Teenage girl shoots dead fellow student and teacher at Wisconsin school

MADISON, Wisconsin - A 15-year-old girl opened fire at a Wisconsin school on Dec 16, 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 420 students from kindergarten through 12th grade in Madison, the state capital of about 270,000 people.

The two shot dead were a teenage student and a teacher. 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.

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, Mr Barnes told a press conference.

“Let that soak in for a minute,” he said.

A school shooting carried out by a girl remains a rarity, with only about 3 per cent of all US mass shootings perpetrated by females, studies show.

There was as yet no known motive for the violence, which authorities said took place in one space inside the school. The shooter’s parents were cooperating with the investigation, Mr Barnes said, without revealing details of what was discussed.

“We have no reason to believe that they have committed a crime at this time,” he said of the parents.

Investigators were speaking with the girl’s father at a police facility, Mr Barnes said, but not pressing him too hard because he just lost a daughter.

Asked how she got the gun, he said, “Good question. How does any 15-year-old get ahold of a gun?“

“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,” Mr 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,” he said.

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 2023’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 Ms Barbara Wiers, Abundant Life’s director of elementary and school relations.

Students practise what to do in the event of a shooting, and are normally told, “this is just a drill,” she told the press conference.

“They were clearly scared ... when they heard ‘lockdown, lockdown’ and nothing else they knew it was real,” she said.

Later students were 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,” Mr Biden said in a statement.

In 2022 Mr 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 US history: the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. A 20-year-old man armed with a semiautomatic 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. REUTERS