“It has to stop,” Ms. Dibble said of school shootings. “I want a politician to sit in a church with families and 250 kids downstairs that are white as a sheet and trembling and gray and yellow and green and blue because of the shock.”
Speaking of the students, she added: “They started this morning, they had their cute little uniforms on, they probably had some Froot Loops. Their whole lives changed today.”
There is no consensus on what constitutes a mass shooting; groups define it differently, depending on the circumstances. But the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit research group that tracks gun violence using police reports, news coverage and other public sources, defines a mass shooting as one in which at least four people are killed or injured. As of late March, the archive has counted 130 mass shootings in the United States in 2023.
Calling the Nashville shooting “sick” and “a family’s worst nightmare,” President Biden again pushed Congress on Monday to enact gun-control legislation. He has repeatedly called for such a ban on assault weapons, including during his recent visit to Monterey Park, Calif., where a gunman killed 11 people at a dance studio in January.
“It’s about time that we begin to make some progress,” Mr. Biden said.
Even as school shootings become more frequent, the shooting at Covenant was unusual.
Many of the highest-profile school shootings in recent years have taken place at public schools, in part because there are far more public schools in the United States: nearly 100,000, compared with about 30,000 private schools.
Shootings at elementary schools are also relatively uncommon, making up less than 20 percent of all incidents of gun violence on school grounds, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database. Most incidents of gun violence on school campuses, including active shooter incidents, happen at high schools.
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