NEWPORT NEWS (Virginia, US), Jan 7 (NNN-AGENCIES) — A six-year-old boy opened fire in an elementary school classroom in the eastern US state of Virginia on Friday, seriously injuring a teacher, police said.
No students were hurt in the incident at Richneck Elementary School in the coastal city of Newport News.
“The individual is a six-year-old student. He is right now in police custody,” local police chief Steve Drew told a news conference, adding that “this was not an accidental shooting.”
Police said that the victim was a teacher in her 30s and her injuries were believed to be life-threatening. Drew told reporters the teacher’s condition had improved somewhat by late afternoon.
“I’m in shock, and I’m disheartened,” said the city’s superintendent of schools, George Parker.
“We need the community’s support to make sure that guns are not available to youth.”
Drew didn’t discuss any details about how the child is thought to have gotten the gun used in the shooting. But he told reporters that officers had moved children on the campus to the school gymnasium, and they were “safe” there while officers processed evidence that was still on the scene of the shooting.
Drew also said that there were “plenty of counselors” working with the students in attempts to keep them calm.
“The number one priority … is to get all our students back with their parents,” he said.
A police statement said officers had implemented a system to reunite the students with their parents, dividing them by grade level.
“An officer and a school official are walking the student to their parents, so it’s a good happy reunion, a little bit of emotion, but everything right now is safe,” Drew said.
Friday’s shooting will almost certainly stoke debate about restricting public access to guns in the US, even after Congress passed a bill last year that tightened restrictions on access to firearms for some people who are considered to be at risk of carrying out violence.
School shootings plague the United States, with recent tragedies including the killing last May of 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, by an 18-year-old gunman.
There were an estimated 44,000 gun-related deaths in the United States last year, about half of them murder cases, accidents and self-defense, and half of them suicides, according to the Gun Violence Archive database. — NNN-AGENCIES
