible gun owner — the killer had no criminal record and purchased at least two of the guns legally in Nashville — Tennessee Republicans are offering the expected prayers and thoughts, although none of the thoughts include reducing the nation’s ample supply of firearms.

As Yr Wonkette noted earlier, brand new member of Congress Rep. Andy Ogles, who only won his seat thanks to Republican gerrymandering, is getting dragged a-plenty for his Christmas card demonstrating his family’s devotion to the Prince of Pieces. We’ll just add that the caption on that December 2021 image was all about the divine power of guns, and we are not making this up: “The very atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil interference — they deserve a place of honor with all that’s good.”

We aren’t sure it quite matches the meter of Mel Tormé’s “The Christmas Song,” but that’s certainly a Christmas wish! And it was so: The atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere is with America not only during the Sacred Baby Season but also all year long.

While Ogles hasn’t been in Congress long enough to vote on any gun bills, in his previous job as mayor of Maury County, Tennessee, he signed a March 2020 resolution declaring the county a “sanctuary community” for the Holy Second Amendment. That doesn’t mean a damn thing at all in practical terms, but it’s a symbolic statement that if Tennessee ever passes a “red flag” law (it hasn’t), maybe the county would just let people making violent threats keep their guns. Stalkers need to defend themselves, too! And now, if Joe Biden tries to take all the guns, the guns can take refuge in Maury County, where people will presumably hide them just like Anne Frank’s family.

Ogles yesterday tweeted a brief statement saying, “My family and I are devastated by the tragedy” at the private Christian school in his district, with the usual thoughts and prayers and an assurance that he was “heartbroken by this senseless act of violence.” The replies were mostly pictures of the Christmas card, with a variety of commentary: “This you?” “We see you,” and the evergreen standby, “Fuck you.”

As it happens, then-mayor Ogles signed his 2021 gun sanctuary resolution just a day after Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee announced his own plan to allow all Tennesseans to carry handguns — openly or concealed — without a permit, meaning they’d no longer need to take a tyrannical safety class or pass any tyrannical criminal background check (other than the tyrannical federal one required to buy a gun). That law passed easily, and Lee signed it into law later in 2021, and now Republicans in the Tennessee Legislature are considering broadening it to allow open carry of all “firearms,” including assault rifles, instead of just handguns. Very important for the atmosphere of firearms to include people walking around on the sidewalk with AR-15s at the ready.

Lee tweeted an inspiring suggestion that Tennesseans join him in prayer, for all that’s worth.

Lee has been very busy protecting Tennessee children this session — not so much from being shot at school but from seeing drag shows and also criminalizing gender affirming healthcare for trans kids so they can be forced to go through puberty as the gender they don’t identify with, which will make them stop being trans anymore (except for how that doesn’t work). Research keeps showing that when trans and nonbinary youth receive gender-affirming medical care, the appallingly high suicide rate among trans kids can be reduced by as much as 73 percent. But as long as they ignore all the warnings, forcing unwanted puberty on trans youth probably won’t have any risks that Republicans would worry about.

As ever: If you are having thoughts of suicide or self harm, call the national Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn, who’s benefited from more than $1.3 million in total spending by the National Rifle Association over her House and Senate career, did a routine “heartbroken” tweet, thanking first responders, but without “thoughts and prayers,” possibly for the sake of avoiding cliché.

Parkland school shooting survivor David Hogg offered a thoughtful revised version for Blackburn, a sort of “War Prayer” explication of the unspoken half part of her tweet:

Let me re write that for you.

Chuck & I are heartbroken to hear about the shooting at Covenant School in Nashville that was enabled by NRA puppets like me who are willing to let kids be fucking slaughtered so long as the NRA continues giving me millions.

Singer Roseanne Cash offered her own thoughts for Blackburn. Her tweet lacked any prayers:

Don’t even. You vote against every common sense gun control bill that comes across your desk, you’ve taken over $1 million from the NRA and you rank 14th in all Congress for NRA contributions. Spare us the hand-wringing @MarshaBlackburn

Possibly the most honest reaction to the shootings came from Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tennessee), who told reporters at the US Capitol what he and fellow Republicans would do to solve gun violence: Not a damn thing, because criminals will always find a way to get guns, like walking into a firearms dealer and buying one.

“It’s a horrible, horrible situation,” Burchett said. “And we’re not gonna fix it. Criminals are gonna be criminals and my daddy fought in the second world war, fought in the Pacific, fought the Japanese.” From that, the elder Burchett’s taught his son that “if somebody wants to take you out and doesn’t mind losing their life, there’s not a heck of a lot you can do about it.”

We aren’t sure whether Burchett is depressed or just lazy, since he didn’t even invoke the mythical “good guy with a gun.” He’s certainly not going to try to stop the massacres anyway, because government and laws are useless. Quite the argument to keep him in the lawmaking business, no?

No, there’s nothing Congress can do either, don’t be silly, because criminals are unstoppable lawbreakers: “I don’t see any real role that we could do other than mess things up.” He did point out that there’s one way to end mass shootings, though:

You gotta change people’s hearts. You know, as a Christian, as we talk about in the church, and I’ve said this many times, I think we really need a Revival in this nation.

That said, Rep. Burchett has an “A+” rating from a leading anti-abortion group, because you can definitely legislate away women’s reproductive freedom without waiting around for the filthy sinning strumpets to find Jesus and mend their ways.

Oh, and as for the safety of his own children, Burchett explained that’s not a problem, since his daughter is homeschooled and will never have to worry about her safety. Rest of you people are on your own, the end.

[Daily Herald / Tennessean / NBC News / Brennan Murphy on Twitter]

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#Tennessee #Republicans #Mass #Shootings #Figured #Guns

Nashville school shooting | 3 children among 6 dead; suspect had drawn maps, done surveillance

Post By World gun violence, mass shootings, nashville school shooting, school shootings, The Covenant School, US bloodsheds, US mass shootings, US news, US school shootings

March 28, 2023 05:14 am | Updated 08:32 am IST – NASHVILLE, Tenn.

The suspect in a Nashville school shooting on March 27 had drawn a detailed map of the school, including potential entry points, and conducted surveillance before killing three students and three adults in the latest in a series of mass shootings in a country growing increasingly unnerved by bloodshed in schools.

The suspect, who was killed by police, is believed to be a former student at The Covenant School in Nashville, where the shooting took place.

The shooter was armed with two “assault-style” weapons — a rifle and a pistol — as well as a handgun, authorities said. At least two of them were believed to have been obtained legally in the Nashville area.

The victims were identified as Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs, and William Kinney, all 9 years old, and adults Cynthia Peak, 61; Katherine Koonce, 60; and Mike Hill, 61.

Students from The Covenant School get off a bus to meet their parents at the reunification site at the Woodmont Baptist Church Monday, March 27, 2023, in Nashville, Tenn. following a mass shooting at their school, where three children and three adults were killed by a perpetrator that was killed by police at the scene.
| Photo Credit:
AP

The website of The Covenant School, a Presbyterian school founded in 2001, lists a Katherine Koonce as the head of the school. Her LinkedIn profile says she has led the school since July 2016.

Police gave unclear information on the gender of the shooter. For hours, police identified the shooter as a 28-year-old woman and eventually identified the person as Audrey Hale. Then at a late afternoon press conference, the police chief said that Hale was transgender. After the news conference, police spokesperson Don Aaron declined to elaborate on how Hale is currently identified.

The attack at The Covenant School — which has about 200 students from preschool through sixth grade, as well as roughly 50 staff members — comes as communities around the nation are reeling from a spate of school violence, including the massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, last year; a first grader who shot his teacher in Virginia; and a shooting last week in Denver that wounded two administrators.

“I was literally moved to tears to see this and the kids as they were being ushered out of the building,” Metropolitan Nashville Police Chief John Drake said on March 27 during one of several news conferences.

Drake did not give a specific motive when asked by reporters but gave chilling examples of the shooter’s prior planning for the targeted attack.

People walk past Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt in Nashville, Tenn. on March 27, 2023, where victims were taken after several children were killed in a shooting at Covenant School. The suspect is dead after a confrontation with police.
| Photo Credit:
AP

“We have a manifesto, we have some writings that we’re going over that pertain to this date, the actual incident,” he said. “We have a map drawn out of how this was all going to take place.”

The Covenant School was founded as a Ministry of Covenant Presbyterian Church. The affluent Green Hills neighbourhood just south of downtown Nashville, where the Covenant School is located, is home to the famed Bluebird Café – a beloved spot for musicians and song writers.

President Joe Biden, speaking at an unrelated event at the White House on March 27, called the shooting a “family’s worst nightmare” and implored Congress again to pass a ban on certain semi-automatic weapons.

“It’s ripping at the soul of this nation, ripping at the very soul of this nation,” Mr. Biden said.

Mario Dennis, one of the kitchen staff at the Covenant School, sits near a police officer after a shooting at the facility in Nashville, Tennessee, U.S. on March 27, 2023.
| Photo Credit:
Reuters

Monday’s tragedy unfolded over roughly 14 minutes. Police received the initial call about an active shooter at 10:13 a.m.

Officers began clearing the first story of the school when they heard gunshots coming from the second level, Mr. Aaron said during a news briefing.

Two officers from a five-member team opened fire in response, fatally shooting the suspect at 10:27 a.m., Mr. Aaron said. One officer had a hand wound from cut glass.

Mr. Aaron said there were no police officers present or assigned to the school at the time of the shooting because it is a church-run school.

Other students walked to safety on Monday, holding hands as they left their school surrounded by police cars, to a nearby church to be reunited with their parents.

Rachel Dibble, who was at the church as families found their children, described the scene as everyone being in “complete shock”.

“People were involuntarily trembling,” said Dibble, whose children attend a different private school in Nashville. “The children … started their morning in their cute little uniforms, they probably had some Froot Loops and now their whole lives changed today.”

Dr. Shamendar Talwar, a social psychologist from the United Kingdom who is working on an unrelated mental health project in Nashville, raced to the church as soon as he heard news of the shooting to offer help. He said he was one of several chaplains, psychologists, life coaches and clergy inside supporting the families.

A child weeps while on the bus leaving The Covenant School following a mass shooting at the school in Nashville, Tenn. on March 27, 2023.
| Photo Credit:
AP

“All you can show is that the human spirit that basically that we are all here together … and hold their hand more than anything else,” he said.

Jozen Reodica heard the police sirens and fire trucks blaring from outside her office building nearby. As her building was placed under lockdown, she took out her phone and recorded the chaos.

“I thought I would just see this on TV,” she said. “And right now, it’s real.”

From her office nearby, Kelly Stooksberry could see parents rushing to park their cars on the side of the road before sprinting to locate their children. She saw one woman fall to her knees and grab her chest.

“It was gut-wrenching,” she said.

Nashville has seen its share of mass violence in recent years, including a Christmas Day 2020 attack where a recreational vehicle was intentionally detonated in the heart of Music City’s historic downtown, killing the bomber, injuring three others and forcing more than 60 businesses to close.

Tennessee state senators met for about 12 minutes on Monday after agreeing to delay taking up any bills due to the shooting. The session started off with an emotional prayer from the guest pastor.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I wrote down a prayer today and I quickly realised that I cannot,” said Pastor Russell Hall, with his voice trembling. “I stand before you today heartbroken.”

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