March 28, 2023 - Nashville elementary school shooting

CNN law enforcement analyst Jonathan Wackrow commended officers for their response to Monday’s shooting at a Nashville school, as seen in footage released Tuesday from two of the officers’ body cameras.

“What the viewers are seeing is law enforcement at its finest,” said Wackrow, a former Secret Service agent.

The videos from the body-worn cameras of officers Rex Engelbert and Michael Collazo — who Nashville police said fatally shot the attacker — show officers go into The Covenant School and immediately enter several rooms to look for the suspect as siren wail.

"Not knowing what the circumstances really were upon arrival, officers remain calm and collected, not raising anxiety but making the entry as necessary to go search for the suspect," he said, adding officers relied on their training to move toward the sound of gunfire and confront the shooter.

The speed with which officers respond to a shooter is "essential for the preservation of life," Wackrow said. "And these officers did a remarkable job."

White House officials are not currently planning a major new push around gun safety reform in the wake of the deadly Nashville school shooting, three senior administration officials said.

But President Joe Biden and White House officials will continue to make one thing clear: It's up to Congress to act.

The White House says Biden has taken more than 20 executive actions on guns since taking office, including regulating the use of "ghost guns" and sales of stabilizing braces that effectively turn pistols into rifles. The list also includes funding measures meant to prevent gun violence.

He also signed a bipartisan measure in 2022 expanding background checks and providing federal funding for so-called "red flag laws," though it failed to ban any weapons and fell far short of what Biden and his party had advocated for, and polls show most Americans want to see.

White House officials are clear-eyed about the political realities in Congress, where Republicans in control of the House have rejected Biden's calls for an assault weapons ban. Even when both chambers of Congress were controlled by Democrats during the first two years of Biden's term, an assault weapon ban gained little traction, in part because of a 60-vote threshold necessary for passage. 

As of now, White House officials are still mulling whether Biden will once again address the Nashville shooting at the top of his remarks this afternoon in Durham, North Carolina.

Metro Nashville Police Department released body-camera footage Tuesday from the two officers who shot the Covenant School shooter.

CNN is reviewing the footage and will update with more information.

There have been at least 130 mass shootings in 2023, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive, including Monday's deadly shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee.

The Gun Violence Archive, like CNN, defines a mass shooting as one in which at least four people are shot, excluding the shooter. 

Three students and three adults were killed at the Covenant School, police said. The shooter, who was identified as a 28-year-old Nashville resident, was also killed in a shootout with police.

Last year, the US hit 100 mass shootings on March 19, per the GVA. The previous year, 2021, saw a late March date, as well. From 2018 to 2020, the country didn't reach 100 mass shootings until May.

This post has been updated with the latest figures from the Gun Violence Archive.

Regular mass shootings are a uniquely American phenomenon. The US is the only developed country where mass shootings have happened every single year for the past 20 years, according to Jason R. Silva, an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at William Paterson University.

To compare across countries, Silva uses a conservative definition of a mass shooting: an event that leaves four or more people dead, excluding the shooter, and that excludes profit-driven criminal activity, familicide and state-sponsored violence. Using this approach, 68 people were killed and 91 injured in eight public shootings in the US over the course of 2019 alone.

A broader definition of mass shootings reveals an even higher figure.

The Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit based in Washington, DC, which CNN relies on for its reporting of mass shootings, defines a mass shooting as an incident leaving at least four people dead or injured, excluding the shooter, and does not differentiate victims based upon the circumstances in which they were shot.

It counted as many as 417 mass shootings in 2019 and 646 in 2022. There have been at least 130 mass shootings so far in 2023, including the one Monday at a school in Nashville.

Meanwhile, mass shootings continue to drive demand for more guns, experts say, with gun control activists arguing the time for reform is long overdue.

Researchers from Washington University at St Louis’ Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute presented this argument to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 2018, saying that the US government’s “failure” to prevent and reduce gun-related violence through “reasonable and effective domestic measures has limited the ability of Americans to enjoy many fundamental freedoms and guarantees protected by international human rights law,” including the right to life and bodily integrity.

This post has been updated with the latest figures from the Gun Violence Archive.

Read more here about how guns in the US compare to the rest of the world.

Sissy Goff, the director of child and adolescent counseling at Daystar Counseling Ministries, was at the reunification site in Nashville Monday, where she told CNN she faced parents wondering about how to talk to their kids about the deadly shooting at the Covenant School.

Three 9-year-old children and three adults were killed in the Monday rampage.

"First of all, as grownups, we really have to manage our own anxiety, because kids pick up on it," Goff told "CNN This Morning."

It's key that parents let their children lead the conversation, Goff said, allowing them to ask questions and providing age appropriate answers.

"Kids have this amazing innate ability that they ask for the information that they're ready for," Goff said, adding parents could use "really short factual statements."

"Say two to three sentences and let them ask the next question," she said. "And then answer that age appropriately — honestly — and let them ask again."

"Be the source," she added, "where you're the one telling them, not someone else."

Nashville Mayor John Cooper praised police for their response to the shooting Monday at the Covenant School, where a 28-year-old shooter, identified by police as a former student, killed three 9-year-old children and three adults.

"This is our worst day, but it could have been worse without this brave response," Cooper told CNN. "So we're very grateful for that."

Five officers initially responded after police received the first call about the shooting at 10:13 a.m. local time Monday, police spokesperson Don Aaron said previously. They confronted the shooter, and two officers opened fire, killing the shooter at 10:27 a.m.

Cooper expects police to release more information about the shooting Tuesday, he said, including the possible release of officers' body cam footage and details about the shooter's writings recovered by investigators.

"They found a lot of documents. This was clearly planned," the mayor said, adding later those documents indicate "numerous sites were investigated."

"So the effective response by first responders is all the more impressive," he said, though he acknowledged it may "take some time for people to really begin to understand what could be the motives here."

Asked what the public could learn, Cooper said:

No Metro Nashville Police officers or school resource officers were stationed at the school, he said, reiterating the Covenant School is private, and as a result it has its own precautions.

"And it seems to me that they really will probably be congratulated on how good they were," the mayor said.

Monday's shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, unfolded over about 14 minutes, according to police, and spanned two floors of the private Christian elementary school.

Metropolitan Nashville Police released surveillance video showing the moment the shooter — who authorities said had three firearms — arrived at the school, shot through glass doors and climbed through to get inside. The video goes on to show the suspect walking through the hallways, pointing an assault style weapon.

Police got the first call about an active shooter inside Covenant school at 10:13 a.m. local time, police spokesperson Don Aaron said, and rushed to the scene. The first five responding officers heard gunfire coming from the second floor.

They went upstairs and confronted the shooter, who “had been firing through a window at arriving police cars,” police said in a news release. Two officers then opened fire, killing the shooter at 10:27 a.m. local time, Aaron said.

Metro Nashville Police Chief John Drake commended the five officers for their quick response.

After the shooter was killed, the children were evacuated from the school and taken in buses to be reunited with their families. Video showed the children holding hands and walking in a line out of the school, where community members were embracing.

One city councilperson praised the school for making sure students and staff were trained for an active shooter scenario:

“This school prepared for this with active shooter training for a reason," Nashville Metropolitan Councilman Russ Pulley told CNN Monday. "We don’t like to think that this is ever going to happen to us. But experience has taught us that we need to be prepared because in this day and time it is the reality of where we are."

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called on Congress to take legislative action in the wake of the school shooting in Nashville that left three children and three adults dead.

"Our message here is very, very clear: Enough is enough. We need to see action in Congress," she told CNN's Kaitlin Collins.

Jean-Pierre criticized the House Judiciary Committee for postponing a scheduled markup of a gun rights resolution after the shooting. The joint resolution, which was announced to be marked up today, would nullify a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives rule that created certain criteria for firearms with attached stabilizing braces.

House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan told CNN on Monday that “Democrats were going to make it all about politics instead about the constitutional issue that it is" when asked why it was canceled. 

Jean-Pierre said that "we have to make sure there are common-sense gun safety laws. We have to make sure that we ban assault weapons."

CNN's Annie Grayer and Melanie Zanona contributed reporting to this post.