Paying tribute. Kelsea Ballerini honored victims of the Nashville, Tennessee, Covenant College capturing initially of the 2023 CMT Awards on Sunday, April 2.
“On March 27, 2023, three 9-year-olds — Evelyn Dieckhaus, William Kinney and Hallie Scruggs — together with Dr. Katherine Koonce, Cynthia Peak and Mike Hill walked into Covenant College and didn’t stroll out,” the “Blindsided” songstress, 29, mentioned as the printed started.
“The group of sorrow over this and the 130 mass shootings within the U.S. this yr alone stretches from coast to coast,” Ballerini, who cohosted the CMT Music Awards with Kane Brown, added. “I wished to personally rise up right here and share this second, as a result of on August 21 2008, I watched Ryan McDonald, my 15-year-old classmate at Central Excessive College, lose his life to a gun in our cafeteria. Tonight’s broadcast is devoted to the ever-growing record of households, pals, survivors, witnesses and responders whose lives proceed to eternally be modified by gun violence. I pray, deeply, that the closeness and the group we really feel for the subsequent few hours by means of of music can quickly flip into motion — like actual motion — that strikes us ahead collectively to create change for the security of our youngsters and our family members.”
The capturing came about on Monday, March 27, when Audrey Hale opened fireplace on the personal faculty. The 28-year-old killed three kids and three workers members earlier than being fatally shot by Metropolitan Nashville Police Division officers.
Shortly after the incident, President Joe Biden known as on Congress to move an assault weapons ban. “We now have to do extra to cease gun violence,” the previous Delaware senator, 80, mentioned throughout a ladies’s enterprise summit held on the White Home. “It’s ripping our communities aside. It’s ripping on the very soul of the nation. We now have to do extra to guard our colleges in order that they aren’t was prisons.”
Dr. Jill Biden, for her half, addressed the capturing whereas talking with convention of metropolis leaders in Washington D.C. later that day. “I’m really with out phrases. Our kids deserve higher,” the primary woman, 71, mentioned. “We stand — all of us — we stand with Nashville in prayer.”
Celebrities have additionally used their voices to sentence the violence within the wake of the tragic occasion. Jana Kramer — who lives in Nashville — confirmed that her two kids had been secure after the capturing.
“Jolie and Jace are okay,” the One Tree Hill alum 39 — who shares 7-year-old daughter Jolie and 4-year-old son Jace with ex-husband Mike Caussin — wrote by way of Instagram on Monday.
She continued: “My coronary heart is totally breaking for the kids and households proper now. Why. Why. Why. I simply won’t ever perceive. Please pray.”
Melissa Joan Hart, in the meantime, revealed that she and husband Mark Wilkerson helped a gaggle of younger college students evacuate to security amid the capturing.
“We helped a category of kindergarteners throughout a busy freeway that had been climbing out of the woods and had been making an attempt to flee the shooter state of affairs at their faculty,” the Sabrina the Teenage Witch alum, 46, mentioned in a Tuesday, March 28, Instagram video. “We helped all these tiny little children cross the street and get their lecturers over there, and we helped a mother reunite along with her kids.”
The Drive Me Loopy actress added that her and Wilkerson’s children attend the “faculty proper subsequent to” Covenant College. “I don’t know what to say anymore. Sufficient is sufficient,” she mentioned. Hart and Wilkerson, 46, share sons Mason, 17, Braydon, 15, and Tucker, 10.
The New York native famous that it was her household’s “second expertise” being in “shut proximity” to a faculty capturing. “We moved right here from Connecticut, the place we had been in a faculty a bit methods down from Sandy Hook,” she defined.
The tragedy was additionally too near dwelling for Jessie James Decker, who shared in a Monday Instagram Story that the college is “solely two miles up the street” from her dwelling. “It’s in our city. It’s in our group. It’s simply terrible. I’m simply heartbroken for these households,” the nation singer, 34, mentioned.
Shawn Johnson, for her half, opened up about her children’ faculty — which she described as “proper within the neighborhood” of Covenant — getting placed on lockdown the day of the capturing.
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“Our infants are actually dwelling with us. I really feel fortunate and blessed however nonetheless so extremely unhappy. No dad or mum or household ought to ever need to cope with this,” the Olympic gymnast, 31, wrote by way of her Instagram Story on Monday. “At the moment has modified me.” Johnson shares daughter Drew, 3, and son Jeff, 20 months, with husband Andrew East.
