6-Year-old Shoots Teacher at Virginia School, Police Say: First-grader at an elementary school in Newport News, Virginia, age 6, shot a teacher during a classroom argument on Friday afternoon, according to the authorities, leaving her with “life-threatening” wounds and reviving calls for stricter gun control.
The child, who shot the instructor once with a revolver at around 2:00 p.m. on Friday, was in police custody as of that evening, Newport News Police Chief Steve Drew announced at a press conference. He added that the instructor, a 30-year-old woman, had been brought to a nearby hospital and that by late Friday afternoon, her health had marginally improved.
At the press conference, Dr. George Parker, the superintendent of Newport News Public Schools, stated that “we need to keep guns out of our young people’s hands.” The turmoil that followed the shooting at Richneck Elementary School in Newport News on Friday was captured in photos and videos that were shot right away.
Children were scared and confused, parents stood next to crime scene tape, and hundreds of police officers scoured the area. Carter Jackson, an 11-year-old fifth-grader at Richneck, terrifyingly called his mother soon after the shooting, according to Trannisha Brown, who is Carter’s mother.
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She claimed that when they heard gunfire, Carter and his companions took cover on the classroom floor. The 32-year-old Ms. Brown stated, “It scared me up hearing those kids weeping and going crazy.” They had no idea who the shooter was; all they knew was that he or she was inside the school.
She continued talking to Carter on the phone while comforting him. She recalls encouraging him, “You’re going to be fine. Chief Drew stated at the press conference that all of the kids and instructors had been swiftly brought to the school’s gymnasium and that the authorities had been in contact with attorneys to assess the best course of action.
Dr. Parker said, “I cannot regulate access to guns.” “My teachers are powerless to prevent access to guns.” He continued, “Today our students learned about gun violence and what weapons can do to disrupt not only a family, a community but also an educational environment.” As part of “our focus on the mental wellness of our employees and our students,” Dr. Parker announced that Monday would be a holiday for the school.
Officials were taken aback by the shooting in Newport News, Virginia, a city of more than 180,000 people located about 70 miles southeast of Richmond. They immediately started to look into what had gone wrong within the school. Dr. Parker said, “I’m in shock, I’m in amazement, and I’m saddened.”
At a press conference, Newport News’ mayor, Phillip Jones, said that although the incident was “still raw,” the city was taking efforts to make sure it didn’t happen again. City councilman Curtis Bethany claimed Newport News was operating in an “uncharted” area. “I’ve never heard of a 6-year-old bringing a loaded gun to school.” School shooting incidents with a shooter that young are extremely uncommon.
Data on every school shooting each time a firearm has been discharged on school property dating back to 1970 has been collated by David Riedman, who developed the K-12 School Shooting Database after the mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, in 2018. In 16 of the incidents, the shooters were under the age of 10.
Six-year-old youngsters were involved in three of them. Two of those shootings were determined to be accidents: one in 2011 at an elementary school in Houston, where a student’s gun accidentally went off, injuring three people; and one in Mississippi in 2021, when a first-grader accidentally shot a classmate while playing with a gun he had brought to school.
The third incident, which received widespread media coverage, included a 6-year-old boy who fatally shot a young girl while the instructor was queuing up pupils in a hallway. TV Was Changed by Streaming. Is TV changing back to streaming? Help! I lost $17,000 due to a check-in agent’s error that caused me to miss an Antarctic cruise.
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The horrific incident in Newport News brought attention to the ongoing danger of gun violence at schools across the nation. 19 students and two instructors were killed in a mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, in May. Six people were hurt in a second school shooting in Oakland, California, in September.
Dr. James J. Fedderman, president of the Virginia Education Association, expressed his sadness in a statement that he had to “react to yet another school shooting here in Virginia.” The educator hurt in yet another horrifying act of gun violence in our classrooms has our best wishes for a speedy recovery, according to National Education Association President Becky Pringle. However, we are talking about the devastation caused by another school shooting today.
This won’t end unless elected officials take meaningful action and oppose the gun lobby to halt gun violence in our neighborhoods and schools. Despite having “metal detecting capacity,” district schools do not require students to go through a metal detector every day, according to Dr. Parker.
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On those days, he added, “we administer random metal detections if we have a perceived threat or an issue.” However, he highlighted that “access in the community” is the reason why firearms are present on campus. He declared, “This is not a Newport News issue. “The issue is wider and more complex than what we are currently witnessing.”