An 18-year-old teenager opened fire Tuesday at a Texas elementary school, killing 18 children in the deadliest US school shooting in years.
The attack in Uvalde, Texas, a small town an hour from the border with Mexico, is the latest in a wave of deadly shootings in the United States, where horror over gun violence has failed to spur enough action to end it.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, told a news conference that the gunman, identified as Salvador Ramos, was believed to have shot his grandmother before driving to Robb Elementary School around noon, abandoning his vehicle and entering with a pistol and possibly also a rifle.
The governor said the suspect, whom he described as a local teenager and US citizen, had also “passed away,” adding that “responding police officers are believed to have killed him.”
Texas State Senator Roland Gutierrez told CNN that three adults had also been killed in the attack, citing the Texas Department of Public Safety, though it was not clear if that number included the shooter.
Small groups of children were seen weaving between parked cars and buses, some holding hands as they walked out under police escort from the school, which has students between the ages of seven and 10.
The shooting was the deadliest since the Sandy Hook shooting in Connecticut in 2012, which killed 20 children and six employees.
The White House ordered flags to be flown at half-staff for the victims, whose deaths caused a wave of shock.
President Joe Biden had been briefed on the shooting.
“Stop”
“Enough is enough,” said the vice president, kamala harris. “Our hearts keep breaking.”
“We have to have the courage to act,” he added.
The Mexican government lamented the “tragic incident.” He “strongly” condemned this act of violence.
“Mexico extends its most sincere condolences to all affected families and will offer all consular support to Mexicans who require it,” he said on Twitter.
More than 500 children, nearly 90% of them Hispanic, studied at the school during the 2020-2021 school year, according to state data.
The school, which has more than 500 second through fourth graders, mostly Hispanic and economically disadvantaged, asked parents not to pick up their children until everyone had been accounted for.
Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas, tweeted that he and his wife were praying for the children and families “in the horrific Uvalde shooting.”
“Nowhere else”
But Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, where the Sandy Hook shooting took place, made an impassioned call for his colleagues to take concrete steps to prevent further violence.
“This is not inevitable, these children were not unlucky. This only happens in this country and nowhere else. Nowhere else do young children go to school thinking they might get shot that day,” Murphy said, pleading “to find a way to pass laws that make this less likely.”
This month there were other mass shootings in the United States.
On May 14, an 18-year-old self-proclaimed white supremacist shot 10 people to death at a store in Buffalo, New York, in an area with a large African-American population.
The next day, a man who said he was “upset by political tensions between China and Taiwan” fired on the Taiwanese-American congregation at a church in Laguna Woods, California, killing one person and wounding five.
But despite repeated mass shootings, multiple initiatives to reform gun regulations have failed in the US Congress, leaving states and local councils to enact their own restrictions.
The National Rifle Association (NRA) has been instrumental in the fight against the passage of stricter gun laws. Abbott and Cruz are listed as speakers at a forum organized by that powerful lobbying group in Houston, Texas, later this week.
The United States recorded 19,350 firearm homicides in 2020, almost 35% more than in 2019, according to official data.
