Teenage girl shoots dead fellow student and teacher at Wisconsin school

A 15-year-old girl opened fire in a Wisconsin school classroom on Monday, fatally shooting a fellow pupil 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 11am (1700 GMT) at the Abundant Life Christian School, which has 420 pupils from pre-kindergarten to grade 12.

The shooter was a pupil at the school, identified by police as Natalie Rupnow, who also went by the name Samantha.

A grade 2 pupil, who would usually 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 pupil and a teacher, Barnes said without identifying the victims.

Two wounded pupils were in critical condition with life-threatening injuries, while another teacher and three other pupils were wounded and expected to survive.

School shootings have been a macabre routine in the US, 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 US mass shootings are perpetrated by females, studies show.

There was as yet no known motive for the violence.

The shooter's parents were co-operating with the investigation, Barnes said, without revealing details of what was discussed.

“We have no reason to believe they have committed a crime,” Barnes said of the parents.

Investigators were speaking with the girl's father at a 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 hold 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 said how commonplace such violence was.

“We need to do better in our country and our community to prevent gun violence,” she 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, pupils were locked in their classrooms and “handled themselves magnificently,” said Barbara Wiers, Abundant Life's director of elementary and school relations.

Pupils practise 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.

Pupils 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 gun violence. We cannot continue to accept it as normal,” Biden said.

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 pupils and two teachers.

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 schoolchildren 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.

Reuters