A woman who says she’s a survivor of the Highland Park, Illinois, shooting took over the Nashville police press conference after the spokesperson left.
A woman who survived an attack at a July Fourth parade in Highland Park, Illinois, last year pleaded for gun safety legislation when she unexpectedly stepped into a press conference about the latest school shooting in Nashville on Monday.
Ashbey Beasley said she happened to be visiting her sister-in-law in Tennessee, on a family vacation with her son, when the shooting at The Covenant School left three children and three adults dead.
“How is this still happening?” Beasley asked. “How are our children still dying and why are we failing them?”
“These mass shootings will continue to happen until our lawmakers step up and pass gun safety legislation,” she said.
We've got the news you need to know to start your day. Sign up for the First & 4Most morning newsletter — delivered to your inbox daily. Sign up here.
Note: The school shootings shown here refer to incidents categorized by Everytown as an "Attack on others", where at least one person was killed or injured. Source: Everytown for Gun Safety's school shootings database.
Amy O’Kruk/NBC
The attack at The Covenant School occurred after 28-year-old Audrey Hale entered the school Monday morning armed with two assault-style rifles and a handgun, according to the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department. The shooter, who police said was a transgender woman and a former student of the school, is also dead.
The three children were all 9 years old. The private Christian school serves students in pre-kindergarten through the sixth grade.
Before the press conference began, a reporter covering the attack recalled surviving a shooting herself while a middle-school student. Joylyn Bukovac, of WSMV4 Nashville, said she hid from a gunman who had already killed.
Beasley was at the parade shooting with her son last year when seven people were killed. She said she has since met with more than 100 lawmakers trying to get gun safety laws passed.
“We can't even pass gun safety — safe storage laws in this country to protect kids from getting ahold of weapons that they shoot each other with,” she said. “Aren't you tired of this?”
In an opinion article for NBCNews.com on Oct. 26, 2022, before the mid-term elections, she wrote: “Gun violence happens so often that if it hasn’t affected you directly, it can be easy to become jaded by the horrific details that emerge after a mass shooting.”
“For survivors like me, that’s not possible. At some point, something inside of me snapped. And it’s the same feeling I hope moves every voter, particularly those fortunate enough not to know the grief of losing a loved one or watching the innocence of a child vanish, into action.”
