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19 children and 2 teachers killed in Texas mass shooting

General19 children and 2 teachers killed in Texas mass shooting

The teenage gunman, identified as Salvador Ramos, shot his grandmother before going to Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, where he engaged in a shooting rampage before being shot dead by police.

BELIZE CITY, Wed. May 25, 2022

Yesterday, the deadliest mass shooting in the United States since the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting took place at Robb Elementary School in the small town of Uvalde, Texas, located about 80 miles from San Antonio. The final body count was 21. Two of the persons who died were teachers, while 19 children in the second to fourth grades were killed—all at the hands of 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, who was apparently shot dead by police on the scene. This mass shooting comes just 10 days after 10 persons were killed in Buffalo, New York, by another mass shooter.

The teenage gunman is said to have shot his grandmother, who survived but was hospitalized, before crashing his vehicle near the school and exiting the car wearing ballistic armor and brandishing a rifle. He was reportedly spotted by police, who failed to prevent his entry into the school compound, where he carried out the bloodbath.

The shooting at the school of approximately 570 students took place just two days before the summer break. 

Robb Elementary is a school for children in the second to fourth grades, whose ages typically range from 7 to 10 years old, and it primarily caters to the largely Latino and Hispanic community of Uvalde. Approximately 80% of students at the school are of Hispanic descent, reports say. No motive has yet been pinpointed to explain why Ramos, a resident of the community, went on such a bloody rampage.

The school alerted parents with a post on their Facebook page at 11:43 a.m. on Tuesday which stated that shots were heard in the area and that the school had been placed on lockdown. The second message posted said, “There is an active shooter at Robb Elementary. Law enforcement is on site.” A third message asked parents to pick up children at the school civic center. Nineteen families received the awful news. 

Belize’s Commissioner of Police Chester Williams, in a public statement about the recent tragedy, said that the mass shootings are “sickening”. “If not at school, where else can children be safe?” Williams asked. 

President Joe Biden said he was also “sick and tired of it”. Biden, who is under heavy pressure to act to implement stricter gun control laws, said in a televised statement said, “As a nation, we have to ask when in God’s name we’re going to stand up to the gun lobby, when in God’s name we do what we all know in our gut needs to be done.”

In 2021 there were 61 active shooter incidents in the United States—the highest tally in 20 years, the FBI reports. President Biden vowed to crack down on gun violence as a part of his campaign agenda. In 1994, as a senator in Delaware, Biden steered the implementation of a 10-year ban on assault weapons which was not renewed in 2004. According to him, when the law was lifted, mass shootings tripled.

In 2020, the University of Michigan published a research letter that listed firearms as the leading cause of death for U.S. children and adolescents.

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