Murky legal path ahead as 6-year-old accused of shooting teacher in US

The scene was heartbreakingly familiar. Inside Richneck Elementary School, children and teachers hunkered down in fear. At a family reunification centre, desperate parents waited for answers. Once again, a school shooting had left a community reeling. Only this time, authorities said, the gun had been fired by a six-year-old boy.
The incident, which initially set off fears about potential mass violence, quickly morphed into another kind of tragedy: a rare example of a school shooting involving an exceptionally young child.
The six-year-old, a first grader at Richneck Elementary in Newport News, shot a teacher with a handgun on Friday afternoon, the Newport News police department said, in an incident that cops said was “not an accidental shooting. ” The boy and the teacher had an altercation in a classroom before the boy shot the teacher once, police said. The teacher suffered “life-threatening” injuries but was in stable condition.
Police radio traffic posted online by Broadcastify, a streaming service, captured the chaotic moments as a dispatcher communicated with officers responding to the scene.
“We have a female victim shot in the abdomen,” the dispatcher said. She added that the victim had also been shot through the hand and she was “in and out of consciousness. ”
It took only six days for the country to register its first school shooting of 2023, according to a Education Week tracker, a count that is certain to grow as school shootings become more common in the US.
Yet school shootings by young children are exceedingly rare, experts say. The K-12 School Shooting Database, which has compiled data one very gun incident at a school since 1970, has identified just 16 incidents involving shooters younger than 10, and even fewer by children as young as 6.
Authorities have not publicly identified the child or the teacher, detailed the nature of the altercation or offered information about whether the gun was taken from home, school or elsewhere.
The boy was in police custody Friday evening, authorities said. While it is possible that the child could be criminally charged, legal scrutiny could also fall on the child’s parents or another adult. Virginia law prohibits leaving a loaded gun where it is accessible to children younger than 14.
Richneck Elementary serves a diverse student body of over 550 students in kindergarten through fifth grade. Newport News, a city of 185,000 in Virginia, is home to a large military community and is known for its shipyard, which builds aircraft carriers and other vessels for the US Navy.
Virginia doesn’t have a broad law that requires guns to be safely stored in homes. “Virginia’s law is on the weaker end of the spectrum of these types of laws,” said Allison Anderman, counsel and director of local policy at Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Under state law, a six-year-old can’t be charged as an adult. And while the child could be charged criminally, the minimum age to be sentenced to a juvenile prison in state is 11.