(Oxford) A 15-year-old opened fire for an unknown reason on Tuesday at a high school in the northern United States, killing three students and injuring eight, including a teacher, local police said.
The alleged shooter, himself a student at Oxford High School in Michigan, was arrested and did not explain his actions, said Michael McCabe, a county police official. Oakland.
“The police arrested the suspect within five minutes of the first call” to emergency services, he told reporters.
According to authorities in this city north of Detroit, the alert was given at 12.51 pm More than a hundred calls to the emergency number 911 were recorded, while the gunman fired between 3 and 5 pm. 20 times with a semi-automatic handgun in a matter of minutes.
Three students died: a 16 year old boy and two 14 and 17 year old girls. Eight other people, including at least one teacher, were injured and transported to hospitals in the area. Six of them were in stable condition at the end of the day and two more needed surgery, Oakland County police said on their Facebook page.
Present in class on Tuesday, the shooter did not put up any resistance to the agents who arrested him with gun in hand in the establishment which accommodates 1,800 students.
The teenager has remained silent since his arrest. “He is not speaking to us at the moment” on the advice of his parents who “told him not to speak to the police,” said Michael McCabe.
PHOTO PAUL SANCYA, ASSOCIATED PRESS
Oxford secondary school
The investigation will have to determine whether the author of the shots fired at random or whether he was targeting identified victims, he added.
“It is a very tragic situation,” explained the policeman. “We have a lot of very stressed parents.”
Oxford is located about sixty kilometers north of the great metropolis of Detroit.
While traveling in Minnesota, US President Joe Biden offered his condolences “to the families who endure the unimaginable pain of having lost a loved one.”
“It’s an entire community that must be in shock right now,” he added.
“An American problem”
Massive shootings remain a recurring scourge in the United States, a country where the right to own guns is constitutionally guaranteed.
According to statistics from the organization Everytown For Gun Safety, the Oxford shooting takes the heaviest toll in a school in 2021.
So far this year, the country had recorded 138 school shootings, including 26 with one or two deaths each time.
“It is a typically American problem which must be answered”, estimated the Democratic governor of Michigan Gretchen Whitmer, during a press briefing at the end of the afternoon in Oxford.
After this fatal shooting, “the experts will say that the solution is to have MORE WEAPONS”, denounced on Twitter Shannon Watts, the founder of the organization Moms Demand Action, which campaigns for a stricter supervision of the sales of weapons.
“It’s a failed experiment: there are over 400 million guns in the hands of civilians (in the United States). If more weapons gave us more security, we would be the safest country in the world, ”she added.
This year, nearly 41,000 people died by guns in the country, including 22,000 by suicide, according to the organization Gun Violence Archive.
In 2018, a massacre at a high school in Parkland, Florida, when a former student fired an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, killing 17 people and injuring about 15 others on Valentine’s Day , had caused a shock wave in the country and revived the demonstrations calling for tighter controls on the sale of firearms.
But blockades in Congress, under the influence of the arms lobby, make any major breakthrough on the subject unlikely despite calls from politicians, President Joe Biden included, to toughen the rules on their movement.