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Texas school massacre: at least 19 children and one teacher shot dead

2022-05-25T05:12:06.077Z


Uvalde is the worst US massacre in almost a decade. Despite all the sadness: nothing should change. The gun lobbyists are too powerful for that – and the Republicans too cynical.


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Grief and shock: relatives in Uvalde

Photo: MARCO BELLO / REUTERS

The scenes are familiar for a long time, like a horror film that you have seen far too many times.

Nevertheless, they are flickering across the screens again.

fleeing victims.

crying families.

Police officers at the gruesome forensics.

The TV helicopters document everything mercilessly.

The most recent crime scene: an elementary school in Uvalde, a town in quiet west Texas with a population of around 25,000, almost three quarters of whom are Latinos.

A man shot dead at least 19 children and a teacher there on Tuesday.

The bloody deed shocked, but hardly surprised.

In the land of politically tolerated massacres, even young schoolchildren are no longer safe.

It is the worst crime of its kind since the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre in December 2012, which killed 20 children and six adults.

And it's already deadlier, according to preliminary figures, than the 2018 Parkland, Florida high school shooting, which killed 17 people, 14 of them teenagers.

"Again," says Joe Biden as he stands in front of the TV cameras in the White House late that evening, next to him First Lady Jill Biden, all in black.

"I was hoping that I wouldn't have to do that again." The US President is both moved and outraged at the same time, he sighs and clears his throat, struggling for words, despite the teleprompter.

"When in God's name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?" he asks.

He had just returned hours earlier from his trip to Southeast Asia, a trip he had to comfort the survivors of another racially motivated gun attack in a supermarket in upstate New York before beginning it.

"Enough is enough"

Biden has another personal connection.

After Sandy Hook, as Vice President of Barack Obama, he was entrusted with the gun issue.

Even then he was unsuccessful: A nationwide ban on assault rifles failed, also thanks to the resistance of Texas Republicans.

Since then, Biden says there have been more than 900 gun incidents in schools.

"Why?" he asks.

"Why are we willing to live with this carnage?"

"Enough is enough," says Vice President Kamala Harris in Washington.

»We must have the courage as a nation to act.«

According to the independent Gun Violence Archive, this is the 213th US mass shooting this year - nearly 10 a week.

27 of these occurred in schools, just seven fewer than all of last year.

According to slightly different FBI statistics, the number of US mass shootings doubled in the four years between 2017 and 2021.

From 2020 to 2021 alone, they would have increased by more than 50 percent.

Almost all of the perpetrators were men.

But this time the ritual is once again taking place with an oppressive business-as-usual routine.

One is appalled, cites statistics, determines the life stories of the victims and the perpetrator.

But will anything change?

"Nothing will be done," says Charles Ramsey, the former police chief of Philadelphia and Washington, on CNN tonight.

"Absolutely nothing."

Two guns for an 18th birthday

This is shown not least by the Texan governor Greg Abbott, who announced the first details of the killing spree.

The arch-conservative Republican speaks monotonously of a "senseless act," a "horrible tragedy that cannot be tolerated in the state of Texas."

But not even a year earlier, Abbott signed a new law that makes it

easier

to carry firearms in Texas - without a gun license, without any training.

That law, Democratic Congresswoman Veronica Escobar warned at the time, "will lead to more violence and loss."

She should be right.

The violence comes in the person of a teenager whom authorities identify as an 18-year-old who attended a nearby high school.

He wore a bulletproof vest and had two guns with him that he bought for his 18th birthday.

CNN later reported that he recently posted a photo of two semi-automatic rifles on social media.

Officials said he shot his grandmother in her house on Tuesday and then drove towards Robb Elementary School, an elementary school with almost 600 students: second graders, third graders, fourth graders, mostly Latinos between the ages of seven and ten.

After his pickup truck landed in a ditch, he broke into the school.

There he shot not only the children but also the teacher Eva Mireles, who was identified by her aunt in the »New York Times«: she was still trying to protect the students even after she died.

In a shootout with police officers, the attacker finally died himself.

His motives remain unclear.

Emptiness "thoughts and prayers"

"Rest assured," Police Chief Pete Adorondo tells the assembled reporters, "the intruder is dead." It's no consolation.

More than a dozen families are now having to identify their children who were killed by a shredding, high-caliber weapon, some of whom did not know during the night.

"Nobody tells me anything," the father of a fourth-grader told local TV station KSAT.

"I'm trying to find out where my baby is."

And yet, as always, many Republicans leave it at empty "thoughts and prayers," the usual symbolism of mourning and devotion.

He and his wife Heidi would "heartily support the affected children and their families in the area," tweeted Texas Senator Ted Cruz, an equally staunch opponent of gun control measures.

Democrats, on the other hand, are helpless.

"What are we doing here?" Senator Chris Murphy - in whose state Connecticut the Sandy Hook massacre occurred - calls out in a trembling voice in the Senate plenary session in Washington.

'It only happens in this country.

Nowhere else, only in the United States of America!

And it's a conscious choice.

It is our decision that this continues.«

“How many little children have to die before we finally say enough is enough?” asks commentator Ana Navarro-Cárdenas.

"It's no longer a question of

whether

you'll be hit by a mass shooting," author Kevin Kruse seconded.

"It's just a matter of

when

and

how

exactly you'll be hit by a mass shooting."

Gun violence has always been part of everyday American life.

But the most recent escalation and the laconic reactions to it seem increasingly grotesque.

US kindergartens hold regular lockdown drills.

Teachers arm themselves.

Even the toughest New York City subway passengers these days look anxiously over their shoulders.

“Has mass deaths become acceptable in America?” US news agency AP asked on Monday.

A rhetorical question.

Especially since the US arms trade flourished during the corona pandemic: According to research by the “New York Times”, Americans bought around two million new firearms in March alone – not to mention illegal weapons.

The school year would have ended on Thursday at Robb Elementary School, and the graduation ceremonies have now been cancelled.

Coincidentally, the annual meeting and arms fair of the US arms lobby NRA also begins on the same day – in Houston, Texas.

Among the keynote speakers: Senator Cruz and Governor Abbott.

Source: spiegel

All news articles on 2022-05-25

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