Paying tribute. Kelsea Ballerini honored victims of the Nashville, Tennessee, Covenant School capturing initially of the 2023 CMT Awards on Sunday, April 2.
“On March 27, 2023, three 9-year-olds — Evelyn Dieckhaus, William Kinney and Hallie Scruggs — along with Dr. Katherine Koonce, Cynthia Peak and Mike Hill walked into Covenant School and didn’t walk out,” the “Blindsided” songstress, 29, stated as the published started.
“The community of sorrow over this and the 130 mass shootings in the U.S. this year alone stretches from coast to coast,” Ballerini, who cohosted the CMT Music Awards with Kane Brown, added. “I wanted to personally stand up here and share this moment, because on August 21 2008, I watched Ryan McDonald, my 15-year-old classmate at Central High School, lose his life to a gun in our cafeteria. Tonight’s broadcast is dedicated to the ever-growing list of families, friends, survivors, witnesses and responders whose lives continue to forever be changed by gun violence. I pray, deeply, that the closeness and the community we feel for the next few hours through of music can soon turn into action — like real action — that moves us forward together to create change for the safety of our kids and our loved ones.”
Kelsea Ballerini. CBS
The capturing came about on Monday, March 27, when Audrey Hale opened hearth on the non-public college. The 28-year-old killed three kids and three workers members earlier than being fatally shot by Metropolitan Nashville Police Department officers.
Shortly after the incident, President Joe Biden referred to as on Congress to cross an assault weapons ban. “We have to do more to stop gun violence,” the previous Delaware senator, 80, stated throughout a girls’s enterprise summit held on the White House. “It’s ripping our communities apart. It’s ripping at the very soul of the nation. We have to do more to protect our schools so they aren’t turned into prisons.”
Dr. Jill Biden, for her half, addressed the capturing whereas talking with convention of metropolis leaders in Washington D.C. later that day. “I am truly without words. Our children deserve better,” the primary girl, 71, stated. “We stand — all of us — we stand with Nashville in prayer.”
Celebrities have additionally used their voices to sentence the violence within the wake of the tragic occasion. Jana Kramer — who lives in Nashville — confirmed that her two kids had been protected after the capturing.
“Jolie and Jace are okay,” the One Tree Hill alum 39 — who shares 7-year-old daughter Jolie and 4-year-old son Jace with ex-husband Mike Caussin — wrote by way of Instagram on Monday.
She continued: “My heart is absolutely breaking for the children and families right now. Why. Why. Why. I just will never understand. Please pray.”
Melissa Joan Hart, in the meantime, revealed that she and husband Mark Wilkerson helped a gaggle of younger college students evacuate to security amid the capturing.
“We helped a class of kindergarteners across a busy highway that were climbing out of the woods and were trying to escape the shooter situation at their school,” the Sabrina the Teenage Witch alum, 46, stated in a Tuesday, March 28, Instagram video. “We helped all these tiny little kids cross the road and get their teachers over there, and we helped a mom reunite with her children.”
The Drive Me Crazy actress added that her and Wilkerson’s children attend the “school right next to” Covenant School. “I don’t know what to say anymore. Enough is enough,” she stated. Hart and Wilkerson, 46, share sons Mason, 17, Braydon, 15, and Tucker, 10.
The New York native famous that it was her household’s “second experience” being in “close proximity” to a college capturing. “We moved here from Connecticut, where we were in a school a little ways down from Sandy Hook,” she defined.
The tragedy was additionally too near house for Jessie James Decker, who shared in a Monday Instagram Story that the college is “only two miles up the road” from her house. “It’s in our town. It’s in our community. It is just awful. I’m just heartbroken for these families,” the nation singer, 34, stated.
Shawn Johnson, for her half, opened up about her children’ college — which she described as “right in the vicinity” of Covenant — getting placed on lockdown the day of the capturing.
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“Our babies are now home with us. I feel lucky and blessed but still so incredibly sad. No parent or family should ever have to deal with this,” the Olympic gymnast, 31, wrote by way of her Instagram Story on Monday. “Today has changed me.” Johnson shares daughter Drew, 3, and son Jeff, 20 months, with husband Andrew East.
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