The mother of the heavily armed Nashville school shooter has been a proponent of gun control who expressed concerns about school shootings, social media posts show.
Norma Hale, the mother of the 28-year-old woman who was killed by police after murdering three 9-year-old children and three adults at Covenant School in Nashville on Monday, had posted various calls for gun control in years past.
On February 21, 2018, Hale posted a petition that stated, “Make large-capacity gun magazines illegal.” Roughly two weeks later, she posted a petition that urged, “Keep guns out of schools,” adding her own comment: “So important!”
The killer, a female who claimed to be a man, was armed with three guns, including a semi-automatic rifle when she stormed into the school she once attended and opened fire. After the incident, police searched her home and recovered a sawed-off shotgun and a second shotgun.
Hale told an ABC News reporter after the incident, “It’s very difficult now; we ask for privacy. I really can’t talk right now, I think I lost my daughter today.”
Nashville Police Chief John Drake said that the shooter had additional plans to attack a second location but decided against it because there was too much security there.
“If I had to imagine, [the shooter’s] parents are probably just as shocked as everybody in the neighborhood is … It just doesn’t seem real,” a resident of the neighborhood where Hale lives told The Daily Beast. “There’s nothing that would have led me to believe that she was capable of such a thing or that she or anybody in that family would have access to, much less ever used, a gun. They just don’t seem like the family that, like, is around guns. They’re not talking about going to a gun range or they’re not going hunting.”
A former high school classmate of the shooter told The Daily Wire, “I haven’t seen [the shooter] since graduation as I moved, and we didn’t keep in touch. But my memories from high school are all pleasant. … I mainly knew her as ‘she’ before the transition. When she transitioned, no one was surprised.” The classmate added that the school had “several LGBTQ and other trans students.”
Meanwhile, The New York Times scrambled after “confusion” on the shooter’s gender, writing, “There was confusion on Monday about the gender identity of the assailant in the Nashville shooting. Officials had used ‘she’ and ‘her’ to refer to the suspect, who, according to a social media post and a LinkedIn profile, appeared to identify as a man in recent months.”
Incredible. The New York Times apologizes for misgendering the Nashville mass shooter who murdered three kids and three adults because it disrespects the murderer’s memory and identity. Truly a cult. Woke mind virus in full swing. pic.twitter.com/yT0J6ldsC1
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) March 28, 2023
