Three children and three adults were killed Monday, March 27, by a woman who opened fire at an elementary school in Nashville, in the south of the United States, before being shot dead by the police. Armed with at least two assault rifles and a pistol, she broke into the premises of a private Christian school in the morning, local police spokesman Don Aaron said during the incident. ‘a press conference.
Officers were quickly dispatched to the scene. After hearing gunfire upstairs, they “immediately” went there and “killed” the assailant, he said. The young woman, “who looks to be under 20,” fired numerous shots as she progressed through the facility. The Covenant Elementary School has about two hundred students and about forty employees.
“How many more children will have to be killed before Republicans in Congress…pass an assault rifle ban?” “Reacted Monday the spokeswoman for the White House. “Too much is too much,” Karine Jean-Pierre said again.
Several elected officials from the state of Tennessee immediately expressed their emotion on social networks. “I am devastated and heartbroken at the tragic news from the Covenant School,” tweeted Republican Senator Bill Hagerty.
Marginal legislative advances on the carrying of weapons
The United States, where approximately 400 million firearms are in circulation, is frequently bereaved by deadly shootings, including in schools. The most striking tragedy was committed in 2012 by a madman in a Connecticut elementary school, during which twenty children aged 6 and 7 were killed.
Such a traumatic event was repeated in May 2022 when an 18-year-old man shot and killed nineteen students and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. Between these two tragedies, a massacre committed in a high school in Florida, on February 14, 2018, in Parkland, triggered a vast national movement, spearheaded by young people, to demand stricter supervision of individual weapons in the United States. .
Despite the mobilization of more than a million demonstrators, the United States Congress has not adopted ambitious legislation, many elected officials being under the influence of the powerful National Rifle Association, the first American arms lobby.
In a country where carrying a gun is considered by millions of Americans to be a constitutional right, the only recent legislative advances remain marginal, such as the generalization of criminal and psychiatric background checks before any gun purchase.
