Nashville School Shooting Kills 6 Children
It is the 129th mass shooting and 89th school shooting of 2023.
Rosanne Cash, the musician daughter of Johnny Cash, said it best. When Tennessee Republican state senator Marsha Blackburn tweeted that she and her husband Chuck were “heartbroken” over the tragedy, Cash tweeted back:
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. @roseanncash
Metro Nashville Police Department identified six victims fatally shot at Covenant School, a small Presbyterian private Christian school for kindergarten through 6th grade, as students Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs, and William Kinney —one was age 8, the others age 9 — and substitute teacher Cynthia Peak, age 61, the head of the school Katherine Koonce, 60, and school custodian Mike Hill, 61.
The first call to the Nashville PD came at 10:13 a.m., and by 10:27 a.m., police had entered the school and had shot dead 28-year-old transgender Audrey Hale, who was armed with two assault rifles and a handgun. Police do not believe victims were personally targeted—but the school, which Hale had attended, definitely was: intricately-detailed maps of the school and plans for the assault were found at her home, along with more weapons, and a manifesto. Hale had not wanted to attend the school.
President Biden again called for a ban on assault weapons. Tennessee Democrat Representation Bob Freeman, who said he “broke down in tears” a video of children being escorted from school, told CNN:
We’re gonna need answers. We’re gonna need some comfort to at least move forward to believe that this can’t happen again. We’re gonna need to trust that our kids are safe. You drop your kids off at school, you expect to pick him up at the end of the day and you expect the school and the school system to keep them safe. That’s a pretty low bar to expect from the school system and we’ve got to do better.
Freeman added that something needs to be done about school shootings but state officials “don’t have the courage to do it.”
The NRA’s response was that the way to stop schools shootings was to ramp up security—basically echoing Trump’s 2018 statement that the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
But activist and trauma surgeon Joseph Sakran, who began his career after being shot in the neck at age 17, reacted by saying of the NRA:
If you are looking for an organization that lacks integrity, and is unwilling to put the safety of our children first—you've come to the right place.
"The shooter shot through locked outside doors to gain access to the school!" Janine Kube, who describes herself as a high school science teacher, wrote. "DO NOT BLAME THIS ON THE SCHOOL'S SECURITY."
Nationwide, attempts to restrict access to military-grade weapons by the general public has almost entirely failed.
The fatal shootings at Nashville’s Convent School for primary students is the 129th mass shooting in the United States in 2023 and the 89th to take place at a school.