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Shooting at Texas Elementary School, at least 21 dead.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022...chool-shooting
t least 18 students and three adults were killed Tuesday in a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, the latest, horrific atrocity in a country besieged by gun violence.
Governor Greg Abbott identified the shooter as Salvador Ramos, an 18-year-old who lived in Uvalde. He is among the 21 dead. Officials have not yet reported on a motive behind the attack. State Senator Roland Gutierrez, who represents Uvalde, confirmed in a live interview on CNN that 18 children, who were in the second, third and fourth grades, died. Gutierrez said Ramos also shot his grandmother prior to entering the school. Uvalde is a town of about 16,000, about 80 miles outside of San Antonio, Texas
President Joe Biden addressed the mass shooting in delivered remarks at the White House Tuesday evening. “I had hoped when I became president I would not have to do this again,” he said. “To lose a child is like having a piece of your soul ripped away, there's a hollowness in your chest, you feel like you're going to be sucked into it and never going to be able to get out.”
He went on to call on lawmakers to act on common sense gun reforms. “Don't tell me we can't have an impact on this carnage,” Biden said. “As a nation we have to ask, when in God's name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby? When in God's name we will do what we all know in our gut needs to be done?”Republicans, however, have shied away from making mention of gun policy. Texas Senator Ted Cruz acknowledged the incident via tweet Tuesday writing he and his wife Heidi were “fervently lifting up in prayer the children and families in the horrific shooting in Uvalde.” He continued to thank law enforcement and first responders.
The Uvalde shooting is the deadliest mass shooting of the year in the United States. It comes on the heels of another tragic mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, when a lone gunman killed ten people at a grocery store in a largely Black neighborhood on May 14. There have been more than 200 mass shootings in the United States in 2022 already, according to a tally from the Gun Violence Archive, an independent non-profit that tracks incidents of gun violence.
Early reports of the shooting evoked memories of Sandy Hook, in Newtown, Connecticut, where a gunman killed 26 people in 2012, 20 of whom were children, and quickly prompted calls for gun reform. Biden, too, brought up memories of the Sandy Hook shooting, reiterating his call for an assault weapons ban.
“The idea that an 18 year old kid can walk into a gun store and buy two assault weapons is just wrong," Biden said. "What in God's name do you need assault weapons except to kill someone? Deer aren't running through the forrest with kevlar vests on for God's sake. It's just sick.”
While most Democrats in Congress have long called for legislation to address gun violence, those debates have gone no where. Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, took to the Senate floor shortly after news of the Uvalde mass shooting imploring his Republican colleagues to compromise on gun control legislation.
“What are we doing?” he asked them in an impassioned speech. “We have another Sandy Hook on our hands. Why do you spend all this time running for the United States Senate, why do you go through all the hassle of getting this job, of putting yourself in a position of authority, if your answer as the slaughter increases, as our kids run for their lives, is we do nothing?”
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Originally Posted by Teutone
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