Six people dead, including three children, after shooting at a primary school in the United States.

Three children and three adults were killed on Monday March 27 by a heavily armed woman who opened fire in 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 shots upstairs, they went there. ” immediately “ surrendered and killed the assailant, who was pronounced dead at 10:27 a.m. local time (5:27 p.m. Paris time), he said. The woman entered through a secondary door and fired numerous shots as she progressed through the facility.

At the police station then clarified the assailant had been identified as a 28-year-old Nashville resident. Law enforcement conducted a search of his home and discovered a map showing ” the accesses “ from school and “a manifesto with some writings”detailed Nashville Police Chief John Drake.

“According to our preliminary investigation, at one time she was a student at this school, but we are not sure of the year”, did he declare. The Covenant Elementary School has about two hundred students and about forty staff.

Devastated and heartbroken about the tragic news at Covenant School. I’m grateful to law enforcement and first resp… https://t.co/WvLpXLLTwo

— SenatorHagerty (@Senator Bill Hagerty)

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.

The United States, where approximately 400 million firearms are in circulation, are 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 an 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. .

Marginal legislative advances on the carrying of weapons

Since his inauguration, Joe Biden has issued a series of executive orders on the regulation of firearms, but they have only a limited scope because it is Congress that has jurisdiction in the matter. His calls to ban assault weapons are unlikely to be heeded, since Republicans, who control the House of Representatives, fiercely oppose it. Moreover, the powerful National Rifle Association, America’s premier arms lobby, is campaigning hard against such a measure.

The United States banned assault rifles for ten years, between 1994 and 2004. Since then, gun violence has increased, as have arms sales during the pandemic, with a strong craze for the semi -automatic AR-15.

In the country, where carrying a weapon is a constitutional right, the only recent legislative advances remain marginal, such as the generalization of judicial and psychiatric background checks before any purchase of a weapon.

A poll by ABC News and the Washington Post from February shows that 51% of Americans oppose an assault weapons ban, while 47% support it.

Also listen Firearms: in the United States, the political deadlock despite the shootings