Nashville School Shooting

‘This Should Not Be Our New Normal': Calls for Change After Nashville School Shooting

Three 9-year-olds and three adults were shot to death Monday The Covenant School in Nashville

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The U.S. is shaken once again by a school shooting that left three children and three adults dead in Tennessee.

The deadly shooting happened Monday at The Covenant School, a religious school in Nashville. All three of the child victims were 9 years old.

Police identified the shooter as 28-year-old Audrey Hale, a transgender woman. She was killed by responding officers.

Professor Emerita Susan Reverby, an expert in women's studies who taught at Wellesley College for decades, says easy access to guns is more relevant than a shooter's gender identity.

"Your genitalia don't affect how much you can pull a trigger," said Reverby.

She also says women are more likely to seek mental health treatment, which could explain why it's more common for a man to be a mass shooter.

"Women have been trained much more to articulate their feelings," said Reverby. "To seek medical care for what's upsetting them, so they tend to keep things less bottled up."

Ruth Zakarin, executive director of the Massachusetts Coalition to Prevent Gun Violence, says a national ban on assault weapons and stronger universal background checks would go a long way in reducing mass shootings across the country.

"We should not accept this as a normal part of what living in the United States is," said Zakarin. "This should not be our new normal."

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