Law enforcement, and other first responders, gather outside Robb Elementary School following a shooting.William Luther (AP)
The ongoing tragedy of massacres in United States schools now has a new chapter.
A shooting in an elementary school in Uvalde, a town of 16,000 in central Texas, has left at least 20 dead, among them 18 children and three adults, according to the state's governor, Greg Abbott.
About stated in a press conference that the attacker, an 18-year-old who he identified as Salvador Ramos, was arrested by the police.
According to Abbott, Ramos brought a pistol to the school and may have also carried a rifle.
He shot and killed more than a dozen children and a teacher.
Police have reported that he also ended his grandmother's life before going to school.
Ramos was a student at the nearby high school.
According to initial indicators, he acted alone.
The event marks one of the worst school shootings in the United States in the last decade.
It is the largest one in an elementary school since the Newton, Connecticut massacre, when 20-year-old Adam Lanza, after shooting his mother de el, killed 26 people, including 20 children aged 6 and 7, at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
He then killed himself.
In 2018, at a high school in Parkland, Florida, a 19-year-old former student, who had been expelled, killed 17 people, the majority of them teenagers.
The attack took place on Tuesday morning in the Robb school, where the police arrived quickly.
The ages of the victims have not been specified.
An adult and a minor have been taken to a hospital in San Antonio, 140 kilometers away, to be treated for serious wounds.
Robb is an elementary school, and most of his students are under 10 years old.
Around 90% of them are Hispanic, and many come from low-income families.
This Thursday was the last day of the school year.
The Uvalde school district authorities had sent out an alert for local schools to activate their maximum security protocols.
The school had warned that there was an active shooter and asked parents to stay away from the area until the police could control the situation.
Shortly after noon, the school posted online a message asking parents to wait to look for their children and instead gather at a meeting point.
Minutes later, police informed that they had arrested the shooter, and students were being moved to a nearby building to reunite with their families.
Local authorities, however, initially asked the parents not to pick up their children right away because the emergency had not ended.
“You will be informed when you can do so,” they wrote on Facebook.
“Texans are grieving for the victims of this senseless crime & for the community of Uvalde,” the governor wrote in a press release and on social media.
“Cecilia and I mourn this horrific loss and urge all Texans to come together.
I've instructed the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Texas Rangers to work with local law enforcement to fully investigate this crime,” he added.
United States president Joe Biden, who just returned from a trip to Asia, is expected to make a statement of grief and solidarity from the White House this Tuesday at 8:15pm.
Biden has ordered federal buildings to lower their flags to half-mast.
The United States, where the right to possess firearms is enshrined in the Constitution, is the only country in the world where massacres by firearms in schools are frequent.
Most recently, in October 2021, a 15-year-old killed four students and wounded six others and a teacher in a middle school in Oxford, Michigan, a small city north of Detroit.
Authorities considered the attack a “terrorist act” and “murder,” and the shooter's parents were also prosecuted.
School shootings are often carried out by minors.
One of the most memorable was the massacre in Columbine, Colorado, on April 20, 1999, when two heavily armed students, aged 17 and 18, killed 12 classmates and a teacher before killing themselves in the library.
The Texas incident coincides with the publication of a report that reveals that shootings multiplied in the United States during 2021. An FBI tally registered 61 such episodes last year, up from 40 in 2020. Last year, shootings left 103 people dead and a hundred more wounded.
These numbers do not include the perpetrators.
One of every five active-shooter situations ends in a mass shooting that takes the life of at least three people.
Only 10 days ago, a shooting in a supermarket, whose 18-year-old perpetrator was motivated by racism, left 10 dead and three wounded in Buffalo, New York.
Mass shootings, and especially those in schools, have revived the debate over controls on sale and usage of firearms.
“Enough is enough.
As a nation we have to have the courage to take action, ”said Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday, after saying that her heart was broken by the tragedy.
