After a teen shooter opened fire at a school in Wisconsin on Monday, killing a classmate and a teacher and injuring six others, police discovered the suspect dead at the scene.
The Abundant Life Christian School, a private school serving 400 students in kindergarten through 12th grade in Madison, the state capital with a population of about 270,000, was the site of the most recent school shooting to terrorize a community in the United States.
At a news conference, Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes stated that two of the students injured in the shooting had potentially fatal injuries. Although three other students and a teacher sustained gunshot wounds, their survival remains uncertain. Barnes reported that the hospital discharged two of those victims.
Officers immediately entered the campus upon their arrival and found the shooter, a student who had used a handgun, dead inside the school, according to police. Officials did not disclose the names, age, or gender of the victims or the shooter.
The shooter, according to CNN and the Associated Press, was a 17-year-old girl who turned the gun on herself after the rampage, citing anonymous police sources. Reuters was unable to verify the reports.
If verified, it would be an uncommon occurrence, as research indicates that women commit only around 3% of mass shootings.
Authorities reported that the violence took place in a single area of the school, but they have not yet identified a motive. According to police, the shooter’s family was assisting with the inquiry.
At an earlier press conference, Barnes, a former school teacher, told reporters, “Today is a sad, sad day, not only for Madison but for our entire country, where yet another police chief is doing a press conference to speak about violence in our community.”
“Everyone in that building—including the children—is a victim and always will be.” “This kind of trauma doesn’t simply disappear,” Barnes stated.
The K–12 School Shooting Database website reports that 322 school shootings have occurred in the United States this year. According to that database, the number of shootings last year topped the total of 349, making it the second-highest number of any year since 1966.
In order to stop gun violence, Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway stated, “We need to do better in our country and our community.”
“LOCKDOWN, LOCKDOWN”
According to officials, the shooter showed up at school on time and took out his gun approximately three hours into the school day.
Barbara Wiers, director of elementary and school relations for Abundant Life, said that after the shooting began, students “handled themselves magnificently” in their classrooms.
“This is merely a drill,” Wiers told the press conference, as students rehearse what to do in the event of a shooting.
“They were clearly scared… when they heard ‘lockdown, lockdown’ and nothing else, they knew it was real,” Wiers claimed.
Officials said that later, they removed the students from campus to a location where they reunited with their parents.
In the United States, where school shootings have increased in recent years, gun control and school safety have emerged as significant political and social issues.
The gun violence epidemic has affected public and private schools in urban, suburban, and rural areas.
To stop more massacres, President Joe Biden urged Congress to pass gun control laws. After nearly every school shooting in recent history, similar calls have gone unanswered.
“That we cannot shield our kids from this evil of gun violence is intolerable. We can’t keep taking it for granted,” Biden said in a statement.
A month or so after an 18-year-old man opened fire at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, killing 19 students and two teachers, Biden signed the first significant federal gun reform bill in thirty years into law in 2022.
The massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, one of the most well-known school shootings in American history, occurred 12 years and 2 days prior to the Wisconsin shooting. A 20-year-old man brandishing a semiautomatic rifle killed twenty schoolchildren and six staff members.
According to polls, American voters want more stringent background checks for gun purchases, temporary restrictions on those in emergency situations, and safer storage regulations for firearms in homes with children. Political leaders, however, have mostly refrained from taking action, pointing to the US Constitution’s protection of gun owners.
