Questions over police response
UVALDE: The gunman in the Texas school massacre barged unchallenged through an unlocked door, then killed 19 children and two teachers while holed up in their classroom for an hour before a tactical team stormed in and killed him, police said yesterday.
The latest official details from the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) on Wednesday’s mass shooting differed sharply from initial police accounts and raised questions about security measures at the elementary school and the response of law enforcement.
The school district in Uvalde, Texas, about 130km west of San Antonio, has a standing policy of locking all entrances, including classroom doors, as a safety precaution. But one student told Reuters some doors were left unlocked the day of the shooting to allow visiting parents to come and go for an awards day event.
The newly detailed chronology came hours after videos emerged showing desperate parents outside Robb Elementary School during the attack. They pleaded with officers to storm the building, and some fathers had to be restrained.
The human toll of the rampage, which ranks as the deadliest US school shooting in nearly a decade, deepened with news that the husband of one of the slain teachers died of a heart attack yesterday while preparing for his wife’s funeral. The couple had four children.
At a briefing for reporters, DPS spokesman Victor Escalon said the gunman, Salvador Ramos (18) made his way unimpeded on to the school grounds after crashing his pickup truck nearby. The carnage began 12 minutes later.
Preliminary police reports had said that Ramos, who drove to the school from his home after shooting and wounding his grandmother there, was confronted by a schoolbased police officer as he ran toward the school. Instead, no armed officer was present when Ramos arrived at the school, Escalon said.
The suspect crashed his pickup truck nearby at 11.28am (local time), opened fire on two people at a funeral home across the street, then scaled a fence on to school property and walked into one of the buildings through an unlocked rear door at 11.40am, Escalon said.
Two responding officers entered the school four minutes later but took cover after Ramos fired a number of rounds at them, Escalon said.
The shooter then barricaded himself inside the fourthgrade classroom of his victims, mostly 9and 10yearolds, for an hour before a US Border Patrol tactical team breached the room and fatally shot him, Escalon said. Officers reported hearing at least 25 gunshots coming from inside the classroom early in the siege, he said.
The hourlong interval before border agents stormed in appeared to be at odds with an approach adopted by many law enforcement agencies to confront ‘‘active shooters’’ at schools immediately to stop bloodshed.
Asked if police should have made en masse entry sooner, Escalon answered, ‘‘That’s a tough question,’’ adding that authorities would offer more information as the investigation proceeded.
He described a chaotic scene after the initial exchange of gunfire, with officers calling for backup and evacuating students and staff.
In one video posted on Facebook by a man named Angel Ledezma, parents can be seen breaking through yellow police tape and yelling at officers to go into the building.
‘‘It’s already been an hour, and they still can’t get all the kids out,’’ Ledezma said in the video. Another video posted on YouTube showed officers restraining at least one adult. One woman can be heard saying, ‘‘Why let the children die? There’s shooting in there.’’
Investigators were still seeking a motive, Escalon said. Minutes before the attack, Ramos however, he had written an online message saying he was about to ‘‘shoot up an elementary school,’’ according to Governor Greg Abbott.
In one of the more chilling accounts of the shooting, a fourthgrade boy who was in the classroom told a local TV station that the gunman announced his presence when he entered by crouching slightly and saying, ‘‘It’s time to die.’’
Why a rear door to the school building would be left unsecured remained under investigation, Escalon said.
The attack, coming 10 days after 10 people were killed by an 18yearold gunman in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, has reignited a national debate over firearms. US President Joe Biden and fellow Democrats have vowed to push for new gun restrictions, despite resistance from Republicans.
Biden is due to travel Uvalde on Monday. — Reuters
TYSONS: America has been here before: Sandy Hook. Charleston. Orlando. Parkland. El Paso. Buffalo. Many others.
Unspeakable carnage followed by spasms of charged rhetoric on Capitol Hill vowing change: weapons bans, background checks, red flags for mental health cases, ammunition magazine restrictions, gun sale loopholes.
Then . . . nothing.
Echoing past tragedies, Americans have condemned the killer of 19 elementary school children and two teachers this week and grieve with the families in Uvalde, Texas, but there is no sense of optimism that this is the mass slaying that will spur tough gun control laws.
The fatalism is especially palpable among US senators, where gun control advocates do not even pretend to have an answer.
‘‘Not that I’ve heard. Not that I’ve seen in the conversations I’ve had with colleagues,’’ Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware, said on Thursday about whether he thought Uvalde would push enough Republicans to the bargaining table
‘‘They are disturbed, upset, troubled, but not willing to change where they are,’’ he said. ‘‘This is a bad day. This is a bad day for anything even vaguely looking like hope or optimism around legislative process or progress.’’
Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat from Arizona, remembers how lawmakers vowed to enact gun restrictions after his wife, thenCongresswoman Gabby Giffords, survived a mass shooting in Tucson in 2011.
‘‘It’s frustrating,’’ he told media.‘‘I mean, could something possibly happen? I’m always hopeful that enough senators will come to their senses and do something on a problem that is uniquely American, and this problem doesn’t exist in other countries.’’
But ‘‘the past is prologue, right?’’ he said.
‘‘History repeats itself.’’
A record of false hope
Mass shootings have prompted pledges of gunrelated legislation, mostly from Democrats with a smattering of Republicans.
After the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting in 2012 in Newtown, Connecticut, where 26 people (including 20 children) died, President Barack Obama pushed legislation that would have expanded background checks for gun buyers and banned certain weapons and highcapacity gun magazines.
A few months later, the Senate defeated what was left of that effort: a measure by Senators Joe Manchin a Democrat, and Pat Toomey, a Republican, that would have expanded background checks to include purchases at gun shows and on the internet. It failed 5446, six votes short of the 60 needed to bypass a filibuster. Fortyone Republicans were joined by five Democrats — primarily from states where gun ownership is high — to reject the proposal.
After a gunman killed nine parishioners in 2015 at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina, Democratic lawmakers tried to close a gap in federal law that allows gun sales to proceed without a completed background check if three business days have passed.
The Bill to close what became known as the ‘‘Charleston loophole’’ would have extended the background check review to 10 days. It passed the House but stalled in the Senate. President Joe Biden is pressing Congress to pass it with little success.
After the rampage in 2016 at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, which left 49 dead and 53 injured, enthusiasm to tighten laws flickered briefly, but partisan disputes kept four gunrelated Bills from passage.
After the shooting on Valentine’s Day 2018 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School , President Donald Trump expressed initial support to raise from 18 to 21 the minimum age to purchase a firearm and to expand background checks.
He later changed his mind, not that either proposal had much of a chance in the GOPcontrolled Congress.
Republicans unmoved
Optimism for compromise on gun control is dimming for a simple reason: it takes 60 votes to pass legislation through the 100seat US Senate, and Republicans, who occupy 50 seats, generally have different views on the solutions to mass shootings.
Many Republicans are heavily backed by gun rights groups: the top 20 recipients of gun lobby donations in the 202122 election cycle are all Republicans, according to data compiled by nonpartisan Open Secrets.
Republicans often blame poor parenting and social ills and support stationing more law enforcement at schools (Trump backed arming teachers after Parkland). They support some mental health screening for gun ownership but generally not to the degree Democrats want.
‘‘The problem starts with people, not with guns,’’ Senator Tommy Tuberville, a Republican representative in Alabama, said Thursday. ‘‘We’ve had guns forever. And we’re gonna continue to have guns.’’
If at least 10 Republicans are going to budge, Missouri Senator Roy Blunt would seem a logical candidate to be among them. One of the more centrist GOP senators, he will retire after this year, so a vote for gun control legislation is less risky to his political career.
He said on Thursday he was not aware of any ‘‘serious’’ discussion among Republicans to restrict gun access.
‘‘People after the last couple of weeks have to be thinking ‘is there anything here that would make a difference if it happened at a national level?’
‘‘I don’t know the answer to that,’’ he said. ‘‘New York has maybe the strongest red flag law, and it clearly didn’t stop what happened in Buffalo. So I don’t know that there’s any one solution here.’’
Red flag laws generally permit police or family members to seek a court order to temporarily confiscate firearms from a person who may present a danger to others or themselves.
Republicans will be needed for any Bill to pass. Manchin, who is working with Toomey on getting gun control legislation enacted, has reaffirmed his opposition to removing the filibuster.
Though the West Virginia Democrat said there ought to be movement on background checks and red flags legislation, he said he opposes getting rid of the 60vote threshold.
‘‘We’ve been talking about throwing out the one tool [filibuster] that we have that keeps us working and at least talking together,’’ he said. ‘‘Without that, we’d have nothing.’’
‘This Congress is failing’
There are steps presidents can — and have — taken to limit gun access.
Last year, Biden directed his administration to tighten restrictions on socalled ghost guns, or untraceable weapons that can be constructed from parts purchased online.
Presidential orders are welcome, but they are no substitute for legislation that passes Congress, said Nicole Hockley, who cofounded the Sandy Hook Promise Foundation after her son, Dylan, was killed.
‘‘It can not [be] sustained if it’s not also passed by Congress, the Senate and the House, and that’s where we have problems right now . . . There’s not even a Bill on the Senate floor right now for something as simple as background checks.’’
Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, a fierce supporter of gun control, said it was no longer an issue of finding a bipartisan legislative solution. It was also about putting people on the record, so voters know where lawmakers stand.
‘‘Put it on the floor and make a vote and then hold them accountable in November,’’ she said on Thursday. ‘‘This is what Americans want us to do. We have a moral responsibility to do our best to keep our children safe, to keep our friends and neighbours safe. And this Congress is failing . . . . Right now, the NRA is holding this Congress hostage.’’
Democratic Senator Tim Kaine, who as Virginia governor helped families cope with the massacre at Virginia Tech University that left 32 dead and 17 wounded in 2007, said on Thursday he still suffers when he hears of another mass shooting.
‘‘That kind of PTSD feeling is partly because of shooting and the number of deaths and especially deaths of kids, and it just brings back a lot of really painful memories. But it’s made worse by [the fact] we haven’t done anything.’’ — USA Today