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A heavily armed 28-year-old American woman killed three children and three staff members at an elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee, on Monday before she was shot dead by police officers.

Armed with at least two assault rifles and a handgun, the shooter entered the Christian Covenant School from a side door before opening fire, Nashville police spokesman Don Aaron told a press conference.

The assailant, believed to have been a former student at the school, fired multiple shots as she went through the building until the police stopped her.

An active shooter event has taken place at Covenant School, Covenant Presbyterian Church, on Burton Hills Dr. The shooter was engaged by MNPD and is dead. Student reunification with parents is at Woodmont Baptist Church, 2100 Woodmont Blvd. pic.twitter.com/vO8p9cj3vx

— Metro Nashville PD (@MNPDNashville) March 27, 2023

The police were on the scene within about 15 minutes, engaging the shooter, who returned fire before she was shot dead, Aaron claimed.

School shootings happen very often in the United States, where the proliferation of firearms has soared in recent years.

Officials are yet to find any indications of a motive for the Nashville attack.

Mass shootings where the perpetrator is a woman are a rare occurrence in the United States; however, they happen more often than one might think in light of the spiraling gun violence epidemic swooping the nation.

President Joe Biden commented on the incident, saying it was "sick" and underlining that gun violence was tearing the nation's soul as he urged Congress to pass a ban on the assault weapons commonly used in mass shootings.

"It's ripping our communities apart, ripping the soul of this nation, ripping at the very soul of the nation," he said.

"All of the remaining students were able to be escorted out of the building with faculty and staff," Kendra Loney of the Nashville fire department said.

"But we are sure that they heard the chaos that was surrounding this, so we do have mental health specialists and professionals that are at that reunification site for both the students and the families," Loney added.

In the wake of the school shooting, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre asked what Republicans were waiting for to "step up and act to pass the assault weapons ban."

The debate on banning guns in the US was given a lot of impetus in May 2022, when a string of mass shootings that left dozens dead culminated in Congress discussing a ban on assault rifles.

The US House of Representatives passed in July 2022 a bill that stipulates banning assault weapons, marking a first in decades in light of a mass shooting epidemic in the country.

The anti-gun legislation was approved by 217 House members and opposed by 213 in the body controlled by a Democratic party majority.

The United States is deeply divided about reforming gun laws despite the aforementioned erratic episode of gun violence. The bill passed the House floor with the support of two Republicans who joined efforts with their democratic counterparts and backed the measure.

The bill passing marked the first ban on assault rifles since 1994 when Congress passed a 10-year ban on weapons and certain high-capacity magazines. Lawmakers, however, let the ban expire in 2004, sending the sales of arms nationwide skyrocketing.

The bill bans the sale, import, manufacture, or transfer of certain semi-automatic rifles, which have long been used in the United States in mass shootings, especially over mid-2022, such as in Buffalo, New York, Uvalde, Texas, and Highland Park, Illinois.

Other measures include bolstering background checks, a ban on high-capacity magazines, maintaining safe storage of firearms, and allowing for the liability of gun manufacturers for crimes committed using their products.

Gunmakers in the United States have seen a tremendous hike in earnings from their sales of AR-15-style rifles, a US House Oversight Committee probe revealed last year while lawmakers and the public call for holding the industry accountable for crimes committed using their products.

"Gun manufacturers collected more than $1 billion from the sale of AR-15-style semiautomatic weapons in the last decade - and sales are increasing as gun deaths and mass shootings rise," a memorandum on the Oversight Committee investigation said. 

Firearm manufacturer Daniel Defense earned more than $120 million in revenue from selling AR-15-Style rifles in 2021, a three-fold increase from the amount it made two years earlier in 2019.

Gunmaker Ruger's earnings, on the other hand, witnessed a near-three-fold increase over the same time period, going from $39 million in 2019 to more than $103 million in 2021, the memorandum revealed.

Furthermore, US President Joe Biden in January called on Congress to pass new legislation to ban assault weapons in light of a recent spate of shootings including in Monterey Park, California.  

He urged both chambers of Congress to act quickly and deliver the Assault Weapons Ban.

Biden said there was still work to be done to "keep dangerous firearms out of dangerous hands," after he signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act this summer.