America’s kids are failed again with another mass shooting
The Nashville, Tennessee, Shooting in the Hat: Nathan Followill, a Child’s Advocate, and the Causes of Shooting at a School
Nathan Followill, drummer for Kings of Leon and a native of Nashville, Tennessee, is appalled at another incident of gun violence against school children, this one close to home.
Followill said that he is not a political person on social media, but this hit too close to home. He hopes that the victims of the shooting can heal from it.
John Drake, the Metro Nashville Police Department’s Chief, said that the shooter, identified by the police asAudrey E. Hale, was armed with two assault-style weapons and a handgun, and fired several shots on the second floor. Chief Drake said that the assailant was “at one point a student” at the school.
As a mother, I’m pissed the f**k off. Children are getting assassinated everyday in a place that is supposed to be their safe haven and it’s disgusting that politicians are ok with doing nothing.
Lauren Daigle told her followers that she was postponing her concert in Nashville that was scheduled for Monday night and instead would hold a community-wide prayer and worship event to honor the victims and everyone in need.
A post from Tim Montana re-shared by country singerjason Aldean was titled “Prada our schools now.”
At the Route 91 Harvest concert in Las Vegas, Nevada, a mass shooting left 60 people dead and 800 more injured, when a man opened fire from a hotel room.
The Insider Story of a Gun-Violating Student in Uvalde (Texas): Elementary School Shootings at the Place Kids Go to School
There is no consensus on what constitutes a mass shooting; groups define it differently, depending on the circumstances. The Gun Violence Archive defines a mass shooting to be an event in which at least four people are killed or injured. As of late March, the archive has counted 130 mass shootings in the United States in 2023.
They were all murdered at the place where kids go to school. A plague of recent classroom rampages, distinguished even among America’s gun violence by their depravity, show that nowhere is really secure. It is why so many parents drop their kids off with a nagging fear about whether their school is next. And it’s why a generation of kids has endured active shooter drills that will mark them – just as children halfway through the last century dived under desks in duck-and-cover practices in case of atomic warfare. The difference now is that the danger comes not from a foreign nuclear rival but from within.
The reality of what unfolded inside was inhuman but it can unfortunately be imagined because of the terrible insider accounts from other school shootings, like the one in Uvalde, Texas, last year.
Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs and William Kinney, all nine years old, were gunned down by a shooter armed with two AR-style weapons and a handgun, two of which police said were bought legally. The police gave out their names about the same time that they should have left Covenant School for the day.
Firearms are the leading cause of death in American kids aged 1 to 19, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation based on 2020 data. And while many guns claim kids in violent neighborhoods, not in the classroom, schools seem to be increasingly vulnerable.
Ashbey Beasley, who escaped the July Fourth mass shooting last year in Highland Park, Illinois, was visiting Tennessee on a family trip when Monday’s shooting occurred. She made an unannounced appearance on live television and asked, “How is this still happening? Why are our children dying?
“It has to stop,” Ms. Dibble said of school shootings. I would like a politician to sit in a church with families and children who are not black, white, gray, yellow, and blue, because of the shock.
At the White House, President Joe Biden diverted from remarks at a previously scheduled event highlighting the role of women in small business to address yet another school shooting.
I urge Congress to pass an assault weapons ban. It’s about time that we began to make some more progress,” Biden said. The president understands that he can’t do it in the current Congress, where Republicans control the House and Democrats aren’t able to get 60 votes in the Senate. A call for action by a president has almost become a custom of mourning as part of the plea for political coalition building. Biden will likely be doing something similar again very soon.
One of the top Senate Republicans, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, quickly tamped down any ideas that the deaths of three small kids and three adults who looked after them would make any political difference. “I would say we’ve gone about as far as we can go – unless somebody identifies some area that we didn’t address,” Cornyn told CNN.
The Texas Republican was a vital player in passing bipartisan gun legislation last year despite some fierce opposition from gun rights activists in his home state. The most significant federal firearms reform of the decade happened after the tragic shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde. It doesn’t ban weapons, but it does give states more incentives to approve red flag laws which allow courts to seize guns from anyone who is a danger to themselves. This was too much for a fragile Senate coalition.
Despite his previous role, Cornyn also expressed some frustration with Biden’s remarks. The president keeps coming back with the same tired talking points. So he’s not offering any new solutions or ideas. I think we ought to look at them, but so far, I have not heard anything.
Shooting a gunman in a building: Or is it a political or a criminal offense to shoot a child while ignoring the law?
Cornyn is right that most Americans who own such firearms never infringe the law, use their weapons recklessly or much less launch mass shootings. Some of the weapons designed for the battlefield have the capacity to cause huge amounts of carnage in just a few moments. Until their attacks, the attackers who open fire with them in schools, shopping malls and bars have sometimes been harmless until their attacks.
The rights of which Americans take priority are at the core of the political argument on guns. Is it those of citizens who own such weapons, even though a tiny minority of them use them to create mayhem and murder? Or should it be the victims of gun crime, like those kids and adults gunned down in Nashville, who had their rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness eradicated in a few seconds of terror?
The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a hero of the conservative movement, wrote in the Heller opinion in 2008 that it was permissible for the government to regulate firearms while remaining faithful to the Second Amendment. He wrote that the right secured by the amendment was not “a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.”
Cornyn underscored in his comments that the Republican Party has moved to the right in a way that has overtaken that position.
This lack of any common ground on an issue of deadly importance parallels the wider disconnect in a politically polarized society that increasingly lacks a common cultural understanding.
This political paralysis means that some kids will attend school on Tuesday, but not until after class because the politicians can’t agree on anything.
The police heard gunshots on the second floor when they arrived at the school after a report of the shooting. There were two officers who opened fire on the attacker on the second floor of the building. The school does not have a police officer guarding it, he said.
Nashville police posted photos of the scene on Monday. Police said the shooter entered the building by shooting out the glass in a door. The shooter fired at police vehicles as they arrived on the second floor.
The attacker is wearing camouflage pants, a black vest, and a backward red baseball cap. At one point, the shooter can be seen walking in and out of the church office and down a hallway past the children’s ministry, as the lights of what appear to be a fire alarm flash.
The attackers gender identity was not known immediately after the attack. Chief Drake said the shooter was female. However, the shooter was referred to by officials as “she” and “her” but, according to a social media post and a profile, he was indeed male.
Cynthia Peak, a substitute teacher, and Mike Hill, a custodian, were identified by the police in Nashville as one of the six victims. Dr. Koonce was the head of school, according to the school website. Hallie Scruggs was the daughter of Chad Scruggs, the pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church, according to a biography published online by his former church in Dallas. Covenant Presbyterian is next to the elementary school.
Chief Drake said it was too early to talk about a possible motive for the attack, though he admitted that the attack was targeted. The authorities were talking to the shooter’s dad, as they were reviewing writings, Chief Drake said.
He said there was a map drawn out of how this would take place. There is a theory that we can talk about later but it is not confirmed, so we will put that out immediately.
The Green Hills Neighborhood School: a Nashville First-Principles Mission on a Hillside After the August 11, 2001, Shooting
The shooting shattered the wealthy enclave of Green Hills, a few miles south of downtown Nashville, where the small school and stone church sit atop a hill, nestled in a residential neighborhood filled with stately homes and lush landscaping. Founded in 2001 as a ministry of the Covenant Presbyterian Church, the Covenant School bills itself as “intentionally small” with about 200 students, according to its website, and a teacher-to-student ratio of 8 to 1. The cost of tuition is $16,000 per year.
Sirens and the buzz of helicopters pierced the still of a sunny spring morning on Monday, sending residents of the area out of their homes to wait for news about the shooting or assurances that their children at neighboring schools had been released from lockdown. A few women gathered around a livestream of the news conference, gasping and shaking their heads.
When you see parents running up a hill, it is frightening, according to Lisa DeBusk. She said she had considered sending her daughter to Covenant, calling it “the sweetest, most wonderful place.”
Kendra Loney, a spokeswoman for the Nashville Fire Department, said that schoolchildren and members of the school’s staff were escorted out of the building after the shooting, and that a total of 108 people had been transported to the nearby Woodmont Baptist Church.
The pupils — dressed in the school uniform of red and black polo shirts, plaid skirts and khaki shorts and pants — held hands as they walked from the buses, escorted by the police, into a conference-like room inside the church. Elsewhere in the building, parents waited to learn if their children were safe.
Rachael Anne Elrod, the Metro Nashville School Board chair, said she was inside “the worst waiting room you can imagine” as officials set about reuniting children with their parents. She said there were some people who were debating about how to manage the rest of the day.
“They are mostly figuring out how they are going to talk to their children going forward about this,” Ms. Elrod said. “What is the next best step? What should they do next? Do we take them to the store to buy ice cream? Take them to the playground? Do we ask what they saw? Do we not ask them what they saw? We have to bring them to school tomorrow. Do you know if there is school tomorrow?
Rachel Dibble, whose children attend a different private school in Nashville, had also visited with Covenant families, some of whom she knew through youth sports.
There were cute little uniforms on, and they probably had some Froot loops. Their lives were changed today.
Shooting of a Former Student at Woodmont Baptist Elementary School: An Investigation by the Brooke-Shannon-Royden Trauma Center
Shootings at elementary schools are also relatively uncommon, making up less than 20 percent of all incidents of gun violence on school grounds, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database. There are often gun violence incidents at high schools.
When she spent time in Woodmont Baptist she mourned the death of Dr. Koonce, whom she knew through her work with children. Ms. Trevathan, who had come with Pippa, a therapy dog in training, to offer support, characterized Dr. Koonce “very magnetic” and strong, and recalled her passion for education, sense of humor and love for adventure.
The reporter was Emily Cochrane from Nashville. Jamie McGee contributed reporting from Nashville. Reporting was also contributed by Sarah Mervosh , Emily Schmall , Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs , Daniel Victor , Ruth Graham and Victoria Kim . Kirsten Noyes , Susan C. Beachy and Kitty Bennett contributed research.
Police did not mention a potential motive for the shooting of a former student. The police identified the shooter asAudrey Hale of Nashville. Hale had no criminal history.
Drake said the parents of the children who were killed have been notified. “I was literally moved to tears to see this and the kids as they were being ushered out of the building,” he said earlier.
The victims were transported to emergency departments at the medical center. A hospital spokeswoman told NPR that two adults and three children had died in the hospital.
The Covenant School: State Senator Jeff Yarbro reflects with sadness on a tragedy of our own children and for their families in the Covenant Presbyterian Church
According to its website, The Covenant School is a private school associated with the Covenant Presbyterian Church serving students from preschool through sixth grade. There are about 207 students and 42 staff members in the school.
State Senator Jeff Yarbro expressed his sympathy for the families at Covenant. I am both sad and angry that fear of tragedies like this is accepted as part of what it means to raise children these days.
