Kelsea Ballerini Honors Nashville Shooting Victims

Paying tribute. Kelsea Ballerini honored victims of the Nashville, Tennessee, Covenant College taking pictures 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 — together with Dr. Katherine Koonce, Cynthia Peak and Mike Hill walked into Covenant College and didn’t stroll out,” the “Blindsided” songstress, 29, stated as the published started.

“The group of sorrow over this and the 130 mass shootings within the U.S. this yr alone stretches from coast to coast,” Ballerini, who cohosted the CMT Music Awards with Kane Brown, added. “I needed to personally get up right here and share this second, as a result of on August 21 2008, I watched Ryan McDonald, my 15-year-old classmate at Central Excessive College, lose his life to a gun in our cafeteria. Tonight’s broadcast is devoted to the ever-growing record of households, associates, survivors, witnesses and responders whose lives proceed to endlessly be modified by gun violence. I pray, deeply, that the closeness and the group we really feel for the following few hours by means of of music can quickly flip into motion — like actual motion — that strikes us ahead collectively to create change for the security of our children and our family members.”

The taking pictures happened on Monday, March 27, when Audrey Hale opened fireplace on the non-public college. The 28-year-old killed three youngsters and three employees members earlier than being fatally shot by Metropolitan Nashville Police Division officers.

Shortly after the incident, President Joe Biden known as on Congress to cross an assault weapons ban. “We’ve to do extra to cease gun violence,” the previous Delaware senator, 80, stated throughout a girls’s enterprise summit held on the White Home. “It’s ripping our communities aside. It’s ripping on the very soul of the nation. We’ve to do extra to guard our faculties so that they aren’t became prisons.”

Dr. Jill Biden, for her half, addressed the taking pictures whereas talking with convention of metropolis leaders in Washington D.C. later that day. “I’m really with out phrases. Our kids deserve higher,” the primary woman, 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 children were safe after the taking pictures.

“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 through Instagram on Monday.

She continued: “My coronary heart is completely breaking for the youngsters and households proper now. Why. Why. Why. I simply won’t ever perceive. 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 taking pictures.

“We helped a category of kindergarteners throughout a busy freeway that had been climbing out of the woods and had been making an attempt to flee the shooter scenario at their college,” the Sabrina the Teenage Witch alum, 46, stated in a Tuesday, March 28, Instagram video. “We helped all these tiny little children cross the highway and get their academics over there, and we helped a mom reunite with her children.”

The Drive Me Loopy actress added that her and Wilkerson’s kids attend the “college proper subsequent to” Covenant College. “I don’t know what to say anymore. Sufficient is sufficient,” 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 expertise” being in “shut proximity” to a faculty taking pictures. “We moved right here from Connecticut, the place we had been in a college 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 varsity is “solely two miles up the highway” from her house. “It’s in our city. It’s in our group. It’s simply terrible. 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 “proper within the neighborhood” of Covenant — getting placed on lockdown the day of the taking pictures.

Join Us Weekly’s free, daily newsletter and by no means miss breaking information or unique tales about your favourite celebrities, TV exhibits and extra!

“Our infants at the moment are house with us. I really feel lucky and blessed but still so incredibly sad. No father or mother or household ought to ever should cope with this,” the Olympic gymnast, 31, wrote through her Instagram Story on Monday. “In the present day has modified me.” Johnson shares daughter Drew, 3, and son Jeff, 20 months, with husband Andrew East.