A shooter armed with two assault-style rifles and a handgun killed at least three children and three adults Monday at Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, before police shot and killed her.
A motive hasn’t yet been determined in the shooting, and neither has the identity of the shooter. Police said she did not have any immediately apparent link to the school, which is a Christian private school serving about 200 students up to sixth grade.
The Covenant School incident is America’s 129th such mass shooting — an incident during which four or more people are shot, as defined by the Gun Violence Archive — since the beginning of 2023. It follows mass shootings at Michigan State University, two mushroom farms in Half Moon Bay, California, and at a ballroom dance studio in Monterey Park, California.
These shootings come in the wake of numerous others last year including at a Walmart in Chesapeake, Virginia; at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado; on a school bus allegedly targeting members of the University of Virginia football team; a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois; at a hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma; at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas; and at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.
No other high-income country has suffered such a high death toll from gun violence. Every day, 120 Americans die at the end of a gun, including suicides and homicides, an average of 43,475 per year. Since 2009, there has been an annual average of 19 shootings in which at least four people are killed. The US gun homicide rate is as much as 26 times that of other high-income countries; its gun suicide rate is nearly 12 times higher.
Gun control opponents have typically framed the gun violence epidemic in the US as a symptom of a broader mental health crisis. But every country has people with mental health issues and extremists; those problems aren’t unique. What is unique is the US’s expansive view of civilian gun ownership, ingrained in…
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