At a private Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee, on Monday, a female shooter killed three children and three adults before being shot dead by police. According to investigators, the attacker looked to be a teenage girl.
At 10:13 am, police started getting calls of a shooter at The Covenant School, which serves students in kindergarten through sixth grade. According to Don Aaron, a spokesperson for the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department, officers could hear gunfire coming from the second level of the school.
According to Aaron, the shooter had a handgun and at least two semi-automatic rifles. She was shot at by two officers from a five-person team in what Aaron characterized as a lobby area, and by 10:27am, she had passed away.
At this point, we don’t know who she is, Aaron stated.
In the US, deadly mass shootings have become all too common, but a female attacker is very unique. The Violence Project, a nonprofit research organization, has recorded 191 mass shootings since 1966, and just four of them were carried out by female attackers.
According to the K-12 School Shooting Database, a website created by researcher David Riedman, there have been 89 school shootings in the US so far in 2023. A school shooting is defined as any time a gun is discharged on school property. The record, which dates back to 1970, shows that there were 303 such events last year, which is the most of any year.
According to John Howser, a hospital spokeswoman, three students who had been shot at the Monroe Carell Jr Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt were later declared dead. According to police, the shooter killed three adult employees.
No one else was shot but the deceased, according to Aaron.
Parents of students were instructed to congregate at a neighboring church.
According to the school’s website, The Covenant School, a ministry of Covenant Presbyterian Church, was established in 2001 and has 200 students in Nashville’s Green Hills neighborhood. According to WTVF-TV, the school, which enrolls children in preschool through sixth grade, held an active shooter training event in 2022.
Nashville Mayor John Cooper posted on social media that his community has “joined the dreadful, long list of places to experience a school shooting” and expressed compassion for the victims.
