By Brad Brooks and Joseph Ax
(Reuters) -A 15-year-old girl opened fire in a Wisconsin school classroom on Monday, fatally shooting a fellow student and a teacher and wounding six other people before killing herself with the handgun, police said.
The shooting took place in a mixed-grade study hall shortly before 11 a.m. (1700 GMT) at the Abundant Life Christian School, which has 420 students from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade.
The shooter was a student at the school, identified by police as Natalie Rupnow, who also went by the name Samantha.
A second-grade student, who would generally be 7 or 8 years old, called 911 to report the shooting at the school, Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes told a press conference.
“Let that soak in for a minute,” Barnes said.
The two shot dead were a teenage student and a teacher, Barnes said without identifying the victims.
Two wounded students were in critical condition with life-threatening injuries, while another teacher and three other students were wounded and expected to survive.
School shootings have been a macabre routine in the United States, with 322 of them this year, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database website. That is the second highest total of any year since 1966, according to that database – topped only by last year’s total of 349 such shootings.
Monday’s rampage was a rarity in that it was carried about by a girl. Only about 3% of all U.S. mass shootings perpetrated by females, studies show.
There was as yet no known motive for the violence.
The shooter’s parents were cooperating with the investigation, Barnes said, without revealing details of what was discussed.
“We have no reason to believe that they have committed a crime at this time,” Barnes said of the parents.
Investigators were speaking with the girl’s father at police facility, Barnes said, but not pressing him too hard because he just lost a daughter.
Asked how she got the gun, Barnes said, “Good question. How does any 15-year-old get ahold of a gun?”
At a previous press conference, Barnes lamented how the tragedy would affect Madison, the capital of Wisconsin with a population of about 270,000.
“Every child, every person in that building, is a victim, and will be a victim forever. These types of trauma don’t just go away,” Barnes said.
Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway also commented on how commonplace such violence was.
“We need to do better in our country and our community to prevent gun violence,” she said.
‘LOCKDOWN, LOCKDOWN’
The shooter arrived at school on time and pulled out the handgun about three hours into the school day, officials said.
Once the shooting began, students were locked in their classrooms and “handled themselves magnificently,” said Barbara Wiers, Abundant Life’s director of elementary and school relations.
Students practice what to do in the event of a shooting, and are normally told, “this is just a drill,” Wiers told the press conference.
“They were clearly scared … when they heard ‘lockdown, lockdown’ and nothing else they knew it was real,” Wiers said.
Students were later taken off campus to a site where all the survivors were reunited with their parents, officials said.
Gun control and school safety have become major political and social issues in the U.S. where the number of school shootings has jumped in recent years.
The gun violence epidemic has afflicted public and private schools alike in urban, suburban and rural communities.
President Joe Biden called on Congress to enact gun-control legislation to prevent further massacres. Similar calls have gone unheeded after almost every school shooting in recent memory.
“It is unacceptable that we are unable to protect our children from this scourge of gun violence. We cannot continue to accept it as normal,” Biden said in a statement.
In 2022, Biden signed into law the first major federal gun reform in three decades, about a month after an 18-year-old man opened fire at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, killing 19 students and two teachers.
The Wisconsin shooting took place 12 years and two days after one of the most notorious school shootings in U.S. history: the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. A 20-year-old man armed with a semi-automatic rifle killed 20 school children plus six adults who worked at the school.
Polling shows American voters favor stronger background checks on gun buyers, temporary limits on people in crisis and more safety requirements for gun storage at homes with children. Yet political leaders have largely declined to act, citing the U.S. constitutional protection for gun owners.
(Reporting by Brad Brooks in Colorado, Joseph Ax in Princeton, New Jersey, Daniel Trotta in Carlsbad, California, Andrew Hay in Taos, New Mexico, and Kanishka Singh and Nandita Bose in Washington; Writing by Brad Brooks and Daniel Trotta; Editing by Frank McGurty, Paul Thomasch, David Gregorio and Lincoln Feast.)
