Fourteen students and a teacher 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 dead. Officials have not yet reported on a motive behind the attack.
Uvalde is a town of about 16,000, about 80 miles outside of San Antonio, Texas. 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, where a gunman killed 26 people in 2012, 20 of whom were children, and quickly prompted calls for gun reform.
“Another mass shooting in America. This time in an elementary school,” tweeted Ana Navarro-Cárdenas, a political commentator and frequent co-host on The View. “How many Americans, how many little kids, need to die before we finally say enough and throw-out those standing in the way of gun reform?”
Or as Princeton historian Kevin Kruse put it, “At this point in America, it’s no longer a question of *if* you’ll be impacted by a mass shooting. It’s just a question of exactly *when* and *how* you’ll be impacted by a mass shooting.”
AFP
