A 14-year-old high school boy has killed two fellow students and two teachers, wounding nine others in a shooting at a Georgia high school on Wednesday, August 5, marking the United States’ first mass campus shooting since the start of the school year.
The suspect who had been queried by law enforcement last year over threats he’d made online about committing a school shooting, was taken into custody shortly after the shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia.
The school shooter has been identified as Colt Gray, aged 14, and he will be charged and tried as an adult, according to Chris Hosey, the director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith said the gunman, armed with an “AR platform style weapon,” or semiautomatic rifle, was quickly confronted by deputies assigned to the school and that the suspect immediately got on the ground and surrendered.
Meanwhile, the identities of those killed have been revealed: two 14-year-old students, Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, and two teachers, Richard Aspinwall, aged 39, and Christina Irimie, aged 53.
All nine of those injured have been hospitalized and are expected to recover, the Country Sheriff, Smith told reporters
Why It Matters
The White House had released a statement revealing that President Joe Biden had been briefed on the shooting, categorically staying that “his administration will continue coordinating with federal, state, and local officials as we receive more information.”
Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party nominee for president, had also reacted to the shooting, calling it a “senseless tragedy.”
Former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, posted on social media, saying, “Our hearts are with the victims and loved ones of those affected by the tragic event in Winder, GA. These cherished children were taken from us far too soon by a sick and deranged monster.”
School shootings in the U.S. are nothing new as hundreds of shootings have occurred inside schools and colleges in the past two decades, with the deadliest one resulting in over 30 deaths at Virginia Tech in 2007.
The rise and constancy of this has intensified the pitched debate over gun laws and the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment, which enshrines the right “to keep and bear arms.”
