Daily Quiddity

Robb Elementary School Shooting

On May 24, 2022, 18-year-old Salvador Rolando Ramos fatally shot nineteen students and two teachers, and wounded seventeen other people at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. This came after he shot his grandmother in the forehead at home, severely wounding her. He proceeded to the school and fired shots outside for approximately five minutes, then entered with an AR-15 style rifle through an open side entrance door, without encountering armed resistance.  He then locked himself inside a classroom, in which he killed all of the shooting's victims, and remained there for about one hour before being killed by a United States Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC).  It is the third-deadliest American school shooting, after the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007 and the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, and the deadliest in Texas.

Law enforcement officials were criticized for their actions in response to the shooting, and their conduct is being reviewed in separate investigations by the Texas Ranger Division and the United States Department of Justice. After initially praising first responders to the shooting, Texas Governor Greg Abbott called for an investigation of the lack of action by incident commanders. Police officers waited 78 minutes on-site before breaching the classroom to engage the shooter. Police also cordoned off the school grounds, resulting in violent conflicts between police and civilians who were attempting to enter the school to rescue children.  Afterwards, local and state officials gave inaccurate reports of the timeline of police actions and overstated police actions.  The Texas Department of Public Safety acknowledged that it was an error for law enforcement to delay an assault on Ramos's position in the student-filled classroom, attributing this to the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District's police chief's assessment of the situation as one with a "barricaded subject" instead of an "active shooter".

Following the shooting, which took place only ten days after the 2022 Buffalo shooting at a supermarket, wider discussions ensued about American gun culture and violence, gridlock in politics, and law enforcement's failure to halt the attack. Some have advocated for a renewal of an assault weapons federal ban. Others criticized politicians for their perceived role in continuing to enable mass shootings.  Republicans have responded by resisting the implementation of gun control measures, and called for increasing security measures in schools, such as arming teachers; they have also accused their opponents of politicizing the shooting.  Some Republican senators have expressed an openness for a bipartisan agreement on gun reform, such as incentivizing states to pass red flag laws and expanding background checks for gun purchasers.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robb_Elementary_School_shooting