An 11-year-old boy has shot and killed an eight-year-old girl at a Tennessee trailer park in an argument over a puppy.

Using his father’s 12-gauge single-shot shotgun, the boy shot his next-door neighbor McKayla Dyer on Saturday evening, the US media reported late on Monday.

The boy has been charged with first-degree murder as a juvenile and is being held in a Knox County juvenile detention center. However, a judge is going to decide whether to transfer his case to adult court.

The incident happened when the boy asked the girl, who was playing outside, to let him see her puppy. After the girl refused to comply, the boy went inside home, grabbed the shot-gun, and shot the girl in the chest.

She was rushed to a hospital, but later was pronounced dead.

The girl’s mother said that the boy had been bullying her daughter since they moved in the mobile home park in White Pine.

“He was making fun of her, calling her names — just being mean to her,” Latasha Dyer said. “I had to go the principal about him, and he quit for a while, and then all of a sudden yesterday he shot her.”

“Wanting to see a puppy, the little girl laughed and told him no, and that was it,” said neighbor Chasity Arwood. “Guns should be under lock and key if you have a child, nowhere in arms' reach of a child.”

The shooting happened a few days after a man, identified as Chris Harper Mercer, opened fire inside a classroom at a college in Oregon and killed ten people and injured seven others on Thursday.

Following the shooting, President Barack Obama once again called for reform in gun laws, but his push radically increased arms sales across the United States.

“Once the public hears the president on the news say we need more gun controls, it tends to drive sales,” The Financial Times quoted Larry Hyatt, owner of a gun store in North Carolina as saying on Sunday.

So far this year, 559 children aged 11 or under have been killed or injured by guns in the United States, according to the Gun Violence Archive.