Steph Deschamps / December 1, 2021
A 15-year-old boy opened fire Tuesday at a northern U.S. high school, killing three students and wounding six, including a teacher, local police said.
The suspected shooter, himself a student at the Oxford, Michigan-based school, was arrested and did not explain his actions, said Michael McCabe, an Oakland County police official. Officers arrested the suspect within five minutes of the initial call to emergency services, McCabe recounted at an impromptu news conference. According to authorities in this city north of Detroit, the alert was given at 12:51 p.m. local time. The shooter fired between 15 and 20 shots with a semi-automatic handgun. He did not resist arresting officers and invoked his right not to speak, McCabe said. The investigation will have to determine whether the shooter fired at random or was targeting identified victims, he added. According to statistics from Everytown For Gun Safety, the Oxford shooting carries the highest death toll at a school in 2021.
So far this year, 138 shootings have occurred in the U.S., 26 of them with one or two fatalities. Mass casualty shootings remain a recurring plague in the United States, in schools, supermarkets or workplaces in particular. In 2018, a mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, when a former student fired an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, killing 17 people and wounding about 15 others on Valentine's Day, sent shock waves through the country and reignited protests calling for stricter controls on gun sales. But blockages in Congress, under the influence of the gun lobby, make any major progress on the subject unlikely despite calls from politicians, including President Joe Biden, to tighten the rules on their circulation.