A man entered a U.S. elementary school armed with a Kalashnikov Tuesday and took employees hostage before surrendering, authorities said.<\/p>\n
No one was wounded when he “held a few staff members captive in the front office,” then fired about six shots at police from inside the building, said Lieutenant Kyle Jones of the DeKalb Sheriff’s Office near Atlanta.<\/p>\n
The suspected gunman had an AK-47 and several other firearms, Jones said, and surrendered after police shot back at him.<\/p>\n
His identity has not been revealed nor have officials said whether he was associated with the Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy where the incident took place.<\/p>\n
According to Mekka Parish, spokeswoman for the DeKalb County Police Department, the suspect is 25 years old.<\/p>\n
Scores of children were safely evacuated from the elementary school to a nearby Walmart superstore to be reunited with their parents.<\/p>\n
As the shooting unfolded, U.S. President Barack Obama was coincidentally tweeting about the need to strengthen U.S. gun laws.<\/p>\n
This newest incident comes eight months after the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, when a young gunman killed 20 students and six adults in a shooting spree.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, several U.S. states have tightened their gun laws, but on a federal level, legislation has remained unchanged.<\/p>\n
The U.S. Senate in April killed a watered-down bill favored by Obama that would have imposed background checks on all gun buyers.<\/p>\n
Source: Agence France Presse<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A man entered a U.S. elementary school armed with a Kalashnikov Tuesday and took employees hostage before surrendering, authorities said.<\/p>\n
No one was wounded when he “held a few staff members captive in the front office,” then fired about six shots at police from inside the building, said Lieutenant Kyle Jones of the DeKalb Sheriff’s Office near Atlanta.<\/p>\n
The suspected gunman had an AK-47 and several other firearms, Jones said, and surrendered after police shot back at him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":8913,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=971"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/971\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8913"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}