10 dead, dozens injured in mass shooting at Canadian school 

OTTAWA — At least 10 people, including the shooter, have been killed at a high school and residential property in western Canada, police said on Tuesday.A woman opened fire at the Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in British Columbia before turning the gun on herself, police said, adding they did not believe there were any more suspects or ongoing threat to the public.Six people were found dead inside the school, two more people were found dead at a residence believed to be connected to the incident, and another person died on the way to hospital, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said.Two victims were airlifted from the school to hospital with serious or life-threatening injuries. About 25 other people with non-life-threatening injuries are being treated at a local medical centre, police said.A police active shooter alert said the suspect was described “as female in a dress with brown hair.” Police Superintendent Ken Floyd later confirmed at a press conference that the suspect described in the alert was the same person found dead in the school. Police did not say how many of the victims may have been minors.Tumbler Ridge Secondary School has 175 students from Grades 7 to 12, according to the province’s website.Police have not yet determined a motive for the shooting.“We are not in a place now to be able to understand why or what may have motivated this tragedy,” Floyd said.“I think we will struggle to determine the ‘why,’ but we will try our best to determine what transpired,” he added.It is not yet clear how many of the dead were children, or what, if any, their connections were to the shooter, Floyd said.Police have identified the shooter but will not be releasing details for privacy reasons, Floyd said. He declined to say whether the shooter was a child.Tumbler Ridge is a town of about 2,400 people at the base of the Rocky Mountains in western Canada, about 680 kilometers (422 miles) from the US border.Mass shootings are extraordinarily rare in Canada, which has much stricter gun laws than the US. According to the Small Arms Research project, there are 121 firearms for every 100 residents in the US, compared with an estimated 35 guns per 100 residents for its northern neighbor.School shootings of this scale are almost unheard of. In 1989, a gunman murdered 14 women at École Polytechnique in Montréal, in a massacre that prompted a national reckoning about violence against women and led to tighter gun laws.It is illegal to purchase an assault-style rifle in Canada – the class of weapons used in several of the deadliest school shootings in the US.Tumbler Ridge Secondary School and Tumbler Ridge Elementary School will be closed for the rest of the week, a notice on the local school district website said.British Columbia Premier David Eby said the government “will ensure every possible support for community members in the coming days, “as we all try to come to terms with this unimaginable tragedy.”“Our hearts are in Tumbler Ridge tonight with the families of those who have lost loved ones,” he said in a post to X. — Agencies