Audrey Hale, the shooter accused of killing six, including three children in Nashville's Covenant School, has been identified as a transgender who hated attending the Christian school.
The Nashville police chief John Drake called Hale a 'transgender woman', but Hale's LinkedIn profile shows that Hale used the pronouns' he/him'.
A report by the Daily Beast, citing people close to Hale, described Hale as an 'autistic' student but highly functioning.?The accused?has been described as a quiet student who recently graduated with a degree in illustration and graphic design from Nossi College of Art and used to design logos for businesses.? ?
The six minutes of harrowing footage, edited together from the body-worn cameras of two responding officers and released by the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department, showed officers clearing several first-floor classrooms before heading upstairs to the second floor as gunfire is heard.
The officers run down a hallway - past what appears to be a victim lying on the ground - and into a lounge area, where the suspect is seen dropping to the floor after being shot.
Armed with an AR-style rifle, an AR-style pistol, and a handgun, Hale entered the school by shooting the locks of the closed side entrance and killed Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs, and William Kinney, all aged 9, as well as the head of school Katherine Koonce, 60, substitute teacher Cynthia Peak, 61, and school custodian Mike Hill, 61, the Daily Beast said in its report.
Hale used a Honda Fit to drive to Covenant School, a Presbyterian private school, and obtained the guns locally, according to the police chief John Drake.
A separate report by the Daily Mail said that the manifesto police found after searching for Hale's home suggested that the shooter felt angered over being sent to a Christian school.
Another report by the New York Post also pointed out that Audrey Hale's mother, Norma Hale was a gun control activist, shared several social media posts, and even carried out a mini-campaign in 2018 and 2019 to sign a petition calling to keep firearms out of schools.
Observers pointed out that the Nashville school shooting was the 129th mass shooting of 2023.
There have been 190 such disasters in the past 57 years, and of those, 185 were carried out by shooters who were assigned male at birth. Only five, including Hale, were assigned female at birth. Two committed the killing sprees alongside their male partners.
"Men perpetrate over 90% of homicides worldwide," said TVP's Jillian Peterson. "Explanations for this focus on a host of biological, social, economic and cultural factors, including societal expectations and gender roles. When it comes to mass shootings, perpetrators often see themselves in previous perpetrators and identify with them, which can contribute to copycat shootings."
The number of shooters who are trans or gender nonconforming is even rarer, placing Hale in an almost unique class. The only other member of this category known in recent years is the 22-year-old shooter involved in killing five people in a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs last November who, according to defence lawyers, is non-binary.?
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