A 15-year-old girl opened fire in a Wisconsin school classroom, fatally shooting a fellow student and a teacher and wounding six other people before killing herself with the handgun, police said. The latest school shooting to devastate a US community took place at the Abundant Life Christian School, a private institution that teaches some 400 students from kindergarten through 12th grade in Madison, the state capital of about 270,000 people. Two students who were wounded in the shooting had life-threatening injuries, Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes told a press conference. A teacher and three other students were shot and expected to survive. CNN and the Associated Press, citing unnamed police sources, reported the shooter was a 17-year-old girl who turned the gun on herself after the rampage. Reuters could not verify the reports.

The shooter was identified as Natalie Rupnow, who also went by the name Samantha, Barnes said. A school shooting carried out by a girl remains a rarity, with only about 3% of all US mass shootings perpetrated by females, studies show. There was as yet no known motive for the violence. The shooter's family was cooperating with the investigation, police said. "Today is a sad, sad day, not only for Madison, but for our entire country, where yet another police chief is doing a press conference to speak about violence in our community," Barnes, a former school teacher, told reporters at an earlier press conference. "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.

He said a second-grade student, who would generally be 7 or 8 years old, called 911 to report the shooting at the school. "Let that soak in for a minute," Barnes said. There have been 322 school shootings this year in the US, 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. "We need to do better in our country and our community to prevent gun violence," Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said. 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 US 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. Meanwhile, the White House said President Biden had been briefed on the shooting, and White House officials were in touch with local officials in Madison to provide any support needed.

The Wisconsin shooting took place 12 years and two days after one of the most notorious school shootings in US 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 favour 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 US constitutional protection for gun owners.

Credit: Independent News Pakistan (INP)