School buses with children arrive at Woodmont Baptist Church to be reunited with their families after a mass shooting at The Covenant School in Nashville, March 27.
Photo:
Seth Herald/Getty Images
Monday’s murder of six people, including three 9-year-olds, by a deranged attacker at a Christian primary school in Nashville is another sign of mental illness unleashed. Many on the left and right barely paused in horror before renewing the nation’s culture wars on gun control and now transgender politics, not that any insight has been the result.
The heroes in Nashville were the police, who were on the scene quickly. With great discipline and courage, they entered the building, ran toward the shots, and killed the attacker once she was cornered. Two have been identified as Officer
Rex Engelbert
and Officer
Michael Collazo.
A timeline posted by the Tennesseean says the attacker entered the elementary school at 10:11 a.m., shooting out the glass doors. A call to police came at 10:13.
By 10:23, officers were inside the school. They shot the attacker at 10:25. Metropolitan Nashville Police Chief
John Drake
told reporters that “someone took control and said, ‘Lets go, lets go.’” The department has released body camera footage that is harrowing.
Waiting to confront the attacker was the mistake last year in Uvalde, Texas. Nineteen children and two teachers were killed. “Three minutes after the subject entered,” the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety later testified, “there was a sufficient number of armed officers wearing body armor to isolate, distract and neutralize the subject.”
Officer Engelbert is a four-year veteran of the Nashville department. Officer Collazo has nine years under his belt. News reports say that neither had been in this kind of situation before. Few cops have.
But this is what police officers all across America know is a possibility every morning as they put on that uniform and kiss goodbye to their wives, husbands and children. Going to work is an act of courage for those who spend a career without seeing an active shooter. For all the political focus on bad or abusive cops, most are good men and women who face potential danger to protect the rest of us.
On the left, the pat answer is always stronger gun control. President Biden has called again for Congress to ban “assault weapons.” The Nashville shooter allegedly had an AR-15-style rifle, but that’s also one of the nation’s most commonly owned guns.
“About 1 in 20 U.S. adults—or roughly 16 million people—own at least one AR-15,” the Washington Post says, and Americans use them for everything from hunting to home defense. The Nashville attacker could as easily have used another rifle or a handgun instead.
The shooter was being treated for an emotional disorder, and perhaps Tennessee could consider a “red flag” law in such situations. “Her parents felt like that she should not own weapons,” Chief Drake said. But she hid the guns. After selling one firearm, they were under the impression “she did not own any more.”
We’ll no doubt learn more soon about her mental health and possible motive, including her history as a transgender former student of the Christian school. But there is nothing but madness in murdering 9-year-olds.
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