- Parents of the Nashville school shooter believed that the shooter should not own guns, police said.
- But the attacker legally purchased seven firearms and hid them at the family's home, police said.
The parents of the Nashville, Tennessee, school shooter believed that the assailant shouldn't have owned guns — but the attacker legally purchased seven firearms and hid them at the family's home, police said on Tuesday.
The 28-year-old shooter who killed three 9-year-olds and three adult staffers at The Covenant School on Monday morning had been under a doctor's care for "an emotional disorder," Metropolitan Nashville Police Chief John Drake told reporters on Tuesday, without elaborating.
"Law enforcement knew nothing about the treatment [the shooter] was receiving, but [the shooter's] parents felt [the shooter] should not own weapons," Drake said, adding that authorities interviewed the parents.
The assailant's parents were "under the impression" that the shooter had one weapon, sold it, and did not have any more firearms, police chief said.
"As it turned out [the shooter] had been hiding several weapons within the house," Drake said.
Police determined that the shooter had legally bought seven firearms from five Nashville-area gun stores and used three of those weapons during the mass shooting at the Christian elementary school where they were a former student, Drake said.
Nashville police initially said the shooter was female and identified as transgender, but on Monday told Insider that the term "may have been used prematurely."
Since-deleted social media pages that appear to belong to the shooter used he/him pronouns, and a male name was written on one of the shooter's guns. But police couldn't confirm the shooter's gender identity.
Mental illness is not linked with increased violence, according to the Association of Medical Colleges; however, poor mental health has been causally linked to increased suicide — and to suicide by firearms, the organization said, citing a 2020 study.
Gun violence expert James Alan Fox told Insider that it's difficult to keep weapons out of the hands of "dangerous individuals" who haven't lost their right to own firearms.
"People want to keep dangerous weapons out of the hands of dangerous individuals, but it's far easier to articulate than achieve," said Fox, a professor of criminology, law, and public policy at Massachusetts' Northeastern University.
Fox said that concerned family members can get someone's weapons taken away "if they can prove to or convince a judge that person is dangerous themselves or others, but if they didn't know [the shooter] had guns, then that wouldn't apply."
Fox called gun laws in the United States "insufficient," saying, "there's only so much laws can accomplish."
"I favor, as do many Americans, universal background checks, but that wouldn't solve this because [the shooter] passed the background check," Fox said of the shooter.
Adam Winkler, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, added: "Traditionally, American law doesn't really allow other people to control what you do."
"If that person's allowed to do something by law such as purchase a gun, there's not much family and friends can do to stop them from doing so other than persuasion and outreach to the person," Winkler said.
Even if it was known that a person had been undergoing psychiatric evaluation, Winkler said, "that generally wouldn't be enough either."
"You have to have been adjudicated in order to be prohibited from having a firearm," said Winkler. "And certainly we don't prohibit anyone who's seeking psychiatric counseling. We don't prohibit them as a class from having access to guns."
The Nashville police chief said hypothetically that if someone had told police that the shooter was "suicidal or that [the shooter] was going to kill someone" then authorities would have tried to get those weapons out of the attacker's possession.
"As it stands, we had absolutely no idea of, actually, who this person was," Drake noted, saying the shooter was off their radar.
Additionally, Drake said that before Monday's massacre at the school, the attacker left the home — where police say the assailant lived with their family — with a red bag and the parents confronted the shooter about what was in it.
The shooter's parents asked them what was in the bag, but they never got an answer and didn't look inside, Drake said.
The shooter's mother "didn't know her [child] had any weapons and didn't think differently," said Drake.
"Again, they lost a child, so it's very traumatic for them," the police chief said of the shooter's parents.
Police ultimately shot and killed the shooter inside the school.
Meanwhile, authorities have not determined a motive in the school shooting, and police believe the students were "randomly targeted."