School shooting: the killer is a 15-year-old girl

The suspect who opened fire on Monday in his school in Madison, in the United States, killing two people and injuring several people, is a 15-year-old student, police announced Monday evening, yet another tragedy in this country regularly bereaved by school killings.

“The shooter has been identified” as a 15-year-old girl, said Shon Barnes, the police chief of this town in the state of Wisconsin, in the north of the United States, assuring that she was in school. in the private Christian school Abundant Life Christian School.

“She was pronounced dead during her transfer to a local hospital,” said the police official, adding that the student had, according to initial information, succumbed to “a self-inflicted gunshot wound.” .

The student and the teacher who were shot died at the scene of the tragedy, Mr. Barnes said.

Among the injured hospitalized, two students are between life and death, two people are in stable condition, and two others have been released from the hospital, he said.

In a statement, outgoing President Joe Biden called the shooting “shocking” and “senseless.” He urged Congress to “take action” to pass more restrictive laws in a country that has more individual firearms than people.

At 10:57 a.m. local time on Monday, Madison police were notified by an elementary school student of a shooting at this private Christian establishment Abundant Life which welcomes approximately 400 students, ranging from kindergarten to high school.

The first officers arrived about three minutes later, Shon Barnes said.

When the students understood that the alert was not an exercise, they reacted “brilliantly,” greeted Barbara Wiers, a school official, during a press conference.

Questioned by the local channel WISC, a young student claimed to have heard two gunshots.

“We heard them and some people started crying, and then we just waited for the police to arrive,” he said, in this extract broadcast by CNN. “I was scared.”

In a previous press conference, the Madison police chief specified that a “handgun” had been found.

Investigators are still trying to understand the motivations of this young woman suspected of being the shooter, Mr. Barnes said Monday evening, adding that members of her family had been questioned.

“It’s truly a sad day for Madison and for our country,” said Shon Barnes.

“I think we need to do better in our country and our community to prevent gun violence,” responded Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway.

Repeated school killings 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,” he said. criticized Democratic President Joe Biden.

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 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, 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.