As students across Nashville walked out of class on Monday to the Tennessee Capitol to protest gun violence after last week's school shooting, police said Audrey Hale, who killed six people, including three 9-year-old children, had been planning the massacre for months. Police have not established a motive for the shootings at The Covenant School, a small Christian elementary school where the 28-year-old shooter was once a student. Both Nashville police and FBI agents continue to review writings by Hale. the Associated Press reports. “It is known that Hale considered the actions of other mass murderers,” police said. The three children killed were Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs and William Kinney. The three adults were Katherine Koonce, 60, the head of the school, custodian Mike Hill, 61, and substitute teacher Cynthia Peak, 61.
Hale fired 152 rounds during the attack before being killed by police. That included 126 rifle rounds and 26 nine-millimeter rounds. Outside the state Capitol on Monday, thousands rallied in a call for gun reform, many of them students from Nashville-area schools. Some other students sat outside the House speaker’s office. The crowd outside the Capitol echoed chants such as “thoughts and prayers are not enough” and sang along to songs like “All You Need is Love” – adding to it, “and action!” At one point, they sat for a moment of silence, raising posters above their heads that read, “Thoughts and prayers are useless to dead children,” “Book bags not body bags,” and “2nd graders over 2nd amendment.” Some students wore orange shooting-target stickers on their shirts. Vivian Carlson, a senior at Hume-Fogg High School nearby in downtown Nashville, helped organize her school’s walkout. She told the crowd that her biggest fear last week, when the shooting unfolded, should have been “missing the bus or my stepmom scolding me for not cleaning the cat litter box.” Instead, she said she was missing English class Monday because politicians are “protecting old laws for a new society.”
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