By Isabelle Wilson-
A six-year-old child deliberately shot a teacher at an elementary school in Virginia on Friday afternoon, according to police.
Police said in a statement that they have arrested the boy accused of shooting a female teacher at Richneck elementary school in Newport News, Virginia, a city in the south-eastern part of the state.
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Police said they were notified about 2pm that the teacher had been shot inside the school during an altercation of some kind.
“We did not have a situation where someone was going around the school shooting,” Newport News police chief Drew told reporters. “We have a situation in one particular location where a gunshot was fired.”
He added that the shooting was not an accident.
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The unidentified female teacher, who is in her 30s, was reportedly shot in the stomach and has been was taken to Riverside Regional Medical Center.
‘The individual is a six-year-old student and is right now in police custody,’ Newport News Chief Scott Drew said at a press conference on Friday. ‘This was not an accidental shooting.
The student has since been taken into custody, and the teacher, a woman in her 30s, was taken to a local hospital to be treated for injuries that were “believed to be life-threatening”, according to the police department. Drew told reporters the teacher’s condition had improved somewhat by late afternoon.
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.T
he incident unfolded at Richneck Elementary School, a school for kids aged five to nine, just before 2pm. No children were harmed and police are working to figure out how the child had access to the gun
“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.
Virginia law does not allow six-year-olds to be tried as adults. In addition, a six-year-old is too young to be committed to the custody of the Department of Juvenile Justice if found guilty.
A juvenile judge would have the authority, though, to revoke a parent’s custody and place a child under the purview of the Department of Social Services.
A school shooting involving a six-year-old is extremely rare, said James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Boston’s Northeastern University.
A similar incident occurred in 2000, when a six-year-old boy fired a bullet from a .32-calibre gun inside Buell Elementary near Flint, Michigan, striking another six-year-old, Kayla Rolland, in the neck, according to an AP article from the time. Rolland died a half-hour later.
Fox, who analysed school shooting data sets going back to 1970 from the Center for Homeland Defense and Security, said the data listed school shootings involving children ages seven, eight, nine and older, but not six-year-olds.
The worrying news continues to shine the torch on America’s irresponsible gun laws that seems to allow all kinds of people own guns.
No responsible parent with a gun would have allowed it to even accidentally slip into the hands of a six year old.
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