NASHVILLE, TN (WSAU-REUTERS) – In a shooting at a private Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee, on Monday, at least three children and three adults died before the shooter, a 28 year old Nashville woman, was killed by police.
At 10:13 a.m., the police started getting calls about a shooter at The Covenant School. According to Don Aaron, a spokesperson for the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department, officers could hear gunfire coming from the second level of the school.
Aaron said the shooter had at least two semi-automatic rifles and a handgun. Two officers from a five-person team shot at her in what Aaron described as a lobby area, and she was dead by 10:27 a.m.
According to the school’s website, the 2001-founded Covenant School is a ministry of the Covenant Presbyterian Church and serves roughly 200 kids in Nashville’s Green Hills district. According to WTVF-TV, the school, which enrolls children in preschool through sixth grade, held an active shooter training event in 2022.
Over the last 18 years, deadly shootings and attempted attacks at schools have become more common in the United States, but a female attacker is extremely rare. Since 1966, only four of the 191 mass shootings documented by The Violence Project, a non-profit research organization, have been carried out by a female attacker.
When four or more people are killed in a shooting, it is referred to as a “mass shooting” (excluding the shooter). According to that definition, there have been 13 incidents involving lone shooters since the beginning of the twenty-first century, killing 66 people and injuring 81 others.
