The good news is that there are no reported fatalities so far. [Updated — 2 killed, 5 wounded] The bad news from the initial report via NBC News:
Seven people were injured in a shooting Tuesday on the Virginia Commonwealth University campus after a high school graduation ceremony was held there, Richmond police said.
Two people were in custody, police said at a news conference.
Three of the victims were being treated for injuries thought to be life-threatening and four had non-life-threatening injuries, police said.
An additional six people sought treatment for conditions including anxiety and falls, police said.
The circumstances:
The shooting took place at Monroe Park, an open space on campus, at 5:13 p.m., authorities said.
Huguenot High School's graduation was scheduled to be held at 4 p.m. Tuesday at the Altria Theater, adjacent to the park, according to the school's website.
In a notice posted to the Richmond Public Schools website, the district said the shooting took place in the park after the graduation ceremony. It said all district schools would be closed Wednesday and all high school graduations this week have been canceled.
Two people, including an 18-year-old man who had just graduated, were killed and five others were injured in a shooting Tuesday after a high school graduation ceremony held on the Virginia Commonwealth University campus, Richmond police said.
One of two people initially taken into custody, identified only as a 19-year-old man, was suspected in the shooting, Richmond’s Interim Police Chief Rick Edwards said at a news conference. A second person who was taken into custody was uninvolved, he said.
The suspect faces two counts of second-degree murder, the interim chief said. Authorities believe the suspect knew at least one of the victims, he said.
The deceased were identified only as an 18-year-old man who had just graduated Tuesday and a 36-year-old man who was there for the ceremony, Edwards said.
The five injured victims — all male — range in age from 14 to 58, he said.
No word on what kind of firearms were involved, other than 4 weapons were recovered at the scene. There will be more updates.
UPDATE — more from NBC on the shooting:
An 18-year-old who had just graduated and his father were killed in a shooting Tuesday after a high school graduation ceremony on the Virginia Commonwealth University campus, Richmond police said.
Tameeka Jackson-Smith told NBC News her son, Shawn Jackson and her husband, Renzo Smith, 36, were killed in the shooting, which left five others injured, according to police. United Communities Against Crime, a local organization, also shared the identities of the slain father and son on behalf of the family.
...Speaking at the first news conference about the shooting, Superintendent Jason Kamras, wearing a black graduation robe, became emotional.
"This is supposed to be a joyous day when our kids walk the stage and get their diploma," he said, describing how Tuesday's graduates walked "out the doors into their families' and friends' arms, taking pictures. And then this tragedy occurred."
Kamras seemed exasperated by the violence.
"I’m tired of seeing people get shot, our kids get shot, and I beg of the entire community to stop," he said. "To just stop. Our kids can’t take it. Our teachers can’t take it. Our families can't take it anymore. I beg of you to stop."
ALSO SEE: The ugly truth about Republicans and the rise of AR-15 sales. Mark Sumner discusses how the Republican Party has made guns and gun ownership a core principle of the party. Combined with what Ryan Busse has to say in the must-read article linked below, it paints a damning portrait of how America has become a free-fire zone in the quest for political power and money.
If you haven't seen it yet, this Pro Publica article by Corey G. Johnson explains why things have gotten so bad:
...According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, guns became the leading killer of children and teens in 2020, overtaking car crashes, drug overdoses and disease for the first time in the nation’s history. Yet as the one-year anniversary of the massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, passes, nagging questions loom.
Why haven’t lawmakers acted with forceful correctives? What will it take to regain a sense of safety? When will change happen? And how, exactly, did America end up here?
Ryan Busse, former executive at Kimber America, a major gun manufacturer, recently shared his thoughts on these questions with ProPublica. He was vice president of sales at Kimber America from 1995 to 2020 but broke with the industry and has become a gun safety advocate. He testified about mass shootings and irresponsible marketing last July in front of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform and authored the book “Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry That Radicalized America.”
Read the whole thing. Busse lays out how the gun industry made a choice.
What caused the radicalization?
It was a combination of factors. After Columbine in 1999, the National Rifle Association in very well-publicized meetings now, thanks to sleuthing and digging by reporters at NPR, we now have tapes of the meetings where they literally said, are we going to be part of the solution here? Or maybe we can use these things to drum up hate and fear in our members? We might even be able to use them to drive membership. And they chose the latter. They perfected that system for about seven or eight years, getting their feet underneath them. They figured out it can drive politics. And then an explosion hit. That explosion was the future Black president leading in the polls in 2007. And then Barack Obama won in 2008. So you have this sort of uncapping of hate and conspiracy, much of it racially driven, that the NRA was tapping into. Prior to 2007, people in the United States never purchased more than 7 million guns in a single year. By the time Barack Obama left office, the United States was purchasing almost 17 million guns a year. And so I think it’s impossible to discount the degree to which Obama’s presidency lit this whole thing on fire.
And…
...You know, I tell the story that 15, 20 years ago, the industry named guns like the Smith & Wesson 629 or the Remington 870 because you had [industry] attorneys that knew that even the names of guns could be important. They could encourage people to do irresponsible things. And so you’d never wanted to even name things that might encourage bad things to happen. Now we have a gun called the Wilson Urban Super Sniper. I mean, what are you supposed to do with that? We now have a gun called the Ultimate Arms Warmonger. What are you supposed to do with that? We now have an AR-15 company called Rooftop Arms, as in when you don’t get what you want, you vote from the rooftops. And what happened in Highland Park? A kid got up and killed people from a rooftop. You see the old self-imposed responsibility; those old norms of behavior have been just completely trashed.
Again, Read the whole thing.
Early reviews of Apple’s new virtual reality headset are mixed; people still have doubts about whether or not people will be willing to spend a lot of time in virtual reality. Given how dangerous guns are making real reality in America, avoiding it whenever possible is starting to look more and more reasonable.
UPDATE — thanks to B Miller for providing a link to a Bob Cesca podcast interview with Ryan Busse.