Nashville school shooting leaves at least 3 children, 3 adults dead ...

At least three children and three adults were killed in a shooting at a private Christian school in Nashville on Monday.

Nashville Metropolitan Police Chief John Drake, at an update just before 2 p.m., said officers have notified the families of the victims. He told reporters police would "refrain" from making public the ages of the children killed in the shooting.

Drake said officers responded to a 911 call about an active shooter at the Covenant School at 10:13 a.m. CT. Police entered the school on the first floor and began clearing it when they heard gunfire on the upper level.

They located the suspect, who was armed with at least two semi-automatic weapons and a handgun, on the upper level firing shots in what a police spokesperson described as "a lobby-type area."

Two members of the five-member team on the site opened fire and killed the suspect by 10:27 a.m.

Drake said he was "moved to tears seeing this and the kids as they were being ushered out of the building" and that his "heart and prayers go out to the families of the six people who were tragically [killed]."

But he said police and other emergency responders "came together and addressed this situation as quickly as possible."

"This is the ultimate crime when schoolchildren and caregivers are the victims of senseless gun violence," District Attorney General Glenn Funk told reporters at the same press conference.

Investigators have "tentatively" identified the suspect as a 28-year-old white woman who lived in the Nashville area, Drake told reporters, though he did not make her identity public. Earlier in the day, police spokesperson Don Aaron had described her as appearing to be a teenage girl. 

Drake said there was a car in the nearby area that offered "clues to who she was." He also said that "from initial findings, she was at one point a student at the school," but it's not known when that may have been. 

Police know the home address of the suspect and investigations are ongoing, he said.

The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) is assisting in the investigation of the "officer involved portion of the investigation," offering independent oversight of how officers engaged with the suspect, TBI director David Rausch said.

Aaron said there would be about 209 students and 42 staff at the school on a typical day.

Students' parents were told to gather at a nearby church.

The Covenant School, founded in 2001, is a ministry of Covenant Presbyterian Church in the Green Hills neighbourhood of Nashville with about 200 students, according to the school's website. The school serves students from preschool Grade 6 and held an active-shooter training program in 2022, WTVF-TV reported.

Reacting to the shooting, U.S. President Joe Biden urged Congress again to pass more gun reform legislation.

"It's sick," he said, addressing the issue during an event at the White House in Washington, D.C. "We have to do more to protect our schools so they aren't turned into prisons.... I call on Congress again to pass my assault weapons ban."

Nashville Mayor John Cooper expressed sympathy for the victims and wrote on social media that his city "joined the dreaded, long list of communities to experience a school shooting."

Deadly mass shootings have become commonplace in the United States, but a female attacker is highly unusual. Only four of the 191 mass shootings since 1966 cataloged by the Violence Project, a non-profit research centre, were carried out by a female attacker.

There have been 89 school shootings, "defined as any time a gun is discharged on school property," in the U.S. so far in 2023, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database, a website founded by researcher David Riedman. Last year saw 303 such incidents, the highest of any year in the database, which goes back to 1970.