Massacre in Texas | 21 people killed, including 18 children, in a primary school

(Houston) 21 people, including 18 children, were killed in a shooting Tuesday at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. A dozen children and two police officers were also injured.

The shooter acted “in an atrocious and senseless manner” at Robb Elementary School in the town of Uvalde, located about 130 kilometers west of San Antonio, Republican Governor of Texas Greg Abbott said during an interview. ‘a press conference.

The suspect also died, probably under the bullets of the police, he added, adding that the events were still under investigation. Two officers also suffered gunshot wounds, the governor said, but they are expected to survive.

Uvalde Memorial Hospital said earlier on Facebook that it had taken care of “13 children”, adding that two people “had died” when they arrived.

The ages of those who died were not specified, despite local media reports that 14 children had died.

A 66-year-old woman is also in “critical condition”, announced another hospital, University Health, located in San Antonio, which says it has received “two patients”, an adult and a child.

The shooting occurred at Robb Elementary School, a town between San Antonio and the Mexican border. More than 500 children, nearly 90 percent of whom are Hispanic, were studying at the facility during the 2020-2021 school year, according to state data.

Authorities did not offer a motive for the shooting, but said the shooter, an 18-year-old identified as Salvador Ramos, was a resident of the community.

It is the deadliest school shooting in Texas history, four years after a gunman fatally shot 10 people at Santa Fe High School in the Houston area.

Ted Cruz, Republican senator from Texas, thanked on Twitter the “heroic police forces” and the emergency services for their intervention during this “horrible shooting”.

President Joe Biden will speak Tuesday night on the shooting, the White House announced.

“President Biden is kept informed” of the killing, said presidential spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre. “His prayers go out to the families affected by this terrible event and he will speak this evening when he returns to the White House” after his trip to Asia, she added.

Joe Biden has ordered flags at the White House and public buildings and places across the United States to be flown at half-mast until Saturday evening, “as a sign of respect for the victims of this senseless act of violence”.

Shootings in public places are almost daily in the United States and gun crime is on the rise in major cities like New York, Chicago, Miami or San Francisco, especially since the 2020 pandemic.

In mid-May, America was bereaved by a racist shooting that killed ten African Americans in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.

“I don’t believe that these recent tragic mass shootings, whether it’s today in Texas or the one a few days ago in Buffalo, are going to change things in any meaningful way,” sighed Jeffrey Simon, guest lecturer at the Department of Political Science at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), in interview with The Press. “We had so many mass shootings causing a lot of debate afterwards […] and usually not much happens. »

The same goes for Nicole Golden, director of Texas Gun Sense, which advocates for “common sense” and evidence-based policies to reduce gun deaths. “Many of the measures that we have fought for in recent years have not been adopted by state legislators, who have even gone in the opposite direction,” she laments, referring in particular to the port of a weapon in public without a license, authorized last year.

Tuesday’s killings come nearly 10 years after another elementary school massacre, this time at Sandy Hook School in Newtown, Connecticut. After shooting his mother, the gunman killed 20 children and six teachers there before turning his gun on himself in December 2012.

Despite the many calls for tighter gun control following this killing like many others, there have been virtually no legislative changes in subsequent years.

M^me Golden became involved in response to the Sandy Hook shootings. If she regrets the lack of results and says she has “lost hope” on the side of the law, she nevertheless says she is grateful for “the movement” created since then. She always encourages her fellow citizens to mobilize for better arms control.

Professor Ron Avi Astor of the UCLA School of Public Affairs, however, thinks “it strikes a special place in people’s hearts” when the victims of a mass shooting are young children. Therefore, “it could upset some lawmakers, especially on the right, who are in favor of certain gun control laws. […] such as background checks and limiting access to weapons for those with violent histories”.

“But the window is very narrow, from what we’ve learned about it,” he warned. “If there is going to be action, it has to happen right away. »

Although common, deaths in mass shootings represent only a small fraction of all gun murders committed each year in the United States, according to the Pew Research Center. In 2020, the most recent year for which complete data is available, more than 19,000 people were shot and killed in the country, not counting suicides, which are even higher.