Summary
That’s all for our live coverage for today. Here are some updates and links from today’s reporting:
- Texas law enforcement agencies are coming under scrutiny over their response, after it emerged that the gunman remained barricaded inside a classroom for up to an hour before his rampage was ended.
- The death toll from the Uvalde school shooting that killed 19 students and two teachers reached the campus’ extended family Thursday, when the husband of one of the slain teachers died of a heart attack.
- More tributes have poured in for the 19 students and two teachers killed in the shooting.
- The Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz confronted a reporter and angrily left an interview after he was asked why school shootings happen so often in the US.
- The gunman allegedly sent a series of text messages to a 15-year-old girl in Germany moments before he carried out his deadly attack, CNN and German media reported.
- Police have arrested a Texas high school student in the Dallas area after semi-automatic weapons were found in his car, one day after the Robb elementary school massacre.
- Democratic senator Chris Murphy has called for a “popular uprising of citizens” to pressure Republicans to support gun laws following the Uvalde massacre.
Some scheduled speakers and performers have pulled out of the NRA convention scheduled for this weekend in Texas, though Texas governor Greg Abbott, US Senator Ted Cruz, South Dakota governor Kristi Noem and former president Donald Trump were all still scheduled to attend.
US Senator John Cornyn and Congressman Dan Crenshaw, both from Texas, were originally supposed to speak on Friday but no longer will be attending, though their staff said it was due to scheduling issues, the AP reports. Some, however, have canceled in response to the school shooting:
Some scheduled speakers and performers have backed out, including American Pie singer Don McLean, who said “it would be disrespectful” to go ahead with his act in the aftermath of the country’s latest mass shooting.
Country music singer Larry Gatlin, who pulled out of planned appearance at the event, said he hopes “the NRA will rethink some of its outdated and ill-thought-out positions”.
More on the outrage over the NRA’s gathering here:
Updated
The Uvalde school district had an extensive safety plan in place for mass shootings, raising further questions about why authorities were unable to prevent the killings of 19 students and two adults, NBC reports:
The death toll suggests that even security plans that appear to be comprehensive and up to the latest research-based standards may have gaps and ultimately fall short of preventing the worst-case scenario, experts said.
“We can do everything we can to mitigate and prevent school shootings but we are never going to stop these events from happening 100% of the time, because evil exists,” said Kathy Martinez-Prather, director of the Texas School Safety Center, a program at Texas State University that helps districts develop safety plans and makes sure they are meeting requirements outlined in state laws.
“That said, it is important that we have plans in place, and training and drilling on that plan so that if an event happens at our schools we are ready and prepared to mitigate as much loss of life as possible, or to mitigate it 100%.”
More here in this thread on the training that school officers are required to undergo in Texas:
This is the training course that school district law enforcement and school resource officers were required to complete — as mandated by the 2019 law https://t.co/lqCESHdrkz pic.twitter.com/ut3Y8DPCZj
— sarah jeong (@sarahjeong) May 26, 2022
Updated
State police say the 18-year-old gunman had no criminal record, no history of mental illness treatment and no obvious signs he was a danger to the community, the AP reports.
As the Washington Post noted in its coverage today, although conservatives and commentators across the political spectrum often focus on “mental illness” after massacres, research has consistently shown that a very small percentage of violent acts can be linked to mental health challenges:
Despite public perception and misleading commentary from many elected officials, decades of research have found that people with mental illness are responsible for a tiny fraction of interpersonal and other gun violence.
From a 2019 McClatchy fact check of Donald Trump, who suggested without evidence that mental illness was a main cause of gun violence:
Just 3-5% of violent acts can be attributed to mental health problems, according to the US Department of Health and Human Services, whereas mentally ill people are more than 10 times more likely to be victims of violent crime than are the general population.
Updated
Victim's husband dies of heart attack
We have more details on Joe Garcia, who died of an apparent heart attack two days after the Robb elementary school gunman killed his wife, 46-year-old Irma Garcia, a teacher who was sheltering with her students.
Guadalupe “Joe” Garcia – the husband of 46-year-old Irma Garcia, who was shot and killed while sheltering children in her classroom – died two days after the mass killing that shattered his family, a cousin of his wife confirmed on a verified GoFundMe page.
The Garcias had been together for more than 30 years. They were high school sweethearts before marrying and having four children, the cousin, Debra Austin, wrote.
“I truly believe Joe died of a broken heart and losing the love of his life … was too much to bear,” Austin wrote.
The Garcias’ nephew, John Martinez, said via Twitter that the couple’s children – ages 13, 15, 19 and 23 – had now lost both parents.
Irma Garcia taught fourth grade at Robb. On her profile on the school’s website, she wrote that she and Joe, 48, enjoyed barbecuing, listening to music, and vacationing at the nearby community of Concan, which sits along Texas’ Frio River.
The couple’s first child – one of two boys – was completing boot camp with the Marines, and their second, another son, was attending Texas State University, according to the profile. The two youngest children, both daughters, are a high school sophomore and a seventh grader.
Updated
A dispatch from the Guardian’s Dani Anguiano who is reporting from Uvalde:
The tears started before anyone even spoke. Inside a Uvalde county building that usually hosts the rodeo in this part of south-west Texas, young children and parents cried and held each other. Together, they waited for a group of pastors to offer some words of comfort for their unfathomable loss.
This week in Uvalde began with a mood of celebration. The high school graduation was to be held on Friday – giant senior portraits lined the lawn outside city hall. Younger children were wrapping up the school year as well, attending classroom parties and awards ceremonies. But on Tuesday, life in this largely Latino town was upended when a gunman barricaded himself in an elementary school classroom and slaughtered 19 children and two teachers.
With all schools in the district cancelled for the remainder of the year and the town mourning for those it lost, hundreds of people came to a vigil at the Uvalde County Fairplex arena on Wednesday. There, pastors, seated on a stage on the dirt normally reserved for horses, tried to offer solace to their community.
“Pray for those children that saw what happened to their friends … pray for each of us as we help them,” said Pastor Tony Grubin, feeling nervous as he addressed the crowd of adults and children, many of them wearing red school shirts. “Evil will not win.”
Jacklyn Cazares remembered as 'firecracker ... with big heart'
The AP has more details on Jacklyn Cazares, a nine-year-old girl who was killed in the shooting alongside her cousin, Annabelle Rodriguez:
Jacklyn Cazares hadn’t yet reached her 10th birthday, but she was already a tough-minded “firecracker” always looking to help people in need, her father said. Jacklyn and her second cousin, Annabelle Rodriguez, were especially tight with three other classmates at Robb elementary school.
“They are all gone now,” Javier Cazares said. “All her little best friends were killed too.”
Jacklyn would have turned ten on 10 June. Despite her young age, she was equal parts tough-minded and compassionate.
“She had a voice,” her father said. “She didn’t like bullies, she didn’t like kids being picked on. All in all, full of love. She had a big heart.”
More about the victims here:
Mother says she was handcuffed outside school
As criticisms mount over the police response to the massacre, one mother who was outside of the school as the attack was unfolding says that officers handcuffed her after she urged police to enter.
Angeli Rose Gomez, who has children in the second and third grade in the school, told the Wall Street Journal she drove 40 miles to the school when she heard there was a shooting and that when she arrived, “The police were doing nothing. They were just standing outside the fence. They weren’t going in there or running anywhere.”
She told the paper that after a few minutes of her urging officers to act, federal marshals approached and put her in handcuffs, alleging that she was being arrested for interfering in an active investigation. She said she was released after she talked to Uvalde police officers she personally knew who convinced the marshals to let her go. At that point, she said she entered the school and got her two children.
Gomez also told the Journal that after the gunman was killed, she saw police use a Taser on a local father who was approaching a bus to find his child. Gomez described it this way:
They didn’t do that to the shooter, but they did that to us. That’s how it felt.”
A mom of two children at Uvalde was put in handcuffs after urging police and law enforcement to enter the school.
— Megan Menchaca (@meganmmenchaca) May 26, 2022
Once freed from her cuffs, she jumped the school fence, ran inside and sprinted out with her kids.
New from @WSJ: https://t.co/SYdgysw0gF pic.twitter.com/ZCadllw9aT
Officials have not offered a clear explanation as to why the gunman was in the school for up to an hour before he was stopped and killed, even while officers were on scene. Authorities admitted that police officers had assembled outside the room where the gunman was located, but did not make any attempt to break through the door during that hour. Instead, they decided to pull back and wait until a specialist tactical unit arrived, while evacuating other children and staff from the building. More on the police response here:
Biden’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said the White House was “disappointed” that Republicans in the Senate blocked the domestic terrorism prevention bill that the Democratic-controlled House last week.
We need Congress to act. We need Congress to advance commonsense measures that we know will save lives.
She later added, “Commonsense gun safety laws work. We know this. They save lives. The public supports this. They are behind this.”
A reporter asked whether Biden would be doing anything differently to reflect the urgency of the gun violence crisis, the press secretary responded, “The president has already declared gun violence to be a public health epidemic. This is a president who has been working on gun violence, comprehensive gun reform since he was a senator.”
When the reporter followed up and asked whether it was indictment of Biden that he has been involved in the issue for so long and so little has changed, she said, “He understands we need to do more, but Congress also has to act ... The president is doing everything that he can to get this done.”
The White House is declining to weigh in on the concerns about the Texas law enforcement response to the school shooting.
Asked at the briefing whether Joe Biden would call for an investigation into police’s actions at the shooting, Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, responded: “The president has the utmost respect for the men and women of law enforcement ... We won’t pre-judge the results from here at this time.”
The gunman was in the school for up to an hour before he was killed, even while officers were on scene, and officials have not offered a clear explanation of the timeline or what police were doing during that hour.
Asked about the NRA convention scheduled to begin in Texas, Jean-Pierre said:
It’s not about the convention. What is inappropriate is that the leadership of the National Rifle Association has proven time and time again that they are contributing to the problem of gun violence, not trying to solve it … [They are] marketing weapons of war to adults. They don’t represent gun owners who know we need to take action. The NRA and their allies have stood in the way of [gun safety measures]. It is shameful.
About the response from some Republicans calling for more armed people, the press secretary said, “If more guns were the solution, we’d be the safest country in the world.”
Joe Biden to visit Uvalde on Sunday
Hi all - Sam Levin here, taking over our live coverage:
The White House has announced that Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden will be traveling to Uvalde, Texas on Sunday to “grieve with the community”. Officials did not have further details on the visit, though a press briefing is due to start momentarily. Follow along here for updates.
Summary
Here are today’s developments so far from Tuesday’s mass shooting at Robb elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, that killed 19 children and two teachers:
- Investigators at an afternoon media briefing were unable to say why the gunman was not confronted during a “missing hour” between entering the school and being killed by a SWAT team.
- Parents and other locals expressed distress at the apparent hesitation of law enforcement to storm the school, with some having begged officers to move in as the massacre was still ongoing.
- However, US Border Patrol chief Raul Ortiz said agents “didn’t hesitate” when responding to the shooting. “They came up with a plan. They entered that classroom and they took care of the situation as quickly as they possibly could,” he told CNN.
- Democratic senator Chris Murphy called for a “popular uprising of citizens” to pressure Republicans to support gun laws following the shooting.
- Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer said he would delay a vote on background checks for weapons buyers while bipartisan talks progressed, but warned Republicans he would move ahead if no deal was reached.
- March for Our Lives, the student-led gun reform activist group set up in the wake of the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school shooting in Florida, is planning protest events in several US cities on 11 June.
- Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz confronted a British reporter and angrily left an interview after he was asked why school shootings like the one in Uvalde happen so often in the US.
- Before attacking the school, the gunman, named as Salvador Ramos, shot and wounded his grandmother at her home. Neighbors called police when she staggered outside and they saw she had been shot in the face.
- The gunman sent three online messages in the half-hour before the mass shooting, according to Texas governor Greg Abbott. The messages were sent via Facebook and “discovered after the terrible tragedy,” company spokesman Andy Stone said.
- The gunman had legally bought the rifle and a second one like it last week, just after his birthday, authorities said.
Thanks for following. My colleague Sam Levin will guide you through the next few hours.
Just days after the deadliest mass school shooting in Texas history, the National Rifle Association (NRA) – America’s leading gun lobbyist group – will meet a few hours away in Houston on Friday.
Ashton P Woods says they are not welcome in his home town.
“These people are coming into our community. The city of Houston needs to kick them out,” said Woods, an activist and founder of Black Lives Matter Houston. “We have to be just as tough about these things as they are.”
Woods is helping organize one of several protests planned just outside the George R Brown Convention Center, where NRA members will browse exhibits of firearms and gun paraphernalia and hear speeches from Republican leaders including Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas.
The goal of the Black Lives Matter protest, Woods said, is to “get loud” outside while powerful speakers take the podium inside. Woods said the issue of firearms was particularly important to the civil rights group that primarily tackles issues of police brutality in America.
“Whether it be death by suicide, death by cop, death by mass shooter, we need to control the access people have to deadly weapons,” Woods said. “These things are interconnected.”
Democratic Texas congressman Colin Allred was another on Wednesday to attack the NRA conference, and its prominent attendees.
“It’s a disgrace that these Republicans are choosing to attend the NRA convention, when they should be in their respective legislatures doing everything in their power to prevent the next attack like this,” he said in a video address from the Democratic party’s war room.
“When it comes to Ted Cruz, let’s just say he’s one of the biggest recipients of gun lobby spending and was the top recipient of campaign donations from so called gun rights backers in the 2018 election cycle.
“We know who Ted Cruz is serving, and it’s not Texans.”
Full story:
Police in Toronto shot and injured a man who was walking down a street carrying a gun in a city neighborhood, and five nearby schools were placed on lockdown, officials in Canada said, according to Reuters.
The suspect, whose condition was not immediately clear, was described as a male in his late teens or early 20s, the Toronto police department said.
The incident occurred in Port Union, a residential area north of Toronto’s city center. Three of the schools remained on lockdown Thursday afternoon, and two others were declared “hold and secure” due to ongoing police work.
Officials can't say why Uvalde gunman wasn't confronted
A briefing Thursday afternoon by the Texas Department of Public Safety created more questions than answers about a “missing” hour during which the Uvalde gunman was in the school but not confronted by law enforcement officers.
Victor Escalon, the department’s regional director, deflected reporters’ questions about why officers did not attempt to stop the gunman in that time.
Photograph: Tannen Maury/EPA
During the short, and sometimes chaotic briefing, Escalon appeared defensive when challenged about the delay. Parents of victims have expressed distress at the apparent hesitation of law enforcement to storm the school, and some begged officers to move in.
“There’s lot of possibilities,” Escalon said, insisting that investigators needed time to interview officers from multiple jurisdictions who were eventually present.
“At the end of the day our job is to report the facts. We don’t have all the answers. We’re not there yet”.
But in laying out a preliminary timeline of the shooting, he did indicate that the gunman appeared to have been able to gain entry to the school through an unlocked back door, and that, contrary to earlier reports, there was no armed police officer on duty at the campus when the shooter walked in and began Tuesday’s deadly rampage that killed 19 students and two teachers.
“The majority of the gunfire was in the beginning,” Escalon said, adding that officers first on the scene prioritized calling for back up and trying to evacuate students and children.
“He did not respond [to officers trying to speak to him],” Escalon said.
Escalon ended the briefing by promising to get back to the media when he had more information to give.
Updated
The chief question arising from that brief briefing is why law enforcement did not enter the school and try to save children in the hour between the gunman entering the school and his being killed by a SWAT team from Customs and Border Protection.
Victor Escalon of the Texas Department of Public Safety did not discuss what happened in that hour in any detail.
He did say “the majority of the gunfire was in the beginning” and said the gunman then fired to keep officers at bay but did not respond to attempts to negotiate. He also said officers made efforts to evacuate other children and teachers.
Escalon’s words might suggest that most of the children who were killed were killed shortly after the gunman entered the room. Nonetheless, officers seem not to have attempted to take the gunman down.
Escalon answers questions.
It appears the door to the school the gunman used was unlocked, he says.
“The majority of the gunfire was in the beginning,” Escalon says. The gunman then fired to keep officers at bay but did not respond to attempts to negotiate.
There was not a readily available armed officer at the school when the gunman arrived, Escalon says.
“At 11.30am the PD got a crash and a man with a gun and you have responding officers.”
He can’t say yet what happened in the next 10 minutes with certainty, he says, adding: “There’s a lot of possibilities.”
All the officers who were present need to be interviewed, Escalon says, asked about questions about what was done to stop the shooting which are growing with the hour.
A British reporter asks: “Is it accurate eyewitnesses were urging police to go in while a SWAT team was awaited, and even asking to borrow police armour to go in and try to rescue their children themselves?”
“I’ve heard that information that we have not verified it,” Escalon says.
Questions are shouted but Escalon has no answers. He says he needs time.
That briefing didn’t clear up much about how police responded to the shooting.
Victor Escalon, regional director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, begins the briefing. He says law enforcement are “hurting inside”, as are other officials and of course the victims and family members and describes how an investigation works.
He recounts what is known about the shooting.
Salvador Ramos’s grandmother is still alive, Escalon says, in stable condition after being shot in the face.
The shooter entered Robb elementary school at 11.40am, after shooting at the building and “numerous rounds are discharged inside the school”. Four minutes later, Uvalde police are inside. They take rounds, move back and get cover, and call for additional resources, as the gunman enters a classroom.
Escalon says that during the time the calls for help are being made, officers are also evacuating teachers and students.
Approximately an hour later, Escalon says, US Border Patrol tactical teams arrive and shoot and kill the suspect.
Now it turns into a rescue operation, he says, the officers asking themselves, “How do we save these children?”
Escalon says reports the gunman was confronted by an officer on the way into the school are not accurate.
He says he will take questions.
A briefing has begun in Uvalde. We’ll follow it here.
The chief of the Uvalde police department, Daniel Rodriguez, has just issued a statement defending his officers over the response time to the Robb elementary school shooting.
Rodriguez said officers “responded within minutes” and that several of them received non-life threating gunshot wounds from the suspect.
A press conference in Uvalde is scheduled to begin within the next 15 minutes or so, and you can expect questions about the timeline of the massacre.
NEW: The chief of the Uvalde Police Department has a released a statement saying his officers responded “within minutes” along with school officers. “I know answers will not come fast enough,” he said. pic.twitter.com/8m7GvLZQo0
— Tony Plohetski (@tplohetski) May 26, 2022
Read more:
More desperately sad news from Uvalde, as if things weren’t bad enough already:
Joe Garcia, the husband of Irma Garcia, one of two teachers shot and killed in Uvalde, TX on Tuesday, has reportedly suffered a fatal heart attack. Joe and Irma were high school sweethearts and married 24 years. They leave behind four children. pic.twitter.com/Rlk0M2B8nR
— Ernie Zuniga (@Ernie_Zuniga) May 26, 2022
His death was confirmed on Twitter by Garcia’s nephew John Martinez, who asked for prayers for his family:
EXTREMELY heartbreaking and come with deep sorrow to say that my Tia Irma’s husband Joe Garcia has passed away due to grief, i truly am at a loss for words for how we are all feeling, PLEASE PRAY FOR OUR FAMILY, God have mercy on us, this isn’t easy pic.twitter.com/GlUSOutRVV
— john martinez ❤️🔥 (@fuhknjo) May 26, 2022
Here’s more on Joe Garcia and this tragic, apparently deadly case of broken heart syndrome.
Updated
Republicans in the senate have, as expected, blocked the domestic terrorism prevention bill that passed the Democratic-controlled House last week.
Chuck Schumer, the senate majority leader, changed his vote to no in a procedural move so he can bring the measure back again. Senators voted 47-47, well short of the 60 votes needed for it to advance.
The bill was seen as the Democrats’ opening attempt to pass some kind of gun restrictions following the massacre of 10 Black people by a white supremacist gunman at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, almost two weeks ago.
It would have established a new domestic terrorism office at the homeland security department that would track and analyze domestic terrorist activity, and require regular reporting of threats from white supremacists and neo-Nazis.
Republicans argued the bill was partisan and not needed because of existing laws to tackle domestic terrorism.
Updated
One of the hosts responding to the Texas shooting on late-night TV on Wednesday, Jimmy Kimmel, became visibly upset as he did so.
“Once again, we grieve for the little boys and girls whose lives have been ended and whose families have been destroyed,” he said.
While the right will “warn us not to politicise” the shooting, Kimmel added, it’s important to remember “they know what they’ve done and they know what they haven’t done”.
The “very least we can do” is insist upon background checks for those seeking to purchase a gun, a law that has been stalled in Congress.
“They won’t pass it because our cowardly leaders just aren’t listening to us, they’re listening to the NRA, they’re listening to those people who write them checks who keep them in power,” Kimmel said.
“If your solution to children being massacred is armed guards, you haven’t been paying attention to what’s going on,” the host said before reminding viewers of the many times armed guards and police officers have not prevented school shootings.
Kimmel then zeroed in on the Texas senator Ted Cruz, who is scheduled to speak at an NRA event in Houston this weekend.
“I refuse to believe he’s unaffected by this,” he said. “He’s not a monster, he’s a human being.”
To Cruz and the many others who refuse to recognise the danger of guns, Kimmel said: “It’s OK to admit you made a mistake, it’s not just OK, it’s necessary.”
He continued: “Do I think these men are brave people? No I don’t but man I would love it if these guys surprised me.”
Kimmel also said “it isn’t a time for moments of silence, this is a time to be loud”, before reminding viewers there have been 27 US school shootings this year and it’s still only May.
“How does this make sense to anyone?” he asked. “These are our children.”
A fourth-grader at Robb elementary school gave a chilling account of the shooting to a local TV station.
The boy, who was not named, told KENS5 that he and four classmates hid under a table with a cloth over it, which might have shielded them from the shooter’s view.
He also described how the massacre came to an end, with police storming the classroom and shooting dead the killer.
He shot the next person’s door. We have a door in the middle. He opened it.
When I heard the shooting through the door, I told my friend to hide under something so he won’t find us. I was hiding hard. And I was telling my friend to not talk because he is going to hear us.
The student said the killing ended with law enforcement breaking into the classroom, but not before the gunman killed one final student after she called for help:
When the cops came, the cop said, ‘yell if you need help!’ And one of the persons in my class said ‘help.’ The guy overheard and he came in and shot her. The cop barged into that classroom. The guy shot at the cop. And the cops started shooting.
You can read the harrowing account here.
Updated
In echoes of the student protests that followed the 2018 Parkland high school shooting in Florida, classmates at Oxford high school in Michigan’s Oakland county walked out of lessons this lunchtime.
#BREAKING Students at Oxford High school are walking out in protest over a lack of gun control laws and to show support for the victims in Texas. @WWJ950 @FOX2News #Oxford #Uvalde #GunControlNow #GunControl pic.twitter.com/3PM2RW3H4e
— Charlie Langton (@charlielangton) May 26, 2022
Reporter Charlie Langton tweeted that the students were protesting a lack of gun control laws, and wanted to show solidarity with the victims of the Robb elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
Harrowing footage of parents outside Robb elementary school, pleading and screaming at law enforcement to enter the building, has just aired on CNN.
It shows some adults begging uniformed officers to go in. The audio accompanying the images is also disturbing, with many adults wailing and shouting at the armed officers, some of whom are seen pushing citizens back.
It is not clear at what exact stage the cellphone video was taken, but some parents and other local people have expressed distress at the apparent hesitation of law enforcement to storm the school.
In another development, an interview has aired of an officer with the Texas department of public safety telling a news reporter from KENS-TV that some local officers breached the school to get their own children before a tactical team arrived and the shooter was taken down.
“There was [sic] some police officers, family, trying to get their children out of the school, because it was an active shooter situation,” the unidentified officer says.
“They were met with gunfire, some of them were shot”.
Here’s a Texas DPS Lieutenant telling a local station that some officers breached the school to get their own children BEFORE the shooter was taken down. pic.twitter.com/BrvS4sCqp6
— Sawyer Hackett (@SawyerHackett) May 26, 2022
Updated
Murphy warns lawmakers: Do the right thing or you aren't coming back
Senator Chris Murphy has called for a “popular uprising of citizens” to pressure Republicans to support gun laws following the Uvalde massacre.
Speaking at a press conference Wednesday morning on Capitol Hill, alongside fellow Democratic lawmakers and activists from Everytown for Gun Safety, the Connecticut senator said he would be talking with Republican lawmakers in the coming days to try to pass compromise legislation:
We’re going to extend a hand of partnership to those who have been sitting on the sidelines, to those who have chosen to side with the gun lobby… to try to find a path forward to makes our streets safer, to make our schools safer.
[We hope] we will be facilitated in finding that common ground by a popular uprising of citizens who are going to make clear: if you don’t do the right thing here, you aren’t coming back here.
Murphy has been entrusted by Democratic senate majority leader Chuck Schumer to lead talks with Republicans to try to find common ground over possible gun legislation.
Later, the crowd of activists at the Capitol chanted, “Vote them out! Vote them out!”
Kids here are holding signs that say things like: “I want 2 B a scientist, not a gun statistic.” pic.twitter.com/GFeM2hkH3n
— Lauren Gambino (@laurenegambino) May 26, 2022
Among the legislation that Congress should consider now are expanded background checks, “red flag” laws that allow people to petition a court to temporarily take guns away from a person at risk of hurting themselves or others, and a ban on ghost guns, said Richard Blumenthal, another Connecticut senator.
It’s not the first time after a mass shooting that Murphy has called for a popular uprising of citizens. After the 2018 Parkland shooting, students across the nation mobilized for weeks of school walkouts and a major demonstration in Washington.
On the Senate floor just now, Schumer said he would not bring a background check bill to the floor immediately, preferring to allow time for bipartisan negotiations to continue.
But he warned Republicans that if there was no agreement in the next two or so weeks, he would not “waste time”, and would bring a background check bill for a vote.
Updated
Texas law enforcement agencies are coming under scrutiny over their response to the mass shooting at Robb elementary school in Uvalde, after it emerged that the gunman remained barricaded inside a classroom for up to an hour before his bloody rampage was brought to an end.
Accounts given by local officials and media reports have confirmed that not only did the gunman evade armed guards outside the school, but he also locked himself into a classroom for 40 to 60 minutes while he carried out his killings.
By the time a tactical team from Customs and Border Protection broke into the classroom and killed the gunman, he had murdered 19 children aged eight to 10 and their two teachers.
The Associated Press reported that as the massacre was unfolding, several parents and other local people expressed distress at the apparent hesitation of law enforcement to storm the school. Juan Carranza, who lives beside the school, told the news agency he witnessed women shouting at officers: “Go in there! Go in there!”
The officers did not go into the building, Carranza said.
Javier Cazares, whose 10-year-old daughter Jacklyn was killed, told AP police appeared unprepared.
“More could have been done,” he said.
He said he and other residents gathered outside the school started to plan their own rescue mission as the gunman remained locked inside.
“Let’s just rush in because the cops aren’t doing anything like they are supposed to,” he said.
Read the full story:
March for Our Lives, the student-led gun reform activist group set up in the wake of the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school massacre in Florida, is planning protest events in several US cities on 11 June.
Hundreds of thousands protested in hundreds of locations worldwide in March 2018, one month after a gunman took the lives of 17 students and staff in Parkland, which remains the nation’s deadliest high school shooting.
The group says it will host an event in Washington DC next month, as well as in several Florida cities, including Parkland, Orlando and Miami.
Activists will also be protesting at the national rifle association conference in Houston on Friday, at which former president Donald Trump – who did not come to Parkland after the shooting – will be speaking.
According to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Zeenat Yahya, director of policy for March for Our Lives, said the group will precede the 11 June marches with a “plan to flood the offices” of congressional lawmakers.
“We’re going to force every single member of Congress to answer to the millions of us showing up in DC,” Yahya said, according to the newspaper.
Updated
The Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz confronted a British reporter and angrily left an interview after he was asked why school shootings like that in Uvalde, where 19 children and two adults were killed, happen so often in the US.
“I’m sorry you think American exceptionalism is awful,” Cruz said. “You’ve got your political agenda. God love you.”
On Thursday, the news site Axios published a list of the leading recipients of gun lobby donations in the current Congress.
Cruz was clear at the top, with $442,000 donated to campaign organisations or political action committees.
Axios noted: “The figures are much higher if you count indirect contributions, like the NRA’s purchase of attack ads against opponents.”
On Tuesday morning in Uvalde, an 18-year-old shot his grandmother then entered Robb elementary school and barricaded himself in a classroom.
After about 40 minutes, during which parents implored police to charge and tackle the gunman, the assailant was killed by a Swat team.
On Wednesday Cruz spoke to Mark Stone, US correspondent for Sky News, at a vigil in Uvalde.
“There are 19 sets of parents who are never gonna get to kiss their child goodnight,” Cruz said.
Stone asked: “Is this the moment to reform gun laws?”
Cruz said: “You know, it’s easy to go to politics.”
“But it’s important,” Stone said. “It’s at the heart of the issue.”
“I get that that’s where the media likes to go,” Cruz said.
Read the full story:
House gun violence prevention chair pessimistic over legislation
The chair of the House task force on gun violence prevention is pessimistic about meaningful gun reforms passing Congress in the wake of the Uvalde massacre.
California Democratic congressman Mike Thompson, a close ally of Connecticut senator Chris Murphy, who is pursuing bipartisan legislation in the upper chamber, has just been on CNN.
He was asked directly if there would be action on Capitol Hill:
I wish I could tell you and your viewers yes, but I can’t.
We’ve been through this so many times... school shootings after school shootings, mass shootings after mass shootings. There’s action on Capitol Hill, it’s just not enough.
Thompson authored a bill on background checks that passed the House before Murphy presented to the senate, where it stalled:
Sadly, that bipartisan piece of legislation, supported by over 90% of the American people, languishes over in the Senate because they don’t have not the 51 votes to pass it, they don’t have the 60 votes necessary to bring it up for a vote.
It’s a critical problem over in the senate. Those 50 Republican senators can’t ratchet up enough courage to pass a bill that will help protect kids and our communities.
The congressman praised Murphy’s efforts to rework the legislation but said he was not confident.
He’s up against an almost immovable force of the Republicans in the Senate [who] have refused, even on this wildly popular, one step towards a safer community bill, to help.
I wish him the best of luck. I’ll do all that I can. But the senate Republicans, and this isn’t a partisan issue anywhere except in the US senate, are holding this up, and they shouldn’t be held accountable for doing that.
If it’s too hard for members of Congress to do their job to help make our kids and our community safer, get another job.
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Churchgoers in Uvalde consoled the mother of the gunman as she wept in the pews, according to a moving report published today by the Texas Tribune.
According to the newspaper, Fatima Abraham, a community leader at the Sacred Heart Catholic church, sat with the woman in the front row and hugged her.
Abraham told the Tribune:
I simply told her that we were with her, that not everyone here was against her. She has to know that she is not to blame for this. She didn’t put that gun in her son’s hand.
Speaking to reporters in Spanish, Abraham said the community needed to support each other, and be sympathetic to the woman:
We are with her because we have to pray instead of criticizing or attacking. Turning into hate and resentment is not good for humanity.
Chris Murphy, the Democratic Connecticut senator who delivered a powerful “What are we doing?” gun law plea to the chamber in the immediate aftermath of the Texas shooting, will address the media a little later this morning with progress report on bipartisan talks.
Photograph: J Scott Applewhite/AP
Murphy is leading his party’s efforts to get enough Republican senators on board to pass some kind of firearms control measures, and met last night with Susan Collins of Maine and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, as well as a group of fellow Democrats, Politico reports.
According to Politico, Democratic majority leader leader Chuck Schumer has decided to forego trying an almost certain to fail vote on background checks before the senate starts its 10-day Memorial Day recess later, in favor of allowing Murphy and his allies to pursue longer-term measures that might attract bipartisan support.
But getting to 60 votes in the divided chamber will still be an uphill battle. Seemingly unmoved by previous mass shootings, Republicans have been singularly opposed to any kind of gun reforms.
Murphy will join Democratic senators Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Alex Padilla of California in the briefing scheduled for 10.30am EST.
A new poll, with the question asked just a day after the Uvalde shooting, suggests that a majority of the US public would support greater background checks on the purchase of guns.
The survey, carried out by Morning Consult and Politico, suggests that only 8% of people “strongly” or “somewhat” oppose them, whereas 73% of people in the sample strongly supported the concept of universal background checks.
The Bipartisan Background Checks Act (HR8) has been passed by Congress, but prevented from becoming law as it has not been able to garner enough Republican support in the Senate.
All the indications are that the gunman who carried out the shooting at the Robb elementary school legally purchased the guns to used carry out the attack on the young children on, or just after, his 18th birthday.
The gunmen in the Ulvade school shooting allegedly sent a series of text messages to a girl in Germany, just moments before he carried out his deadly attack, according to CNN and German media.
The 18-year-old gunman told the teenage girl, who lives in Frankfurt, that he had just shot his grandmother in the head and that he was going to shoot up an elementary school next, according to screen shots seen by CNN.
“Ima go shoot up a(n) elementary school rn (right now),” he wrote at 6:21 p.m. Central European time (CET), which was 11:21 a.m. Central time (CT) in Texas.
The girl told CNN that Salvador Ramos had been talking to her regularly online since the beginning of May and that he told her he planned to come and visit her in Europe. She said he would send her selfie videos and that he seemed to spend a lot of time at home by himself.
Before the attack, the suspect told the teenage girl that he had bought bullets. But when she asked what he was going to do with them, he said she should “just wait for it”.
Here are some more of the striking images from last night of the makeshift memorial that has been established outside the Robb elementary school.
Jimmy Kimmel has questioned why his monologue about the Robb elementary school shooting was not broadcast in full by on Dallas/Fort Worth’s ABC affiliate channel WFAA/Channel 8 in Texas.
According to local media the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Kimmel’s six-minute monologue was cut off by commercials, which began with an in-house news spot.
Variety reports that the station responded to Kimmel’s query by saying: “We’d made the decision earlier in the day to extend our 10 o’clock news to include extra Uvalde coverage in our broadcast, it had nothing to do with your monologue. We’re on the same team.”
Frustrated onlookers urged police officers to charge into the Texas elementary school where a gunman’s rampage killed 19 children and two teachers, witnesses have told Associated Press.
“Go in there! Go in there!” nearby women shouted at the officers soon after the attack began, said Juan Carranza, 24, who saw the scene from outside his house, across the street from Robb Elementary School in the town of Uvalde. Carranza said the officers did not go in.
Javier Cazares, whose fourth grade daughter, Jacklyn Cazares, was killed in the attack, said he raced to the school when he heard about the shooting, arriving while police were still gathered outside the building.
Upset that police were not moving in, he raised the idea of charging into the school with several other bystanders.
“Let’s just rush in because the cops aren’t doing anything like they are supposed to,” he said. “More could have been done.”
“They were unprepared,” he added.
Minutes earlier, Carranza said he had watched as the gunman crashed his truck into a ditch outside the school, grabbed his AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle and shot at two people outside a nearby funeral home who ran away uninjured.
The 19 child victims and two teachers killed in the school have all now been identified.
Musician Don Mclean has said in a statement that he will no longer be performing at the National Rifle Association convention due to take place in Texas later this week.
Mclean said:
I have decided it would be disrespectful and hurtful for me to perform. I’m sure all the folks planning to attend this event are shocked and sickened by these events as well.
At the moment, former president Donald Trump, senator Ted Cruz and Texas governor Greg Abbott are all still scheduled to speak at the event, which takes place just a couple of days after 19 elementary school pupils were killed in the state.
Alvin Chang and Andrew Witherspoon have put together for us a look at how the push for gun control in the US rises and falls with each school shooting. They write:
Mass shootings are so common in America that most of these tragedies barely make a blip in the gun control debate.
The country experiences a mass shooting nearly every day, and once every three weeks someone is shot on school property, according to data from the Center for Homeland Defense and Security. The large majority of these shootings don’t get coverage in national media outlets. Among the few things that keep gun control in the public consciousness are school shootings with large death tolls.
After the Sandy Hook shooting, gun control stayed in the news cycle for months, according to data from the GDELT project which analyzes closed caption text. An extended political debate eventually led to 23 executive actions from President Barack Obama which, among other things, created a more robust background check system. Soon thereafter, Congress nearly passed bipartisan gun control legislation.
A similar thing happened after 17 people were killed in the 2018 Parkland school shooting. After extensive media coverage and political handwringing, federal legislation stalled but state legislators passed a flurry of gun control laws.
Read more here: Outrage and inaction – how the push for gun control rises and falls with each school shooting
Overnight NBC has been carrying an anonymous interview with a teacher who was at the Robb Elementary School shooting. Interviewed by Mike Hixenbaugh, the teacher described it as “the longest 35 minutes” of their life. Here are some of the key quote:
What do you want me to say? That I can’t eat? That all I hear are their voices screaming? And I can’t help them?
They’ve been practicing for this day for years. They knew this wasn’t a drill. We knew we had to be quiet or else we were going to give ourselves away.
The teacher described comforting the young children and keeping them quiet, until people arrived to help them evacuate. They said “After the last kid, I turned around to ensure everyone was out. I knew I had to go quickly, but I wasn’t leaving until I knew for sure.”
They then said that they had received messages of thanks from parents, and explained how strong the bond is between elementary teachers and their pupils. The teacher said:
It’s not just their baby. That’s my baby, too. They are not my students. They are my children.
You can read it in full here: NBC – A teacher in Uvalde, Texas, describes ‘the longest 35 minutes of my life’
What we know so far
As the US wakes up in the aftermath of Tuesday’s school shooting in Texas, here is what we know:
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Onlookers reportedly urged police officers to charge into the school on Tuesday, while the shooter was inside. Juan Carranza, 24, who saw the scene unfold from outside his house across the street said he felt arriving officers should have entered the school sooner.
- Law enforcement say the 18-year-old gunman charged into one classroom at the Robb Elementary School. Lt Christopher Olivarez of the Texas Department of Public Safety told CNN the gunman once there “just started shooting children and teachers that were inside that classroom”.
- About “40 minutes or so” elapsed from when the gunman opened fire on the school security officer and when the Border Patrol team shot him, Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw said.
- Javier Cazares, whose daughter, Jacklyn Cazares, was killed in the attack, said he raced to the school and arrived while police were still massed outside the building. “Let’s just rush in because the cops aren’t doing anything like they are supposed to,” he recalled. “More could have been done.”
- However, US Border Patrol chief Raul Ortiz said agents “didn’t hesitate” when responding to the shooting. “They didn’t hesitate. They came up with a plan. They entered that classroom and they took care of the situation as quickly as they possibly could,” he told CNN. More than 100 federal officers responded to Uvalde school shooting, Ortiz added
- All of the 19 young victims of the shooting have now been identified. A law enforcement official said all victims were in the same fourth-grade classroom at the school.
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Before attacking the school, the gunman, named as Salvador Ramos, shot and wounded his grandmother at her home. Neighbours called police when she staggered outside and they saw she had been shot in the face, Texas Department of Public Safety spokesperson Travis Considine said.
- The gunman sent three online messages in the half-hour before the mass shooting, according to the governor of Texas, Greg Abbot. The private, one-to-one messages were sent via Facebook, and were “discovered after the terrible tragedy,” company spokesman Andy Stone said. He said Meta, which owns Facebook, is cooperating with investigators.
- The gunman had legally bought the rifle and a second one like it last week, just after his birthday, authorities said. Investigators have so far shed no light on the motive for the attack.
- Community members attended a prayer vigil Wednesday evening at the Uvalde County Fairplex Arena.
- Authorities in Texas have called for more armed officers and armed teachers in schools, as Republican leaders have doubled down on their opposition to gun control.
- Texas Democrat Beto O’Rourke told the state’s governor, Greg Abbott, his inaction over gun violence made the shooting at an elementary school on Tuesday “predictable”. O’Rourke, who is running to be the next governor, told Abbott in a news conference on Wednesday: “This is on you, until you choose to do something.”
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The National Rifle Association released a statement describing the shooting as “the act of a lone, deranged criminal” and pledged to “redouble our commitment to make our schools secure”. The group will gather in Houston for its first annual meeting in three years this weekend.
- US president Joe Biden said he is “sick and tired” of continued mass shootings in the US and access to military-style weapons for youth. “When in God’s name will we do what needs to be done to, not completely stop, but fundamentally change the amount of carnage that goes on in this country.” he said. “To state the obvious, I’m sick and tired, I’m just sick and tired of what is going on, what continues to go on.”
I am Martin Belam in London and I’ll be bringing you more reaction and the latest developments until handing over to my colleagues in New York. You can contact me on martin.belam@theguardian.com
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