The heavily armed female assailant was a former student, the police say.
A heavily armed woman entered a Christian school in Nashville on Monday morning and fatally shot three children and three staff members before she was shot and killed by the police, the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department said.
According to the initial findings of an investigation, the woman, who was 28 and lived in the Nashville area, was “at one point a student” at the school, although it was unclear when, John Drake, the Nashville police chief, said at a news conference.
The school, the Covenant School, was founded in 2001, and serves about 200 students from preschool through 6th grade, according to its website.
The woman entered the building through a side door, armed with two assault-style rifles and a handgun, and went from the first floor to the second floor, firing “multiple shots,” Don Aaron, a spokesman for the Police Department said.
When officers arrived, they heard gunshots on the second floor, he said. Once there, members of a five-person team saw the woman firing, Mr. Aaron said. Two members of the team opened fire, killing her, he said.
Here’s what else to know:
▪︎President Biden addressed the deadly shooting, calling the deaths of six people, including three elementary school children, “sick,” and pushing Congress to do more to enact gun-control legislation.
▪︎John Howser, a spokesman for Vanderbilt University Medical Center, said that three pediatric patients with gunshot wounds had been taken to Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt and were pronounced dead after arrival. Three staff members were also killed, the police said.
▪︎A police officer was also injured by cut glass at the scene.
It is rare for a woman to commit a mass shooting
Female assailants in mass shootings in the United States — like the one that occurred on Monday in Nashville — are extremely rare, according to the Violence Project, which maintains a national database of mass shootings dating to 1966.
In a data set of 172 mass shootings, defined as involving four victims or more and collected before Monday’s case, only four assailants were women or girls. In two cases, women acted alongside a man.
The rarity of female aggressors in mass shootings reflects a broader trend: Between 80 and 90 percent of all offenders in homicide cases in any given year are men, according to the Violence Project.
“The female issue is amazingly rare,” said Robert Louden, a retired New York City police officer and a professor emeritus of criminal justice at Georgian Court University, in Lakewood, N.J.
Female offenders in homicide cases are often associated with domestic violence, Professor Louden said
“Women do kill somebody who had been an abuser,” he said, adding: “Women do not kill or shoot or hold hostages as much as men do. It’s few and far between.”
The archetypical mass shooter is young and male.
Six of the nine deadliest mass shootings in the United States since 2018 were by people who were 21 or younger, representing a shift for mass casualty shootings, which before 2000 were most often initiated by men in their mid-20s, 30s and 40s.
An F.B.I. study of 160 “active shooter” episodes between 2000 and 2013 found that only six, or 3.8 percent, involved female assailants.
In more recent years, there have been several high-profile outliers to the trend of mass shootings committed by young, male gunmen.
In May 2021, a sixth-grade girl brought a gun to her Idaho middle school and wounded two students and a custodian before she was disarmed by a teacher. The shooter, who was not identified because she was a minor, was sentenced to a juvenile corrections center.
In April 2018, Nasim Najafi Aghdam, who the police said was in her late 30s, walked into YouTube’s corporate headquarters in San Bruno, Calif., on the northern edge of Silicon Valley, fatally shooting three people before killing herself. The police said Ms. Aghdam’s anger over what she believed to be unfair treatment by YouTube had set her on a 500-mile drive from her home near San Diego to YouTube’s offices.
Biden calls on Congress to pass an assault weapons ban. That is unlikely.
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.”
Mr. Biden has repeatedly called for such a ban in recent public speeches and visits, including during a recent visit to Monterey Park, Calif., where a gunman killed 11 people at a dance studio in January. His remarks on Monday once again highlighted not only the scourge of mass shootings in America, but also the limits of his power to address them.
Even with majorities in both houses of Congress during Mr. Biden’s first two years in office, Democrats were unable to pass a ban, and any effort now would be all but certain to die in the Republican-controlled House. That has left Mr. Biden with few options but the bully pulpit.
As a senator in 1994, Mr. Biden negotiated a 10-year assault weapons ban as part of a broader crime bill. That led to a temporary drop in gun crime and shootings of police officers, according to a study by the Justice Department. The ban blocked the sale of 19 weapons similar to those used by the United States military, including semiautomatic rifles and certain types of shotguns and handguns, and it was opposed by Republicans and the National Rifle Association.
Last summer, Congress passed a bipartisan bill that bolstered background checks for potential gun buyers under the age of 21 and pumped federal money into states to put in place so-called red flag laws, which allow officials to temporarily confiscate guns from people found in court to be unfit to possess them. Last month, the Justice Department announced a $200 million program to fund state crisis intervention programs in an effort to reduce gun violence.
The bill was considered a compromise, and Democrats said it fell far short of the sort of assault weapons ban that Mr. Biden has proposed. This year, Republican lawmakers have introduced several bills that would expand access to guns, including a proposal backed by Senate Republicans that would codify the right of Americans to carry guns outside of their homes and use them for self-defense.
Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, told reporters at a news briefing on Monday that there were no plans for Mr. Biden to address congressional Republicans directly on the issue.
“The president calls on Congress to do something before another child is senselessly killed in another act of gun violence,” Ms. Jean-Pierre said.
Earlier this month, the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit research group, said that, since the beginning of the year, the United States had surpassed 100 mass shootings, defined as those in which at least four people were killed or injured.
How political leaders and gun control groups have responded to the shooting
The shooting at a Christian school in Nashville on Monday in which a woman killed six people, including three children, 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.
Kris Brown, the president of Brady: United Against Gun Violence, one of the country’s oldest gun control groups, denounced the frequency of mass shootings and urged people never to grow inured to them.
“We do not have to live like this, nor should we ever accept this as our reality,” Ms. Brown said in a statement. “Our children deserve a life free from worry of being gunned down while learning their ABC’s.”
Representative Andy Ogles, Republican of Tennessee, who represents the district where the Covenant School is, said that he and his family were “devastated by the tragedy” and that, as a father of three, he was particularly distraught by “this senseless act of violence.”
In 2021, Mr. Ogles posted a photo of his family to Facebook with he and his wife — and two of his three children — holding firearms.
Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, said on Twitter that she was “heartbroken,” and that her office had been in contact with the authorities
The Covenant School is a small academy housed at a Presbyterian church
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 teacher-to-student ratio of 8-to-1. Tuition costs around $16,000 a year.
The school was founded in 2001 as a ministry of the Covenant Presbyterian Church, according to the school’s website. The two share a location.
Even as school shootings become more frequent, the shooting at Covenant was unusual on several counts.
Many of the highest-profile school shootings in recent years have taken place at public schools, in part because there are far more public schools in the United States: Nearly 100,000, compared to about 30,000 private schools.
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. Most incidents of gun violence on school campuses, including active shooter incidents, happen at high schools.
And it is not typical for a female shooter to carry out school shootings. The typical perpetrator is a white man in his teens or early 20s.
Still, the shooting in Nashville was just one of several instances of gun violence on school campuses in the last week alone. A 16-year-old was fatally shot last Monday morning before classes began at a high school in Arlington, Texas. On Wednesday, a 17-year-old student shot two administrators and later killed himself in Denver.
While those involved fewer than four victims and so were not considered mass shootings, “every one of these incidents has a profound impact on everyone involved in the entire school shooting, and they are happening, like, every day,” said David Riedman, the researcher behind the K-12 School Shooting Database, which tracks gun incidents on school grounds and has found campus gun violence to be increasing in frequency.
More than 270 people were fatally shot or wounded in shootings on school grounds last year, compared to 159 in 2018, the year of the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., according to the database.
