United States: Wisconsin school shooting leaves two dead

A teenager opened fire Monday in his school in Madison, in the north of the United States, killing two people and injuring six others before being found dead, according to the authorities, yet another tragedy in this country regularly bereaved by school killings.

Three people died, including the suspected shootersaid Shon Barnes, the police chief of this city in the American Midwest. The suspect, whose age or gender he does not reveal, is a teenage student educated at the private Christian school Abundant Life Christian School.

This student is a young woman, says CNN, citing an anonymous source within the police. The two deceased victims are a teacher and a student, Mr. Barnes added during a press conference, adding that two students were still between life and death. Two of the four other injured people were released from the hospital, he said.

In a statement, outgoing President Joe Biden called the shooting a shocking andsenseless. He urged Congress to act to pass more restrictive laws in a country that has more individual firearms than people.

At 10:57 a.m. local time Monday, Madison police were notified of a shooting in progress at the private Christian school Abundant Life, which serves approximately 400 students, ranging from kindergarten through high school. The first officers arrived about three minutes later, Shon Barnes said.

The shooter was dead upon the arrival of the police, he added, specifying that a handgun had been found and that the police had not opened fire. The killing occurred in only one area of ​​the establishment, according to the police chief.

We have secured the school, there are no other threats or dangers to the communityhe assured, claiming not to know, at present, the motivations of the suspect.

This is truly a sad day for Madison and for our countrysaid Shon Barnes.

I think we need to do better in our country and our community to prevent gun violencedeclared, for her part, the mayor of Madison, Satya Rhodes-Conway.

I hoped this day would never come to Madisonsaid the Democratic councilor.

Repeated killings in schools provoke strong emotion in public opinion in the United States, a country which pays a very heavy price for the dissemination of firearms and the ease with which the population has access to them.

More than 16,000 people have been killed by firearms since the start of the year in the country, according to Gun Violence Archive, with the NGO recording in 2024 at least 487 cases of shootings resulting in at least four deaths or injuries.

From Newton to Uvalde, from Parkland to Madison, to many other shootings that don’t attract attention – it is unacceptable that we are unable to protect our children from this scourge of gun violence.

In September, a 14-year-old teenager killed four people, two students of his age and two teachers, by opening fire in his high school in Georgia.

In 2012, a madman shot and killed 26 people, including 20 children aged six and seven at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut.

Such a traumatic event was repeated in May 2022 when an 18-year-old man shot and killed 19 students and 2 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, with youth at the forefront, to demand stricter regulation of individual weapons in the United States.

In fact, in a country where the possibility of owning a firearm is considered by millions of Americans as a fundamental constitutional right, the only recent legislative advances remain marginal, such as the generalization of criminal and psychiatric background checks above all. purchase of weapon.