At least four killed in US high school shooting

Four people were killed and at least nine more injured in a mass shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, in the US state of Georgia. 

Winder is a community of fewer than 20,000 residents northeast of Atlanta. Apalachee High has an enrollment of just under 2,000. Police responded to an active shooter call around 10:30am on Wednesday.

Barrow County deputies responded to the scene first, and were later reinforced by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) and federal agents. 

“We are still gathering information, but the FBI and ATF are on the scene working with state, local and federal partners,” US Attorney General Merrick Garland told reporters at an unrelated press event in Washington, DC.

Around 2pm local time, the GBI said on X that the suspected shooter was “in custody and alive,” denying media reports that he had been “neutralized.” The agency also confirmed the death toll at four, with “an additional nine taken to various hospitals with injuries.”

There has been no official information about the suspect. CNN, which is based out of nearby Atlanta, cited anonymous law enforcement sources to claim it was a 14-year-old boy, but could not tell whether he was a student at Apalachee High.

Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith appealed to the public for patience.

“Please let us get the facts that we need to make sure we get this right,” Smith told reporters on Wednesday afternoon. “This is going to take multiple days for us to get answers as to what happened and why this happened.”

The White House has responded to the shooting with calls for more gun control.

“What should have been a joyous back-to-school season in Winder, Georgia, has now turned into another horrific reminder of how gun violence continues to tear our communities apart,” President Joe Biden said in a statement. “We cannot continue to accept this as normal.”

Vice President Kamala Harris addressed the shooting at her campaign rally in New Hampshire, calling it “outrageous” that “every day in our country, in the United States of America, that parents have to send their children to school worried about whether or not their child will come home alive.”

“We’ve got to stop it,” she added. “It doesn’t have to be this way.”

Biden championed an “assault weapons” ban in the 1990s and called for its renewal within weeks of taking office in 2021. Democrats pressured him to bow out of the presidential race in favor of Harris in July, but left him to serve out the remainder of his term in the Oval Office.