A 15-year-old girl has opened fire at a Wisconsin school, fatally shooting a fellow student and a teacher and wounding six other people before killing herself with the handgun.
The latest school shooting to devastate a US community occurred on Monday at the Abundant Life Christian School, a private institution that teaches some 400 students from kindergarten through 12th grade in Madison, the state capital of about 270,000 people.
Two students who were wounded in the shooting had life-threatening injuries, Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes told a press conference. A teacher and three other students were shot and expected to survive.
A school shooting carried out by a girl remains a rarity, with only about three per cent of all US mass shootings perpetrated by females, studies show.
Students walk as they leave shelter following a shooting at the Abundant Life Christian School. (AP PHOTO)
There was as yet no known motive for the violence, which authorities said took place in one space inside the school. The shooter's family was cooperating with the investigation, police said.
"Today is a sad, sad day, not only for Madison, but for our entire country, where yet another police chief is doing a press conference to speak about violence in our community," Barnes, a former school teacher, told reporters at an earlier press conference.
"Every child, every person in that building, is a victim, and will be a victim forever. These types of trauma don't just go away," Barnes said.
He said a second grade student called 911 to report the shooting at the school.
There have been 322 school shootings this year in the US, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database website. That is the second highest total of any year since 1966, according to that database - topped only by last year's total of 349 such shootings.
"We need to do better in our country and our community to prevent gun violence," Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said.
The shooter arrived at school on time and pulled out the handgun about three hours into the school day, officials said.
Once the shooting began, students were locked in their classrooms and "handled themselves magnificently," said Barbara Wiers, Abundant Life's director of elementary and school relations.
Students practice what to do in the event of a shooting, and are normally told, "this is just a drill," Wiers told the press conference.
"They were clearly scared ... when they heard 'lockdown, lockdown' and nothing else they knew it was real," Wiers said.
Later students were taken off campus to a site where all the survivors were reunited with their parents, officials said.
Gun control and school safety have become major political and social issues in the US where the number of school shootings has jumped in recent years.
The gun violence epidemic has afflicted public and private schools alike in urban, suburban and rural communities.
President Joe Biden called on Congress to enact gun-control legislation to prevent further massacres. Similar calls have gone unheeded after almost every school shooting in recent memory.
"It is unacceptable that we are unable to protect our children from this scourge of gun violence. We cannot continue to accept it as normal," Biden said in a statement.
At least six other people were wounded in the Abundant Life Christian School shooting. (AP PHOTO)
In 2022 Biden signed into law the first major federal gun reform in three decades, about a month after an 18-year-old man opened fire at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, killing 19 students and two teachers.
The Wisconsin shooting took place 12 years and two days after one of the most notorious school shootings in US history: the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. A 20-year-old man armed with a semiautomatic rifle killed 20 school children plus six adults who worked at the school.
Polling shows American voters favour stronger background checks on gun buyers, temporary limits on people in crisis and more safety requirements for gun storage at homes with children. Yet political leaders have largely declined to act, citing the US constitutional protection for gun owners.