"There are more mass shootings than days in the year."
Chris Murphy has made the fight against arms, his fight, his mission.
Marked by the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre in 2012, in Connecticut, the state from which he was elected, he has continued to advocate for better gun control ever since.
A few hours after the massacre in an elementary school in Texas, which killed 21 people, including 19 children, the senator "begged" his elected colleagues to act, assuring that these tragedies were not "inevitable".
“It only happens in this country, and nowhere else.
In no other country do children go to school thinking they might get shot.”
A drama plunging America back into the recurring nightmare of school shootings.
The suspect killed his victims "in an atrocious and senseless manner" in the town of Uvalde, Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott said at a press conference.
The alleged shooter, Salvador Ramos, also died in this massacre which affected the town located about 130 km west of San Antonio.
Salvador Ramos, 18, allegedly first targeted his grandmother, whose state of health remained to be determined, before going to school and "abandoning his car" to enter the building with "a handgun" and possibly "a rifle," according to the governor.
The motives of this attack, one of the worst in a school for years, are for the moment unknown.
VIDEO.
Killing in Texas: the anger of an NBA coach after the death of 19 children in their school
- Children under 10 -
The shooting occurred at Robb Primary School, which caters for children under the age of 10 in Uvalde.
More than 500 children, nearly 90% of whom are Hispanic, were studying at the facility during the 2020-2021 school year, according to state data.
Videos shared on social networks showed children evacuated in emergency, running in small groups towards yellow school buses, in front of this establishment with low and flat buildings, typical of the south of the United States.
The White House ordered flags to be flown at half-mast in all public buildings to "honor the victims" of Uvalde.
The attack plunged the country back into the throes of school shootings, which are frequently repeated with shocking images of traumatized students forced to confine themselves to their classrooms before being evacuated by law enforcement and parents panicked, desperate to hear from their children.
The tragedy is reminiscent of that of the elementary school in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, where a 20-year-old madman killed 26 people, including twenty children aged 6 and 7, before committing suicide.
America was also particularly marked by a shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, which killed 17 people, the majority of them teenagers, in 2018. This new killing, all the more shocking as the victims are children, is sure to rekindle criticism of the proliferation of firearms in the United States, a debate that is almost on hold given the absence of hope for Congress to pass an ambitious national law on the question.
The leader of the Democrats in Congress, Nancy Pelosi, spoke of a "monstrous act that stole the future of dear children".