"I cannot control access to weapons. My teachers cannot control access to weapons," schools superintendent George Parker laments.
A six-year-old student has shot and wounded a teacher in the US state of Virginia during an altercation inside a first-grade classroom, police and school officials in the city of Newport News said, in yet another case of gun violence menacing the country.
No students were wounded in the Friday shooting at Richneck Elementary School, police said.
The teacher — a woman in her 30s — suffered life-threatening wounds.
Newport News Police Chief Steve Drew told reporters that her condition had improved somewhat by late afternoon.
Police said the child had a handgun in the classroom and that they took that student into custody.
There was no further explanation for how a 6-year-old acquired the handgun.
"We did not have a situation where someone was going around the school shooting," Drew told reporters.
"We have a situation in one particular location where a gunshot was fired."
He added that the shooting was not an accident.
Parents and students were reunited at a gymnasium door, Newport News Public Schools said on Facebook.
Newport News is a city of about 185,000 people in southeastern Virginia known for its shipyard, which builds the nation's aircraft carriers and other US Navy vessels.
Richneck has about 550 students who are in kindergarten through fifth grade, according to the Virginia Department of Education’s website.
School officials have already said that there will be no classes at the school on Monday.
Schools superintendent George Parker lamented educators' inability to keep guns out of school, saying he was "shocked" and "disheartened".
"We need to keep guns out of the hands of our young people," Parker said. "I cannot control access to weapons. My teachers cannot control access to weapons."
READ MORE: US accounted for 73 percent of global mass shootings
Common tragedy
It comes after a 42-year-old Utah man whose wife had filed for divorce just before Christmas shot dead seven members of his family including his five children ranging in age from 4 to 17 and then turned the gun on himself on Wednesday.
Family mass killings have become a disturbingly common tragedy across the country.
In 2022 there were 17 of them, according to a database compiled by USA Today, The Associated Press and Northeastern University.
Ten were murder-suicides, and 14 were shootings. The database defines a mass killing as four or more people slain, not including the assailant.
Students and police gather outside of Richneck Elementary School after the shooting.
Millions of guns in heavily-armed society
US remains the most heavily armed civilian population in the world, with Americans possessing 393.3 million weapons, according to a report by the Small Arms Survey, a Geneva-based organisation.
US firearms manufacturers produced over 139 million guns for the commercial market over the two decades from 2000, including 11.3 million in 2020 alone, according to a government report in 2022.
Another 71 million firearms were imported in the same period –– compared to just 7.5 million exported –– underscoring how the country is literally swimming in personal weapons that have stoked a surge in gun violence, murders and suicides, the Justice Department report said.
The report showed that while Americans have made favourites of semi-automatic assault rifles seen in many mass shootings, they have bought en masse the increasingly cheap, easy-to-use and accurate semi-automatic 9 mm pistols like those that most police now use.
The report showed authorities face a surge in unregistered "ghost guns" made at home with parts that can be bought online and produced with 3-D printers, and pistols and short-barrelled rifles that are as powerful and lethal as the semi-automatic assault rifles used in mass shootings.
READ MORE: US gun violence epidemic is a plague with no vaccine
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