President Biden addressed the deadly shooting in Nashville on Monday, calling the deaths of six people, including three elementary school children, “a family’s worst nightmare.”
NASHVILLE — A 28-year-old from Nashville fatally shot three children and three adults on Monday at a private Christian elementary school, officials said, leaving behind writings and detailed maps of the school and its security protocols.
In the latest episode of gun violence that has devastated American families and communities, the assailant opened fire just after 10 a.m. inside the Covenant School, in the affluent Green Hills neighborhood, where children in preschool through sixth grade had just begun their final full week of classes before Easter break.
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As a spokesman for the Nashville Police wrapped up a news conference on the mass shooting at an elementary school, an exasperated mother stepped up to the cluster of microphones and cried out: “Aren’t you guys tired of covering this?”
Ashbey Beasley said she and her young son were at the scene of another mass shooting just nine months earlier, at a Fourth of July parade in their town of Highland Park, Ill. Demonstrating how frequent such shootings have become, her family happened to be on a vacation in Tennessee visiting her sister-in-law on Monday when yet another shooting took place in their vicinity, this one claiming the lives of three children and three adults.
Details are still emerging about the six people killed in a mass shooting on Monday at the Covenant School in Nashville.
Of the three 9-year-old children whose lives were abruptly ended, one was Hallie Scruggs; she was the daughter of Chad Scruggs, the pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church, according to a biography published online by his former church in Dallas. The other two were identified as Evelyn Dieckhaus and William Kinney.
Covenant Presbyterian Church, which founded and housed the Covenant School, is a prominent church affiliated with the Presbyterian Church in America, a theologically conservative denomination.
The Presbyterian Church in America, an evangelical group founded in the 1970s, broke from a larger Presbyterian body over issues including the ordination of women, which the P.C.A. opposes.
The attacker who fatally shot three children and three staff members at a Nashville school on Monday was identified as a former student at the school who the police said appeared to have written a manifesto about the attack and drawn maps of the campus.
The shooter, identified as Audrey E. Hale, was killed by police officers who responded to the shooting at the Covenant School, a small, private Christian school that is attached to a church and serves children from pre-school through sixth grade.
President Biden addressed the deadly shooting in Nashville on Monday, calling the deaths of six people, including three elementary school children, “a family’s worst nightmare,” and urging Congress to enact gun-control legislation.
“The shooter in this situation reportedly had two assault weapons and a pistol,” Mr. Biden said during a small-business event at the White House, referring to reports by local officials. “So I call on Congress, again, to pass my assault weapons ban. It’s about time that we begin to make some progress.”
The shooting at a Christian school in Nashville on Monday in which six people, including three children, were killed, prompted an outpouring of condolences that spanned party lines — but also a big dose of frustration that gun violence continues to plague American life.
“Enough is enough,” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said Monday.
How many children have to be murdered before Republicans will support passing an assault weapons ban, she asked.
The Covenant School in Nashville is a small, private Christian school, with an enrollment of around 200 students in preschool through sixth grade.
The school is “intentionally small” with an emphasis on relationships, according to its website, and the school boasts a student-to-teacher ratio of 8-to-1. Tuition costs around $16,000 a year.
Investigators were reviewing video footage from the Christian school in Nashville where an assailant fatally shot three children and three staff members on Monday morning, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department said at a news conference.
The attacker, who was identified by the police as a 28-year-old from Nashville named Audrey Hale, had entered the Covenant School through a side door, armed with two assault-style rifles and a handgun, the spokesman, Don Aaron, said at the news conference. The school does not have a police officer guarding it, Mr. Aaron said
A few blocks from the Covenant School, parents and neighbors trickled out of their homes in disbelief as they waited for news about the shooting or word that their children at neighboring schools had been released from lockdown.
A few women clustered around a livestream of the news conference, where they gasped in horror and shook their heads, wondering out loud how this could have happened in Nashville. The sirens — more than usual, considering the nearby fire station — and the sound of helicopters had been the first sign that something was wrong.
At the start of 2023, the United States has gotten no reprieve from its epidemic of mass shootings.
Some happen in public places, bringing terror to the spaces Americans pass through every day, while others happen behind the closed doors of a home. Some are motivated by personal grievances, while others are terrifyingly random. Some capture widespread attention, while others are barely noticed outside the local area.
