Kelsea Ballerini Opens CMT Music Awards With Emotional Comment on Nashville Shooting

By Daniel S. Levine

Kelsea Ballerini opened the 2023 CMT Music Awards with an emotional speech honoring the victims of the March 27 shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville. Ballerini read the names of all six victims before pleading with politicians to do something about the never-ending spread of gun violence. The "Heartfirst" singer is the survivor of a school shooting herself, having witnessed a classmate die while in high school in Knoxville, Tennessee.

After describing the horrible events of that day, Ballerini noted that the "community of sorrow over this and the 130 mass shootings in the U.S. this year alone stretches from coast to coast." After taking a deep breath, Ballerini said she personally wanted to begin the ceremony with a statement on gun violence because she watched a classmate die in 2008. She went on to dedicate the show to victims of gun violence.

"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," Ballerini said. "I pray, deeply, that the closeness and the community that we feel for the next few hours in 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."

The CMT Music Awards, which are being held in Austin instead of Nashville this year, are taking place less than a week after the shooting at Covenant School, a private school in Nashville's Green Hills neighborhood. Three 9-year-old students – Evelyn Dieckhaus, William Kinney, and Hallie Scruggs – were killed. Three school employees – substitute teacher Cynthia Peak, 61; custodian Mike Hill, 61; and head of the school Katherine Koonce, 60 – were also killed. Two Metropolitan Nashville Police officers shot and killed the perpetrator, Audrey Hale, 28, who also went by Aiden Hale.

Ballerini has opened up about her own experience with school shootings in the past. When she was a sophomore at Central High School in Knoxville, she saw a classmate killed with a gun in a cafeteria. She wrote about it in her poetry book Feel Your Way Through and told PEOPLE she has PTSD from the shooting. Ballerini was 15 at the time of the shooting.

"The noise was sudden, loud, and sharp. The quickness, the panic made it hard to get my bearings, but I was staring at a boy with both hands to his heart," Ballerini wrote in her book. "His name was Ryan, and he died on the cafeteria floor from a gunshot wound to the chest. I can't be too sure, but I think I saw him breathe his last breath ... That day, we went from strangers to lifelong friends. I think about him often, who he could have been." 

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