NRA opens gun convention in Texas on Friday after school massacre

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Bloomberg

President Biden laid flowers outside a Texas elementary school where an 18-year-old with an assault rifle killed 19 children and two teachers, paying his respects during a day-long visit to comfort families of the victims.

With gun control back on the agenda in Washington, Biden heard shouts of “do something” from a crowd as he left a Roman Catholic memorial service. “We will,” he replied, before getting into the presidential limousine to meet in private with grieving parents and relatives as well as survivors.

The president and first lady Jill Biden were joined on Sunday by Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican who regularly criticizes the Democratic president over immigration and is seeking re-election in November. Some onlookers booed and heckled Abbott, with one yelling, “We need change, governor, our children don’t deserve this.”

Annie Bennett, Globe Correspondent

A senior at Emerson College is selling shirts that mimic the one featured in the new season of “Stranger Things” and donating the thousands of dollars in profit to the victims of the Uvalde, Texas, shooting.

When Emerson students tuned into Netflix for the Season Four premiere of the hit show “Stranger Things,” they saw that Nancy Wheeler, a main character, wore an Emerson College t-shirt that featured the Boston institution’s logo from the 1980s, the time period when the show is set. A minor plot line involves Jonathan Byers, Wheeler’s boyfriend, who decides not to follow her to Emerson after high school. The previous seasons showed Wheeler as an aspiring journalist and Byers as a talented photographer, so Emerson, with its popular majors in journalism and film, is a perfect, albeit somewhat niche, school for the show’s writers to pick.

Reagan Allen, a 20-year-old Emerson student who wants to pursue design as a career, saw an opportunity. The logo in “Stranger Things” is long retired but Allen decided to recreate it and sell shirts like the one worn by Nancy Wheeler. Allen said she is a “big fan of ‘Stranger Things’” and only needed about 20 minutes on Adobe Illustrator to recreate the design.

Washington Post

Those who spend their lives in this remote town in the rolling scrublands of South Texas say there is something here they could never find elsewhere.

It is a togetherness, they say, born of innumerable ties of kinship and preserved through the easy rituals of rural life: baptisms and deer seasons, long lunches of carne guisada and summer evenings on the Frio River. Uvalde is a city of more than 15,000 where people still claim to know each other.

But since Tuesday, when one of Uvalde’s own killed 21 people – including 19 children – at Robb Elementary School, its residents have been forced to consider that they may not have known each other as well as they thought. The town they once called a haven from the pathologies of American life has found itself, and a nation seemingly inured to gun violence, on the brink of despair.

The most powerful sign yet of that wrenching transformation was the expected arrival on Sunday of President Joe Biden, who was headed to Uvalde to comfort the families of the dead and wounded. But his presence also would confirm that the town was something its residents never expected it to be: The site of the worst school shooting since the 2012 massacre in Newtown, Conn. Uvalde is a place no longer known for its village closeness but for nearly two dozen white crosses erected to honor the dead.

Biden’s appearance capped a week of jolting intrusions into the rhythms of daily life here, as residents have confronted not only the slaughter of children and their teachers but subsequent questions about whether some of those lives could have been saved by more prompt attempts to bring down the 18-year-old gunman. Uvalde’s residents, most of them Mexican American, have watched television news broadcasters describe their travails in French and Japanese and politicians resurrect familiar arguments about gun control. And they have watched their own understanding of their community begin to dissolve.

Associated Press

The Justice Department said Sunday it will review the law enforcement response to the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that left 19 students and two teachers dead.

The review comes amid mounting pressure and questions about the shifting and at times contradictory information about what happened in the shooting last Tuesday at Robb Elementary School and how police responded.

Justice Department spokesman Anthony Coley said the review would be conducted in a fair, impartial and independent manner and that the findings would be made public.

The review is being conducted at the request of Uvalde’s mayor, officials said.

New York Times

Congress failed to impose gun restrictions after the school massacres in Newtown, Connecticut, and Parkland, Florida, and there’s little confidence that 21 deaths at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, will change matters now.

But states aren’t waiting.

In New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy urged lawmakers to advance firearms safety measures, including raising the age to 21 for purchases of long guns and exposing gun-makers to lawsuits.

In New York — where an 18-year-old in Buffalo was charged two weeks ago with committing a racist mass shooting — Gov. Kathy Hochul said she would seek to ban people under 21 from purchasing AR-15-style rifles.

Associated Press

As the US mourns the victims of its latest mass shooting — 19 elementary school students and two teachers gunned down in Texas — Democratic governors are amplifying their calls for greater restrictions on guns.

Many Republican governors are emphasizing a different solution: more security at schools.

The divide among the nation’s governors mirrors a partisan split that has stymied action in Congress and many state capitols over how best to respond to a record-high number of gun-related deaths in the U.S. The political differences tap deep into the country’s roots, highlighting the tensions between life, liberty and the constitutional rights spelled out in the nation’s founding documents.

After the massacre Tuesday at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, The Associated Press asked governors across the U.S. whether they believed their states have an obligation to reduce mass shootings and violence committed with guns and, if so, how to do that.

About half the governor’s offices responded to the AP. There was agreement that they had a responsibility to try to do something. Democrats and Republicans alike mentioned the need to invest in mental health services and training to try to help people potentially prone to a violent outburst.

But the commonality generally ended after that.

Washington Post

Marty Daniel, founder of gunmaker Daniel Defense, didn’t offer an apology after four of his company’s firearms turned up in the arsenal used by a gunman to kill 58 people on the Las Vegas Strip in 2017. The company sent out a statement offering “Our deepest thoughts and prayers.”

And Daniel hasn’t apologized since a Daniel Defense DDM4 rifle was used to kill 19 children and two adults on Tuesday in Uvalde, Texas. The company again offered “our thoughts and our prayers.”

But four years ago, Daniel, 59, admitted he’d gone too far.

In the wake of a different mass shooting at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, where 26 people died, Daniel had backed a federal bill to strengthen the nation’s firearms background check system. The gunman in that tragedy had a record of domestic violence, which should have stopped him from buying his guns, including a Ruger semiautomatic rifle. But the charges hadn’t been logged in the correct database, so Congress passed a bill to fix the problem and then-President Donald Trump signed it into law.

Customers of Daniel Defense were outraged. They saw the bill as a Trojan horse for gun control. So Daniel backed down. In a Facebook post, he wrote that he could “no longer in good conscience put my support behind” the bill. And he vowed not to give an inch in the future.

“I stand with you and I am ready to continue to fight for our rights,” he said.

The U.S. firearms industry has long been buffeted by the nation’s polarizing debate over guns, alternately toasted and reviled, its leaders regarded as titans of industry or social pariahs. But Daniel, who built his family-owned company in Black Creek, Ga., from nothing into at Top 25 firearms manufacturer, is accustomed to being celebrated for the business he created.

Meanwhile, the U.S. gun industry – unique for its massive production of weapons for both military and civilian markets – is coming off its best years in history. Gunmakers sold an estimated 19.9 million firearms in 2021, second only to the 22.8 million sold in 2020, according to the research group Small Arms Analytics and Forecasting.

While some see guns as symbols of an inalienable constitutional right, others blame the gun industry for tens of thousands of violent deaths each year – homicides and suicides, family disputes turned deadly and horrific massacres at schools. The industry “exists right on the edge of morality, especially in the United States,” said Jurgen Brauer, an economist with Small Arms Analytics.

Washington Post

Several people were injured after false reports of an active shooter sent crowds scrambling after a boxing match at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn attended by celebrities such as Madonna and tennis star Naomi Osaka, authorities said.

A spokesman for the New York Police Department told The Washington Post that a “loud disturbance” after the world lightweight championship match caused people to start running just after midnight on Sunday, and that early reports swirling on social media of shots fired were “incorrect.”

Ten people suffered minor injuries in the crowd surge and were transported to hospitals for treatment, Detective Adam Navarro said.

Osaka wrote on Twitter early Sunday that she was inside the Barclays Center when she “heard shouting and saw people running,” before being told “that there was an active shooter and we had to huddle in a room and close the doors.” Osaka said she was “petrified.”

By The Associated Press

In the aftermath of the elementary school massacre in Uvalde, Texas, schools around the U.S. have brought in additional security staff and restricted visitors as they deal with a new rash of copycat threats.

For some families and educators it all has added to uneasiness in the wake of the deadliest school shooting since the 2012 attack at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Jake Green, 34, of Los Alamos, New Mexico, was jolted when he saw a plainclothes police officer for the first time while walking his 7-year-old daughter into school Friday morning. He grew up in Colorado, not far from where two Columbine High School students shot and killed 12 classmates and a teacher in 1999. Green remembers attending memorials and candlelight vigils as a fifth-grader, but he’s torn about whether having police at his daughter’s school is best.

By The Associated Press

President Biden and first lady Jill Biden are hoping to console a city stricken by grief and anger when they meet with families affected by the mass shooting at a Texas elementary school that killed 19 students and two teachers.

The visit to Uvalde on Sunday is Biden’s second trip in as many weeks to comfort a community in mourning after staggering loss. On May 17, he was in Buffalo, New York, to meet with victims’ families and condemn white supremacy after a shooter espousing the racist “replacement theory” killed 10 Black people at a supermarket.

The shootings in Texas and New York and their aftermath have put a spotlight on the nation’s entrenched divisions and its inability to forge consensus on actions to reduce gun violence.

“Evil came to that elementary school classroom in Texas, to that grocery store in New York, to far too many places where innocents have died,” Biden said Saturday in a commencement address at the University of Delaware. “We have to stand stronger. We must stand stronger. We cannot outlaw tragedy, I know, but we can make America safer.”

By New York Times

On Saturday night, the Uvalde community gathered again, this time in the parking lot behind Sacred Heart Catholic Church, remembering the teachers and students killed at Robb Elementary School and finding ways to navigate their grief together.

“We want you to know you are not alone,” Jaclyn Gonzales, a parishioner at the church who organized the vigil in roughly 24 hours, told the crowd of a few hundred.

By the time they assembled, filling the parking lot as they set out folding chairs, the sun that had scorched Uvalde on Saturday had settled, giving way to golden light and a pleasant breeze. Stuffed animals, rosaries and snacks were handed out. A memorial had been set up with photographs of the victims along with flowers and candles.

By New York Times

From the first minutes after a gunman began shooting, officers descended on Robb Elementary School. Local police from the town of Uvalde. County sheriff’s deputies. Agents from the federal Border Patrol.

But none of the growing number of agencies had control over the scores of officers at the scene on Tuesday of what would become the deadliest school shooting since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School a decade ago.

That fell to the chief of a small police department created only four years ago to help provide security at Uvalde’s eight schools. Its chief, Pedro Arredondo, had ordered the assembled officers to hold off on storming the two adjoining classrooms where the gunman had already fired more than 100 rounds at the walls, the door and the terrified fourth graders locked inside with him, the state police said.

As Uvalde lurched into a holiday weekend with roadside prayers, free public barbecues and an evening vigil Saturday, attention focused on the critical decision made by Arredondo, a veteran officer of several departments who won election to the City Council two weeks before the shooting.

The degree to which some law enforcement officers on the scene disagreed with the decision to hold back became more apparent Saturday, as more became known about their frustrations in the protracted chaos of Tuesday’s shooting.

By Lauren Booker, Globe Staff

Outside of the National Rifle Association’s convention, protesters advocated for gun control measures on Saturday in Houston. The convention continued its second day less than 300 miles away from where a mass school shooting happened in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday.

Some of the signs held by demonstrators read “The body count is on your hands” and “Americans support common-sense regulations of gun sales.”

Here are some images from the protest.

By The Washington Post

The final victim of the racist attack on a Buffalo supermarket has been laid to rest.

The solemn occasion on Saturday celebrating the life of Ruth E. Whitfield, the 86-year-old matriarch of her family, was the last funeral for the 10 victims of the killing from May 14, allegedly carried out by 18-year-old Payton Gendron. Authorities say he drove more than three hours and targeted the Tops grocery store in the heart of Buffalo with the intent of killing Black people.

The shooting, which horrified the nation just two weeks ago, seems to have been quickly overshadowed by another senseless mass shooting after the massacre in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday. But to the community here, the service also served as a call to action full of desperate pleas for lawmakers to put measures in place to prevent more gun violence.

By The Washington Post

Grieving parents and loved ones began making plans to bury the dead, while demands for accountability increased Saturday after officials acknowledged law enforcement officers improperly waited an excruciatingly long time before rushing the classroom where a gunman murdered 19 children and two teachers.

Rogelio M. Muñoz, a former city council member who left the council due to term limits, said in an interview on Saturday morning that what the community had learned so far about the police response is “very concerning.”

Texas authorities made clear on Friday that many things went wrong earlier in the week. Muñoz criticized the Texas Department of Public Safety for its shifting accounts of what occurred at the school on Tuesday, but he cautioned against making too many conclusions.

By Jess Bidgood, Globe Staff

In the 10 years that passed between the slaughter of 26 children and adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School and the mass murder in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday, the lack of action on gun control became a perennial source of frustration — and fear — for millions of Americans.

And while it is true that Congress has not passed major gun control legislation during that time, the idea that nothing has changed is not quite right. While many Democrat-led states have implemented new gun restrictions in recent years, Republican lawmakers in many states have loosened them — and a Supreme Court ruling expected in the next few weeks could accelerate that trend further by declaring unconstitutional the restrictive gun licensing requirements used in New York and some other blue states.

By New York Times

After one of its military-style rifles was used in the Texas elementary school shooting Tuesday, gun manufacturer Daniel Defense published a pop-up statement on its homepage sending “thoughts and prayers” to the community of Uvalde, Texas, and pledging to cooperate with authorities.

When the pop-up disappeared, a different message took center stage: a promotion for a sweepstakes to win $15,000 worth of guns or ammunition.

The Texas shooting, which left 19 schoolchildren and two teachers dead, has put a spotlight on Daniel Defense, a family-owned business in Georgia that has emerged as a trailblazer in an aggressive, boundary-pushing style of weapons marketing and sales.

Some of its advertisements invoke popular video games like “Call of Duty” and feature “Star Wars” characters and Santa Claus. The company was an early adopter of a direct-to-consumer business model that aimed to make buying military gear as simple as ordering from Amazon, enticing customers with “adventure now, pay later” installment plans that make expensive weaponry more affordable.

And the company’s founder and CEO, Marty Daniel, has fashioned himself as a provocateur who ridicules gun control proposals and uses publicity stunts to drum up sales.

“Daniel Defense is basically the poster child of this egregious, aggressive marketing,” said Ryan Busse, a former executive at gun company Kimber who is now an industry critic. “Marty Daniel burst in the door, a lot louder and more brazen than other gun-makers, much like Donald Trump did on the political scene.”

Daniel Defense’s strategy seems to have been effective. Its sales have soared, in part because of its successful targeting of young customers like Salvador Ramos, the gunman in Texas. Ramos, whom authorities killed Tuesday, was a “Call of Duty” video game enthusiast and appears to have bought his assault rifle directly from Daniel Defense less than a week after turning 18.

By Bloomberg News

President Joe Biden decried US gun violence after two mass shootings in less than two weeks, telling university graduates in his home state of Delaware “we must stand stronger” to make the country safer, including for children.

Biden addressed the University of Delaware commencement ceremony a day before he’s due to visit Uvalde, Texas, where a shooter who legally bought two assault rifles killed 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school on Tuesday. He also cited a May 14 mass shooting at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket, linking it to “white supremacy.”

By Annie Bennett, Globe Correspondent

The Uvalde shooter threatened violent acts before the school attack on Yubo, a social media platform that bills itself as an app that helps young people find friends all over the world. Yubo lets users swipe on different profiles, similar to a dating app, join communities based on interests, live-stream with multiple users, and other communication features.

Salvador Ramos, the shooter, used Yubo to show off a gun, as well as threaten school shootings and rapes, CNN reported. Amanda Robbins, 19, said she was threatened by Ramos during a live-stream, one of the app’s main features. A screenshot of what is believed to be Ramos’s profile shows that his self-written biography was “kids be scared irl” (in real life).

Ramos directly messaged a girl on the app on Valentine’s Day and told her to “go jump off a bridge,” after saying he would “worship” her. He also sent someone a picture of a receipt for a gun, according to the British network Sky News.

By text, he told a 15-year-old girl he had met on Yubo that he had just shot his grandmother and was going to “shoot up a (sic) elementary school.” A representative from Yubo said, “We are deeply saddened by this unspeakable loss and are fully cooperating with law enforcement on their investigation.”

Ramos threatened young women with sexual assault and posted photos of dead animals, according to the Washington Post, which interviewed four teens who were familiar with him on Yubo. In a live chat room, Ramos said, “everyone in this world deserves to get raped,” one teen reported.

The suspected shooter from the racist attack in Buffalo also reportedly used a private messaging app similar to Yubo before the mass murder.

By New York Times

Days after 19 children and two teachers were gunned down in Texas, politicians in Washington are tinkering around the edges of America’s gun laws.

A bipartisan group of senators is scheduled to hold virtual meetings early next week and has some proposals on the table: the expansion of background checks, legal changes to prevent the mentally ill and teenagers from getting guns, and new rules for gun trafficking.

By The Washington Post

Texas public safety officials on Friday said an incident commander in charge of police response at the May 24 school massacre made “the wrong decision” in deciding to stop treating a gunman who locked himself in adjoining classrooms with children as an active shooter and instead view him as a barricaded subject as his shots became less frequent.

The gunman was in the classrooms for more than an hour before officers entered and killed him, according to an account released Friday during a news conference outside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde. Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven C. McCraw revised authorities’ timeline of the shooting once again and said children called 911 from the classrooms as officers gathered in the hallway outside.

McCraw’s account — combined with video, interviews and emergency line audio — show how police responded as 18-year-old Salvador Ramos killed 19 children and two teachers.

See a timeline of what happened.

By Washington Post

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, was heckled at a Houston restaurant on Friday night, following his speech at the National Rifle Association’s convention in which he broadly rejected proposals for gun control, days after the Uvalde school shooting.

A video shared on social media shows Cruz standing stoically at Uptown Sushi in Houston as a man challenges him to support background checks on gun sales, which the Texas senator and many of his Republican colleagues have rejected.

“Why did you come here to the convention?” the man, later identified as Benjamin Hernandez, asked Cruz. “Why? When 19 children died!”

Washington Post

When Curtis Lavarello walks through the vendor hall at the huge school safety conference his organization sponsors this July, he will stop and marvel at just how useless some of the technology being marketed to schools is.

It won’t help prevent a shooting, he said, and could even hurt.

He cited a $400,000 system that fills hallways with smoke in hopes of stopping a shooter, noting that this same smoke would also obstruct law enforcement trying to intervene and children trying to escape.

“You’re going to see bizarre things you would never want to see in your child’s school,” said Lavarello, executive director of the School Safety Advocacy Council.

Experts call it “school security theater” – the idea that if a school system buys enough technology or infrastructure, it can keep its children safe from the horrors of a gunman.

In reality, many say, strong relationships between students and staff and robust staff training to influence what may seem like small decisions by school personnel may be at least as important, if not far more.

In the aftermath of another school shooting, school leaders, teachers, parents and others are debating, yet again, how the next one might be prevented. The national debate revolves around policy decisions: Should gun sales be restricted? Should teachers be armed?

For school systems, though, the questions often come down to what to buy, who to hire and how to prepare their staffs.

One security measure that enjoys broad consensus is keeping all external school doors locked, and forcing visitors to enter schools through a single entry point. This is a low-hanging-fruit solution that many districts have adopted.

But in Uvalde, Texas, officials say the gunman entered a back door that had been propped open by a teacher.

Better training might have led that teacher to think twice, experts say.

“We are throwing billions of dollars at security hardware, access control on doors, single point of entry, cameras, metal detectors in some places,” said Kenneth S. Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services. “Any security technology is only as good as the weakest human link behind it and we are not focusing on training our people.”

Washington Post

Noah Orona still had not cried.

The 10-year-old’s father, Oscar, couldn’t understand it. Just hours earlier, a stranger with a rifle had walked into the boy’s fourth-grade classroom at Robb Elementary School and opened fire, slaughtering his teachers and classmates in front of him. One round struck Noah in the shoulder blade, carving a 10-inch gash through his back before popping out and spraying his right arm with shrapnel. He’d laid amid the blood and bodies of his dead friends for an hour, maybe more, waiting for help to come.

But there he was, resting in his hospital bed, his brown eyes vacant, his voice muted.

“I think my clothes are ruined,” Noah lamented.

It was OK, his dad assured him. He would get new clothes.

“I don’t think I’m going to get to go back to school,” he said.

“Don’t worry about it,” his father insisted, squeezing his son’s left hand.

“I lost my glasses,” the boy continued. “I’m sorry.”

The children and adults who die in school shootings dominate headlines and consume the public’s attention. Body counts become synonymous with each event, dictating where they rank in the catalogue of these singularly American horrors: 10 at Santa Fe High, 13 at Columbine High, 17 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, 26 at Sandy Hook Elementary. And now, added to the list is 21 at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas.

Those tallies, however, do not begin to capture the true scope of this epidemic in the United States, where hundreds of thousands of children’s lives have been profoundly changed by school shootings. There are the more than 360 kids and adults, including Noah, who have been injured on K-12 campuses since 1999, according to a Washington Post database. And then there are the children who suffer no physical wounds at all, but are still haunted for years by what they saw or heard or lost.

New York Times

It did not go without notice when an 18-year-old who frequently sparred with classmates before dropping out of high school posted a picture of two long, black rifles on his Instagram story.

The image was startling enough that a freshman at Uvalde High School sent it to his older cousin Saturday morning and asked who would have let the former student obtain the weapons.

“He finna shoot something up,” replied the older cousin, Jeremiah Munoz, who had graduated from the high school and knew the former student.

The freshman noted that the week ahead was the last of the school year and said, in words that would become chillingly prescient: “I’m scared now to go to school.” He added a skull emoji.

Washington Post

He could be cryptic, demeaning and scary, sending angry messages and photos of guns. If they didn’t respond how he wanted, he sometimes threatened to rape or kidnap them — then laughed it off as some big joke.

But the girls and young women who talked with Salvador Ramos online in the months before he allegedly killed 19 children in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, rarely reported him. His threats seemed too vague, several said in interviews with The Washington Post. One teen who reported Ramos on the social app Yubo said nothing happened as a result.

Some also suspected this was just how teen boys talked on the Internet these days – a blend of rage and misogyny so predictable they could barely tell each one apart. One girl, discussing moments when he had been creepy and threatening, said that was just “how online is.”

By Bloomberg News

When Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed into law measures that would allow adults to carry handguns without a license in 2021, smiling at the dais a seat away from him was the head of the National Rifle Association.

On Wednesday, after the shooting deaths of at least 19 children and two adults at an elementary school in Uvalde, the Republican governor said more mental health support was needed for the town. He didn’t echo the calls of President Biden or Senate Democrats for gun-control measures.

By The Associated Press

For a brief moment in 2012, it seemed like a national stalemate over guns was breaking.

Adam Lanza, a 20-year-old gunman, had forced his way into a Connecticut elementary school and massacred 26 people, mostly children, with an AR-15-style rifle. Flags flew at half-staff. A sporting goods chain suspended sales of similar weapons. And longtime gun-rights supporters from both parties in Congress said they were willing to consider new legislation. The issue was complex, then-President Barack Obama said, but everyone was obligated to try.

Then, one week after the bloodshed at Sandy Hook elementary, the most powerful gun lobby in the US made its public position known and the effort unraveled.

By The New York Times

Responding to a call of a mass shooting, police officers in the United States are trained, above all else, to stop the gunman. Act with urgency. Defend innocent lives.

As new questions emerged Friday about the police response to the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, experts described those principles as the central tenets for handling such circumstances — a set of protocols that have evolved significantly over the past two decades but are widely accepted by law enforcement agencies in the United States.

By Bloomberg News

Texas police accused of bungling the response to a mass shooter in an Uvalde school where 19 children and two teachers were killed aren’t likely to be held liable in a civil court, benefiting from broad immunity granted government entities.

The law enforcement response is under intense scrutiny. According to the timeline provided by Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, 19 officers were in the school for almost an hour before police entered the classroom where the gunman was and killed him. Students had been calling 911, begging for help while the shooter was still active.

“I certainly think the police activity, or non activity, was awful but I don’t think there is any recourse in suing the police officers,” David Crump, law professor at University of Houston, said in an interview Friday.

According to the Doctrine of Sovereign Immunity a government isn’t liable to its citizens for their injuries. The Texas Torts Claims Act grants permission to sue in certain limited circumstances, but according to legal experts interviewed, those wouldn’t apply in the Uvalde school shooting case.

“The police were doing what police do,” Dick DeGuerin, a criminal defense attorney in Houston, said in an interview. “They may have been terribly negligent in how they did it. But it’s got to be more than negligence, it’s got to be a policy fault” for civil liability to stick in court.

By The Washington Post

Schools across the country are facing a wave of violent threats in the days following the devastating rampage at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas that left 21 people, including 19 students, dead.

Experts say that while school threats are a daily occurrence, schools are now on edge as administrators assess threats made on social media and in classrooms, resulting in heightened security and lockdowns.

By Katie McInerney, Globe Staff

Like the Heat did ahead of Game 5 of the NBA’s Eastern Conference finals, the Celtics on Friday urged fans to call their senators in a video message shown before Game 6 in Boston in response to the deadly massacre in Uvalde, Texas, earlier this week.

The Celtics also held a moment of silence for the victims. Two adults and 19 children were killed.

By The Associated Press

San Francisco Giants manager Gabe Kapler said Friday he will refuse to take the field for the national anthem in a protest over the nation’s political direction following this week’s school shooting in Texas.

“I don’t plan on coming out for the anthem going forward until I feel better about the direction of our country,” Kapler said before a series opener at Cincinnati. “I don’t expect it to move the needle necessarily. It’s just something that I feel strongly enough about to take that step.”

By The Associated Press

Speakers at the National Rifle Association annual meeting assailed a Chicago gun ban that doesn’t exist, ignored security upgrades at the Texas school where children were slaughtered and roundly distorted national gun and crime statistics as they pushed back against any tightening of gun laws.

Take a look at the fact check of some of the claims.

By The Associated Press

The police official blamed for not sending officers in more quickly to stop the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting is the chief of the school system’s small police force, a unit dedicated ordinarily to building relationships with students and responding to the occasional fight.

Preparing for mass shootings is a small part of what school police officers do, but local experts say the preparation for officers assigned to schools in Texas — including mandatory active shooter training — provides them with as solid a foundation as any.

“The tactical, conceptual mindset is definitely there in Texas,” said Joe McKenna, deputy superintendent for the Comal school district in Texas and a former assistant director at the state’s school safety center.

By The Associated Press

A young survivor of the massacre at a Texas elementary school said she covered herself with a friend’s blood and pretended to be dead while she waited for help to arrive.

Miah Cerrillo, 11, told CNN that she and a friend called 911 from her dead teacher’s phone Tuesday and waited for what felt like, to her, three hours for officers to arrive at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde.

The 18-year-old shooter, Salvador Ramos, was inside the school for more than an hour before he was shot to death by Border Patrol tactical officers. That’s according to top law enforcement officials who provided new details Thursday of a confusing and sometimes contradictory timeline that has angered and frustrated the parents and onlookers who had urged police to charge into the school.

Miah said that after the shooter moved from one room into the adjacent one she could hear screams and a lot more gunfire, and that the gunman then started blaring music.

The children who survived the attack, which killed 19 schoolchildren and two teachers, described a festive, end-of-the-school-year day that quickly turned to terror.

Samuel Salinas, 10, told ABC’s ” Good Morning America ” that he and other classmates pretended to be dead after Ramos opened fire on the class. Samuel was struck by shrapnel in his thigh.

“He shot the teacher and then he shot the kids,” said Samuel, who was in Irma Garcia’s class. Garcia died in the attack and her husband, Joe Garcia, died Thursday of an apparent heart attack.

Gemma Lopez, 10, was in a classroom down the hall when Ramos entered the building. She told “Good Morning America” that a bullet came through her classroom wall before any lockdown was called.

Her best friend, Amerie Garza, died in the rampage.

By The Associated Press

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said Friday that he was “misled” about the police response to the shooting at the elementary school in Uvalde, and he’s “livid.”

In his earlier statements, the governor told a news conference, he was repeating what he had been told. “The information that I was given turned out, in part, to be inaccurate,” he said.

Abbott said exactly what happened needs to be “thoroughly, exhaustively” investigated.

By The Associated Press

Texas authorities said Friday that the gunman who killed 19 children and two teachers inside an elementary school discussed his interest in buying a gun in private online conversations, but backed away from earlier descriptions that he made public threats less than an hour before the attack.

Gov. Greg Abbott said Wednesday, a day after the shooting, that “the only information that was known in advance was posted by the gunman on Facebook approximately 30 minutes before reaching the school.” Abbott’s claim prompted questions about whether technology companies could have provided advance warning.

But on Friday, the head of the Texas Department of Public Safety said the gunman made the threatening comments in a private message.

“I want to correct something that was said early on in the investigation, that he posted on Facebook publicly that he was going to kill, that he was going to shoot his grandmother and secondly after that that he was going to, that he had shot her and that third he was going to go shoot up a school,” Steven McCraw said. “That did not happen.”

Facebook had already noted on Wednesday that the threats were in direct text messages, not a public post.

McCraw did not say to whom 18-year-old Salvador Ramos sent the messages.

McCraw also told reporters Friday that Ramos asked his sister to help him buy a gun in September 2021, but that she “flatly refused.” He did not say how authorities learned of that request.

McCraw shared information from four more of Ramos’ social media private messages.

In a Feb. 28 four-person chat, McCraw said “Ramos being a school shooter” was discussed.

In a March 1 four-person chat, he said Ramos discussed buying a gun.

In a March 3 four-person chat, another person said “word on the street is that you’re buying a gun.” McCraw said Ramos replied “Just bought something.”

On March 14, McCraw said Ramos shared the words “10 more days” in a social media post. Another user asked “Are you going to shoot up a school or something?” McCraw said.

He said Ramos replied “no and stop asking dumb questions and you’ll see.”

McCraw did not identify any of the other people included in those chat groups.

The department did not immediately respond to a request Friday for more detail, including screenshots of the communications mentioned during the news conference.

By The Associated Press

According to the new timeline provided by officials, After crashing his truck, the gunman fired on two people coming out of a nearby funeral home, officials said.

Contrary to earlier statements by officials, a school district police officer was not inside the school when the gunman arrived. When that officer did respond, he unknowingly drove past the gunman, who was crouched behind a car parked outside and firing at the building, McCraw said.

At 11:33 p.m., the gunman entered the school through a rear door that had been propped open and fired more than 100 rounds into a pair of classrooms, McCraw said.

DPS spokesman Travis Considine said investigators haven’t determined why the door was propped open.

By Bloomberg News

Republican politicians from Senator Ted Cruz to Texas Governor Greg Abbott have been quick to blame mental illness following a deadly school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that killed 19 children and two teachers.

The problem with that thinking is that the evidence doesn’t support it — even if common sense suggests a mass shooting, especially of children, is not the act of a person who is mentally well.

While reporting from Texas following the May 24 shooting makes clear the Uvalde gunman, Salvador Ramos, was a deeply troubled individual, state officials have said he had no documented mental health issues. Research shows that only a very small percentage of violent behavior is connected to mental illness.

“If we magically cured all these serious mental illnesses tomorrow, which would be wonderful — imagine the alleviation of suffering — our violence problem would go down by about 4%,” said Jeffrey Swanson, a professor in psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke Unversity.

Firearm violence is a greater risk for young males, individuals with a violent childhood and those who abuse drugs and alcohol. While mental illness can contribute to gun violence, the vast majority of those suffering from mental illness will never engage in violent acts, Swanson said.

Attributing school shootings to mental illness, meanwhile, increases the stigma around such conditions, which include depression, schizophrenia and psychosis, according to experts.

By The New York Times

During an active shooting situation, American law enforcement officers are taught that their response should focus on two principles: first “stop the killing” and then “stop the dying,” according to a training program based in Texas that is considered the national standard. The response should center on neutralizing the gunman, the program says, and then on getting medical aid to anyone who has been injured.

As more questions emerged Friday about the police response to the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, experts described those principles as the central tenets for handling such circumstances — a set of protocols that have evolved significantly over the past two decades but are widely accepted by law enforcement agencies in the United States.

Officers are taught to enter quickly in small formations — or even with one or two officers — and act to contain and neutralize any gunman. “DO NOT waste valuable time searching areas where you know there is no violence occurring,” officers are told in a training bulletin from the Louisville Metro Police Department in Kentucky. “Go straight to the source of the violence.”

Rescues, the thinking goes, should begin after the gunman is stopped or if there are additional officers to carry them out.

If the gunfire stops, the situation may change to a barricade or hostage scenario, which calls for a different, slower approach, experts say. The priority becomes making contact with the aggressor and starting negotiations. Although hostage situations can require complex judgment calls — particularly if trapped victims are wounded and need treatment — law enforcement experts say negotiating has repeatedly saved lives.

Experts said that situations often are fluid and may transition repeatedly from an active shooting scenario to a hostage situation. That distinction appeared to be at issue in the questions emerging about the police handling of the shootings in Uvalde.

By John R. Ellement, Globe Staff

Activists associated with March for Our Lives were working Friday to finalize plans for a nationwide march against gun violence set for June 11. Some 100 communities, including Boston, are currently expected to participate along with a march in Washington, D.C., according to the organization.

By the New York Times

Students in classrooms at Robb Elementary School called 911 multiple times during Tuesday’s mass shooting there, according to Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety.

Reporter Mike Baker of the New York Times outlined the timeline:

By Bloomberg News

The maker of the gun used to kill 19 children and two teachers in Texas this week won’t attend the National Rifle Association’s meeting Friday in Houston.

Daniel Defense is skipping the gathering “due to the horrifying tragedy in Uvalde, Texas, where one of our products was criminally misused,” Steve Reed, a spokesman for the Georgia-based company, said in an email. “We believe this week is not the appropriate time to be promoting our products in Texas at the NRA meeting.”

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott also dropped plans to address the gun lobby’s annual meeting in person after the worst US school shooting in almost a decade.

By The Washington Post

Texas’s two senators – Ted Cruz and John Cornyn – have similar positions on gun legislation. Both have received “A+” ratings from the National Rifle Association’s political arm. Both have opposed efforts to tighten restrictions on firearms, including the banning of assault rifles and the limiting of high-capacity magazine sales.

But in the wake of Tuesday’s mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas – the second-deadliest school shooting in American history – Cornyn and Cruz have struck markedly different tones while adopting contrasting roles.

Cornyn, 70, the state’s senior senator, had been scheduled to speak at Friday’s NRA annual meeting in Houston. He pulled out ahead of the shooting for personal reasons requiring him to be in Washington, a spokesperson said.

Cruz, 51, is going ahead with plans to speak at the event Friday. In an interview with a local CBS reporter in Uvalde this week, Cruz said he will attend because Democrats and the press are “trying to demonize law-abiding gun owners” and “demonize the NRA.”

One day earlier, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., had tapped Cornyn to negotiate with Democrats on possible but long-shot gun legislation, deputizing the former member of Senate GOP leadership.

“Maybe this will provide some impetus for [compromise],” Cornyn told reporters at the Capitol Thursday. “This is horrible. Hard to imagine anything that could be worse than parents worrying about the safety of their kids going to school.”

Cruz, meanwhile, was making international headlines for storming away from a British journalist after being asked why mass shootings take place “only in America.” The exchange took place as Cruz was attending a vigil in Texas for the 19 children and two adults killed in the massacre.

Pressed on restrictions on guns, Cruz said this week, “That doesn’t work. It’s not effective. It doesn’t prevent crime.”

After mass shootings in previous years, both Cruz and Cornyn have issued statements that have almost always omitted the mention of guns altogether. But Cornyn – a former Texas attorney general and state Supreme Court justice who has long courted and enjoyed strong support from gun rights organizations – has in the past been open to working across the aisle on certain gun-related legislation.

By The Associated Press

Robb Elementary School had measures in place to prevent this kind of violence. A fence lined the school property. Teachers were ordered to keep classroom doors closed and locked. Students faced regular lockdown and evacuation drills.

But when an 18-year-old man arrived Tuesday at the school in Uvalde, Texas, intent on killing children, none of it stopped him.

Security failures allowed the shooter to massacre 19 students and two teachers, school safety experts say. The shooting already has led to calls to fortify schools further, on top of millions spent on equipment and other measures following earlier shootings. But more security offers drawbacks, with no guarantee of an end to mass violence. In the worst case, as in Uvalde, it could backfire.

“You can do the best job you can to prevent a school crisis, but we cannot read the minds of all the criminals who are out there,” said Ronald Stephens, executive director of the National School Safety Center, a nonprofit that works with schools across the country. “We cannot prevent all crime.”

According to a district safety plan, Uvalde schools had a wide range of measures in place to prevent violence. The district had four police officers and four support counselors, according to the plan, which appears to be dated from the 2019-20 school year. The district had software to monitor social media for threats and software to screen school visitors.

Yet when the gunman arrived at the school, he hopped its fence and easily entered through an unlocked back door, police said. Behind the locked door of a fourth-grade classroom, he gunned down children and teachers.

Amid the attack, nearly 20 officers stood in a hallway because the on-site commander believed the gunman was barricaded in the classroom and children were not at risk, Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw said at a Friday news conference, saying “it was the wrong decision.”

The case underscores that even the strongest security plans can be undermined by a seemingly simple lapse, said Curtis Lavarello, executive director of the School Safety Advocacy Council, which provides training on school safety. The Texas school appeared to be doing many things right, he said, but none of that mattered once the gunman was able to walk unobstructed into the building and into a classroom.

By The Associated Press

The National Rifle Association began its annual convention in Houston on Friday, three days after a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers at an elementary school on the other side of the state, renewing the national debate over gun violence.

Former President Donald Trump and other Republican leaders were scheduled to speak at the event. Leaders of the gun rights lobbying group planned to “reflect on” — and deflect any blame for — the school shooting in Uvalde. Protesters angry about gun violence demonstrated outside, including some holding crosses with photos of the Uvalde shooting victims.

By The Associated Press

Nearly 20 officers were in a hallway outside of the classrooms at a Texas elementary school for more than 45 minutes before agents used a master key to open a door and confront a gunman, authorities said Friday.

Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw said U.S. Border Patrol agents eventually used a master key to open the locked door of the classroom where they confronted and killed Ramos, who killed 19 students and two teachers.

By The Associated Press

Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw said on Friday that there was a barrage of gunfire shortly after the gunman entered the classroom where he was killed but that shots were “sporadic” for much of the 48 minutes while officers waited outside the hallway. He said investigators do not know if or how many children died during those 48 minutes.

Throughout the attack, teachers and children repeatedly called 911 asking for help, including a girl who pleaded: “Please send the police now,” McCraw said.

By The Associated Press

Nearly 20 officers were in a hallway outside of the classrooms at a Texas elementary school for more than 45 minutes before agents used a master key to open a door and confront a gunman, authorities said Friday.

The on-site commander believed the gunman was barricaded in a classroom at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde during Tuesday’s attack and that the children were not at risk, Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw said at a news conference.

”Of course it was not the right decision. It was the wrong decision,” McCraw said.

Children repeatedly called 911 asking for help, including one who pleaded: “Please send the police now.”

U.S. Border Patrol agents eventually used a master key to open the locked door of the classroom where they confronted and killed the gunman, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, McCraw said.

By Ryan Huddle and Christina Prignano, Globe Staff

The United States is an outlier among other high-income countries when it comes to firearm deaths.

Data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation show that among countries defined as “high income” by the World Bank, the United States fares poorly, but it does even worse among high-income countries with large populations. The data show the US has a death rate from interpersonal firearm violence that is about twice as high as Chile, which has the second-highest rate.

Officials with the Texas Department of Public Safety are providing an update Friday on the elementary school massacre. Watch it live.

By The Associated Press

What happened in the gunman’s final 90 minutes has fueled mounting public anger and scrutiny over law enforcement’s response to Tuesday’s rampage.

After crashing his truck, the gunman fired on two people coming out of a nearby funeral home, Victor Escalon, regional director for the Texas Department of Public Safety, said. He then entered the school “unobstructed” through an apparently unlocked door at about 11:40 a.m.

But the first police officers did not arrive on the scene until 12 minutes after the crash and did not enter the school to pursue the shooter until four minutes after that. Inside, they were driven back by gunfire from the gunman and took cover, Escalon said.

The gunman was still inside at 12:10 p.m. when the first U.S. Marshals Service deputies arrived. They had raced to the school from nearly 70 miles away in the border town of Del Rio, the agency said in a tweet Friday.

By The Associated Press

A young survivor of the massacre at a Texas elementary school said she covered herself with a friend’s blood and pretended to be dead while she waited for help to arrive.

Miah Cerrillo, 11, told CNN that she and a friend called 911 from her dead teacher’s phone Tuesday and waited for what felt like, to her, three hours for officers to arrive at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde.

The 18-year-old shooter, Salvador Ramos, was inside the school for more than an hour before he was shot to death by Border Patrol tactical officers. That’s according to top law enforcement officials who provided new details Thursday of a confusing and sometimes contradictory timeline that has angered and frustrated the parents and onlookers who had urged police to charge into the school.

The children who survived the attack, which killed 19 schoolchildren and two teachers, described a festive, end-of-the-school-year day that quickly turned to terror.

Samuel Salinas, 10, told ABC’s ” Good Morning America ” that he and other classmates pretended to be dead after Ramos opened fire on the class. Samuel was struck by shrapnel in his thigh.

“He shot the teacher and then he shot the kids,” said Samuel, who was in Irma Garcia’s class. Garcia died in the attack and her husband, Joe Garcia, died Thursday of an apparent heart attack.

Gemma Lopez, 10, was in a classroom down the hall when Ramos entered the building. She told “Good Morning America” that a bullet came through her classroom wall before any lockdown was called.

Her best friend, Amerie Garza, died in the rampage.

By The Washington Post

In the wake of two massacres that have killed 31 people in less than two weeks, the chairwoman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has launched an investigation into gun manufacturers.

Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., contacted five gunmakers on Thursday, requesting information regarding the manufacturing, sale, and marketing of deadly weapons used in mass shootings. Both gunmen responsible for the carnage in Buffalo and Uvalde, Tex., used AR-15-style rifles, purchased legally at the age of 18.

The companies being investigated, according to letters provided to The Washington Post, include Daniel Defense, the maker of the DDM4 rifle the gunman used to kill 19 children and two adults at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, and Bushmaster, the maker of the Bushmaster XM-15 semiautomatic rifle that the suspected Buffalo shooter said he illegally modified and then used to kill 10 people at a Tops Friendly Markets store.

In a letter to Marty Daniel, the CEO of Daniel Defense, Maloney cites online advertising posted by the company on May 16 of a toddler holding an AR-15-style rifle. The picture featured “a caption quoting a biblical proverb to ‘Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it,’ ” Maloney writes. Daniel Defense protected its tweets from public view shortly after the shooting.

“Your company’s own weapons of war have been repeatedly used to carry out horrific and deadly attacks,” Maloney says in the letter. “In addition to this week’s horrific shooting in Texas, four Daniel Defense AR-15-style rifles were found in the hotel room of the 2017 Las Vegas shooter. This shooter used more than a dozen assault weapons to massacre 60 people and wound more than 400 others. One of these Daniel Defense weapons was found with a bump stock and a 100-round magazine.”

The gunman who murdered 26 people in the attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 was also carried out with a Bushmaster XM-15.

By The Associated Press

Tuesday should have been a day of triumph for 10-year-old Maite Rodriguez. Instead, it was the day she died.

Maite was among 19 grade school students who, along with two teachers, were shot to death at Robb Elementary School in the southwestern Texas town of Uvalde. The 18-year-old gunman also died.

Maite liked and excelled at physical education — after her death, her teacher texted her mother that she was very competitive at kickball and ran faster than all the boys.

She had always been a straight-A student until the COVID-19 pandemic forced the school to cancel in-person classes. Zoom didn’t work well for Maite — she got all Fs.

But with school back in session, Maite rebounded — all As and Bs. She was among the honor roll students recognized at an assembly Tuesday morning.

“She worked hard, I only encouraged her,” her mother, Ana Rodríguez, said in an interview Thursday at her dining room table, which displayed a bouquet of red roses, the honor roll certificate and photos of Maite.

Hours later, Maite was gone. Her mother described her as “focused, competitive, smart, bright, beautiful, happy.”

As a kindergartner, Maite said she wanted to be a marine biologist and held firmly to that goal. She researched a program at Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi and told her mother she was set on studying there.

“She was just so driven. She was definitely special. She was going to be something, she was going to be something very, very special,” Rodríguez said.

By Jenna Russell and Adria Watson, Globe Staff

Nearly a decade has passed since Newtown became known around the world for an act of unthinkable violence in an elementary school. But the years collapsed in an instant on Tuesday, as news filtered in about a school 2,000 miles away in Uvalde, Texas, another small, close-knit community thrust into trauma and horror without warning.

At once, the worst hours of their lives came flooding back to Newtown parents whose first-graders were among the 20 children killed in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School. As night fell Tuesday and dawn arrived on Wednesday, they thought of the parents in Texas and the gut-wrenching milestones they faced: Gathering their surviving children to explain why the youngest wasn’t coming home. Waking up certain it must have been a nightmare — only to realize it was real, and always will be.

By The Associated Press

The National Rifle Association begins its annual convention in Houston on Friday, and leaders of the powerful gun-rights lobbying group are gearing up to “reflect on” — and deflect any blame for — the deadly shooting earlier this week of 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, was listed as a speaker, and former president Donald Trump said Wednesday that he still intends to attend. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican, also is sticking to her plans to speak Friday at the NRA event.

Though personal firearms are allowed at the convention, the NRA said guns would not be permitted during the session featuring Trump because of Secret Service security protocols.

By The New York Times

After gym class, an awards ceremony and watching “The Jungle Cruise,” Gemma Lopez was with her fourth grade classmates in Room 108, finishing up work and playing around — “doing whatever we do,” as she put it. Then she heard loud popping in the distance. She thought it was firecrackers. But she saw police officers outside her window, and the popping grew louder.

“Everyone was scared and everything, and I told them to be quiet,” Gemma, 10, said. One of her classmates thought it might be a prank and laughed. Gemma said she hushed her.

For years up to that point, she had been drilled on what to do in case a shooter came into her school. “We practice like a lot, since pre-K or kindergarten,” she said. She flipped off the lights in the room, just as she had been taught, she said, and huddled under a big table in the room.

Gemma said that she doesn’t get frightened easily. “I think I get it from my tío” she said. “Because my tío doesn’t get scared at all.” She was calmer than some of her classmates, she said.

But she had never heard gunfire like this before. Her only previous encounter with a gun in real life was when she was 5, her uncle let her fire his BB gun.

“I heard a lot more of the gunshots, and then I was crying a little bit,” she recalled, “and my best friend Sophie was also crying right next to me.”

Eventually, a police officer came to the room and asked if anyone had been hurt. Then, he told the class to hurry out of the school to a funeral home across the street.

“I think it’s the fastest I’ve run in my entire life,” Gemma said. Once she got to the funeral home, she said: “I felt a lot more safer, but I couldn’t stop crying. I thought the man would come again — to the funeral home this time.”

By The Washington Post

Singer-songwriter Don McLean has announced that he’s dropping out from performing at the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting this weekend in Houston, saying it would be “disrespectful and hurtful” to perform days after 19 children and two adults were killed in a mass shooting in the state.

McLean, who is best known for his legendary 1971 folk rock anthem “American Pie,” was scheduled to perform Saturday night during the NRA’s Grand Ole Night of Freedom concert. But those plans changed when a gunman, identified by police as Salvador Rolando Ramos, 18, entered Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and started firing on children in the worst mass shooting at an American school in nearly a decade.

“In light of the recent events in Texas, I have decided it would be disrespectful and hurtful for me to perform for the NRA at their convention in Houston this week,” McLean, 76, said in a statement. “I’m sure all the folks planning to attend this event are shocked and sickened by these events as well. After all, we are all Americans.”

The news was first reported by the Portland Press Herald in Maine.

McLean is among a few performers who have announced they will no longer perform at this weekend’s convention. Country and gospel singer Larry Gatlin and Larry Stewart of the country band Restless Heart also said Thursday they were dropping out in response to the shooting at Robb Elementary.

McLean’s exit comes as gunmaker Daniel Defense, which manufactured the rifle used by Ramos in Tuesday’s massacre, appears to have also pulled out of the NRA convention. The NRA’s exhibitor list no longer includes Daniel Defense among the hundreds of gunmakers, firearm parts manufacturers and taxidermists appearing at the convention hall. The booth once claimed by Daniel Defense is now listed only as “the NRA.”

By Shannon Larson, Globe Staff

Days after a gunman entered Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and opened fire, killing 19 children and two teachers, many details remain unclear about the timeline of events and how authorities responded.

State law enforcement officials provided conflicting versions of how the shooter was able to enter the building on Tuesday and the police response to the massacre during a press briefing held on Thursday — revising key information.

Many questions remain unanswered, with authorities coming under fire from parents who alleged the police did not enter the building immediately. Here is a look and what we know — and don’t yet know — about how law enforcement handled the attack.

By Sarah Ryley, Globe Staff

Supporters of a bill to prohibit gunmakers in the state from manufacturing assault weapons for civilian use are making a renewed push to get the ban enacted in the wake of the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting that left 19 children and two teachers dead.

Massachusetts has among the strictest gun laws in the nation, yet until recently, was also its top gun manufacturer, producing 1.8 million guns in 2018, according to data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. That includes an unknown number of assault rifles, even though Massachusetts law has long prohibited them from being owned or sold in the state.

Proponents of the ban say that Massachusetts companies should not be making assault weapons for civilian use in other states either.

By The Washington Post

The owners of Daniel Defense, the manufacturer of the rifle apparently used in the massacre of 21 people at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, are deep-pocketed Republican donors, giving to candidates and committees at the federal and state level aligned against limits on access to assault rifles and other semiautomatic weapons.

The owners of the Georgia-based company have donated more than $70,000 directly to GOP candidates for federal office this election cycle, according to a review of filings with the Federal Election Commission. Daniel Defense itself gave $100,000 last year to a PAC backing incumbent Republican senators.

By John Hancock and Christina Prignano, Globe Staff

The National Rifle Association declared bankruptcy last year as it faced allegations that its executives used tens of millions of dollars for personal expenditures and otherwise mismanaged money. But that hasn’t stopped the gun rights organization from funding the campaigns of political candidates.

Since 2010, the NRA has spent more than $148 million on federal elections, nearly all of which has gone toward supporting Republican candidates in one way or another. About $91 million was spent trying to defeat candidates, according to OpenSecrets, a campaign finance watchdog.

By The Washington Post

“When we passed the assault weapons ban, mass shootings went down. When the law expired, mass shootings tripled.” — President Biden, addressing the mass shooting in Uvalde, Tex., May 24

“There are, quote, ‘real’ gun laws in New York. There are ‘real’ gun laws in California. I hate to say this, but there are more people who were shot every weekend in Chicago than there are in schools in Texas.” — Tex. Gov. Greg Abbott, R, on the mass shooting, May 25

– – –

Democrats and Republicans will forever argue about the effectiveness of gun laws to prevent mass shootings. But what does the latest academic research show?

By The Associated Press

The National Rifle Association begins its annual convention in Houston on Friday, and leaders of the powerful gun-rights lobbying group are gearing up to “reflect on” — and deflect any blame for — the deadly shooting earlier this week of 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.

Former president Donald Trump and other leading Republicans are scheduled to address the three-day firearms marketing and advocacy event, which is expected to draw protesters fed up with gun violence.

Some scheduled speakers and performers have backed out, including two Texas lawmakers and “American Pie” singer Don McLean, who said “it would be disrespectful” to go ahead with his act in the aftermath of the country’s latest mass shooting.

By Bloomberg

Texas Governor Greg Abbott dropped plans to address the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting in person, just days after the worst US school shooting in almost a decade, the Dallas Morning News reported.

Abbott, the pro-gun Republican leader of the second-largest US state, was scheduled to be among GOP luminaries speaking ahead of former president Donald Trump’s appearance at the NRA gathering in Houston on Friday. The governor, who faces re-election in November, is the highest-ranking Republican to pull out of the NRA event since the massacre.

Abbott plans to be at the site of this week’s massacre that killed 19 children and two adults in Uvalde, Texas, on Friday afternoon for a media briefing, according to a tweet from the governor’s office. Uvalde is some 277 miles (446 kilometers) from Houston.

The governor will deliver a pre-recorded message to the NRA event in lieu of an in-person address, the newspaper reported. Abbott’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

By The Associated Press

Monday morning at Robb Elementary School, a line of graduating high school seniors in maroon caps and gowns paid a visit to the children to offer smiles, high fives and encouragement that one day, if they studied hard enough, they could graduate too.

Notably missing from those Uvalde High School seniors was 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, who had frequently skipped class and was not set to graduate. The next day, he shot his grandmother and then went to the school alone with an AR-style rifle and fatally shot 19 children and two teachers for reasons authorities are still at a loss to explain.

State police say Ramos had no criminal record, no history of mental illness treatment and no obvious signs he was a danger to this tight-knit, largely Latino community 85 miles west of San Antonio.

But those who knew him saw increasing signs of isolation, outbursts and aggression.

By The Washington Post

Since a gunman opened fire at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday, killing 19 children and two teachers, authorities have provided an incomplete – and evolving – explanation of what happened.

Officials, who are facing mounting questions about the police response to the massacre, have offered varied timelines and explanations of the massacre and law enforcement’s response. They have also made sometimes inconsistent or contradictory announcements about key details, such as how the shooter entered the school or how long he was inside. They have even withdrawn some claims outright.

While it is common for details to shift following mass attacks, some of the changes in Uvalde made during news briefings and interviews have been striking. Here is a brief rundown of some ways the official accounts have differed.

By The New York Times

The grief of families in Uvalde was compounded by anger and frustration Thursday as police leaders struggled to answer questions about the horrific hour it took to halt a gunman who opened fire on students and teachers inside Robb Elementary School.

No school police officer confronted the gunman before he went into the school, a state police spokesperson said Thursday, contradicting earlier reports of an encounter outside and suggesting a shortfall in the response.

“He walked in unobstructed initially,” Victor Escalon, a regional director for the state’s Department of Public Safety, said at a news conference. “He was not confronted by anybody.”

By The Associated Press

Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, made a visit to a memorial site for the victims involved in the deadly elementary school shooting in Texas.

Meghan placed white flowers tied with a purple ribbon at a memorial outside the Uvalde County Courthouse on Thursday. She paid her respects after a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers Tuesday at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde.

The Duchess of Sussex lives in California with her husband Prince Harry and their two children. She took the trip to Texas in a personal capacity as a mother to offer her condolences and support in person to a “community experiencing unimaginable grief,” according to her spokesperson.

Meghan left the flowers at the memorial and stood with her arms crossed while she looked at the memorials.

By New York Times

After the deadliest school shooting in a decade, a small group of Republican and Democratic senators have begun an urgent and uphill effort to strike a compromise on new gun laws, voicing hope that a wave of collective outrage at the slaughter of 19 children and two teachers could finally end a decade of congressional paralysis.

Members of the bipartisan group emerged from a private meeting Thursday determined to work quickly to try to reach a deal on modest steps to limit access to guns. They agreed to spend the Memorial Day recess examining a number of proposals, including ways to incentivize states to pass so-called red flag laws aimed at taking firearms away from potentially dangerous people and expanding criminal background checks for gun buyers.

By Jim Puzzanghera, Globe Staff

Arming teachers. Limiting access to school buildings to a single locked door. Expanding research into school violence. Creating a federal task force to recommend how communities can make schools safe. Improving mental health care.

In the days after the massacre of 19 elementary school students and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, by an 18-year-old who had legally purchased two assault-style rifles, Republicans have offered up seemingly every potential solution to stop mass gun violence except restricting access to the weapons themselves.

By The Washington Post

Some of America’s largest gun and ammunition makers have seen their stock prices swell since the massacre this week at a Texas elementary school.

Smith & Wesson Brands stock has climbed 8.4% in the two days since 19 children and two teachers were fatally shot at the school in Uvalde, Texas, while Sturm, Ruger & Co., has jumped about 5.7%, and ammunition maker Olin 3.8%.

Meanwhile, Ammo Inc. has jumped more than 12% in the past week; the Arizona-based maker of ammunition and components also owns GunBroker.com, which it bills as the largest online marketplace for the firearms and shooting sports industries.

Such upswings are not uncommon after a mass shooting or any event that puts gun control in the political spotlight, in the view that there will be a rush on guns, ammunition and accessories in advance of any effort to limit access.

Smith & Wesson, for example, spiked 20% after a gunman killed 49 people at an Orlando nightclub in 2016. The company’s stock price also climbed sharply in the first five months of 2021, a possible reaction to Democrats taking control of the presidency and both houses of Congress.

By The Associated Press

The National Rifle Association begins its annual convention in Houston on Friday, and leaders of the powerful gun-rights lobbying group are gearing up to “reflect on” — and deflect any blame for — the deadly shooting earlier this week of 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.

Former President Donald Trump and other leading Republicans are scheduled to address the three-day firearms industry marketing event, which is expected to draw protesters fed up with gun violence.

Some scheduled speakers and performers have backed out, including two Texas lawmakers and “American Pie” singer Don McLean, who said “it would be disrespectful” to go ahead with his act in the aftermath of the country’s latest mass shooting.

While President Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress have renewed calls for stricter gun laws, NRA board member Phil Journey said the focus should be on better mental health care and trying to prevent gun violence. He said he wouldn’t support banning or limiting access to firearms.

The NRA said in an online statement that meeting attendees will “reflect on” the Uvalde school shooting, “pray for the victims, recognize our patriotic members, and pledge to redouble our commitment to making our schools secure.”

People planning to attend picked up registration badges Thursday and shopped for NRA souvenirs, such as T-shirts that say “Suns Out Guns Out.” Police already had set up metal barriers across the street from the convention center, at a park where protesters are expected to gather Friday.

By Amanda Kaufman, Globe Staff

A parent with two children who attend Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, where a gunman killed 21 people on Tuesday, told The Wall Street Journal that authorities handcuffed her and tackled and pepper-sprayed other parents who responded to the school after hearing reports of the shooting.

Angeli Rose Gomez told the Journal that after she and other parents began encouraging police and other officials to enter the school, federal marshals put her in handcuffs and told her she was being arrested for intervening in an active investigation. She said she convinced local Uvalde police officers, whom she knew, to persuade the marshals to take off the handcuffs.

After the handcuffs were taken off, Gomez said she distanced herself from the crowd, jumped a school fenced, and ran inside to grab her children. She ran out of the school with them, she told the Journal.

Gomez described to the Journal a chaotic scene in which police tackled a father to the ground and another parent was pepper sprayed.

“The police were doing nothing,” Gomez told the Journal. “They were just standing outside the fence. They weren’t going in there or running anywhere.”

Gomez’s account comes as the police response to the shooting has drawn scrutiny from parents and lawmakers after authorities changed the initial account of who initially engaged the gunman after he entered the school. Authorities have also come under fire for the length of time it took police to engage with the shooter. Video obtained by The Washington Post showed frantic parents wailing outside of the school, pleading with officials to enter.

By The Associated Press

Texas authorities say the gunman who massacred 21 people at an elementary school was in the building for over an hour before he was killed by law enforcement officers.

The amount of time that elapsed has stirred anger and questions among family members, who demanded to know why they did not storm the place and put a stop to the rampage more quickly.

Texas Department of Public Safety spokesperson Travis Considine said 18-year-old Salvador Ramos entered Robb Elementary School and began his rampage at 11:40 a.m. Tuesday.

A Border Patrol tactical unit began trying to get inside an hour later, and at 12:58 p.m., radio chatter noted he was dead.

By Amanda Kaufman, Globe Staff

President Biden and his wife, Jill Biden, will travel to Uvalde, Texas, on Sunday “to grieve with the community that lost twenty-one lives in the horrific elementary school shooting,” the White House said on Thursday.

By Amanda Kaufman, Globe Staff

Joe Garcia, the husband of Irma Garcia, a teacher who was killed in the shooting at an Uvalde, Texas, elementary school, died on Thursday, the family said.

John Martinez, Irma Garcia’s nephew, posted to Twitter on Thursday afternoon that Joe Garcia “passed away due to grief.”

Martinez told NBC News that Joe Garcia died after delivering flowers to Irma’s memorial.

Martinez wrote on Twitter that the couple were high school sweethearts and leave behind four children, whose ages are 23, 19, 15, and 13.

By Amanda Kaufman, Globe Staff

Texas Representative Joaquin Castro wrote a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray urging the agency to investigate the police response to the shooting at the Uvalde elementary school after “state officials have provided conflicting accounts that are at odds with those provided by witnesses.”

“A block of time between 11:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. local time has yet to be fully accounted for,” the letter stated. “Onlookers allege that parents unsuccessfully urged law enforcement to enter the building during this time and confront the shooter.”

By The Associated Press

Jacklyn Cazares hadn’t yet reached her 10th birthday, but she was already a tough-minded “firecracker” always looking to help people in need, her father said. Jacklyn and her second cousin, Annabelle Rodriguez, were especially tight with three other classmates at Robb Elementary School.

“They are all gone now,” Javier Cazares said. “All her little best friends were killed too.”

The girls were among 19 students killed Tuesday when an 18-year-old gunman barricaded himself in a fourth-grade classroom Tuesday at the school in the southwestern Texas town of Uvalde and began to kill. Their families can only cling to memories, and each other.

Jacklyn would have turned 10 on June 10. Despite her young age, she was equal parts tough-minded and compassionate.

“She had a voice,” her father said. “She didn’t like bullies, she didn’t like kids being picked on. All in all, full of love. She had a big heart.

“She was a character – a little firecracker.”

Cazares drove his daughter to school Tuesday — she had an awards ceremony that morning. About 90 minutes later, the family got a call: An active shooter was in the school.

“I drove like a bat out of hell,” he said. “My baby was in trouble.”

By The Associated Press

A Texas law enforcement official says the 18-year-old gunman who slaughtered 21 people at an elementary school entered the building “unobstructed” through a door that was apparently unlocked.

Victor Escalon, a regional director at the Texas Department of Public Safety, said Thursday that Salvador Ramos did not initially encounter any law enforcement officers when he entered Robb Elementary School on Tuesday and opened fire, killing 19 children and two teachers.

By The Associated Press

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said Thursday that he’s ashamed the United States is “becoming desensitized to the murder of children” and that action is needed now to prevent more lives from being lost in school shootings like the one in Uvalde, Texas.

Cardona spoke at a House Education and Labor Committee hearing two days after a gunman armed with an AR-15-style rifle stormed into an elementary school and killed 19 children and two teachers. The massacre, which followed the fatal of shootings of 10 people earlier this month at a Buffalo, New York, grocery store, has revived the debate over gun control.

On Thursday, committee Chairman Bobby Scott, D-Va., opened the hearing by holding a moment of silence in memory of those who had died in Texas.

While the hearing was on the Education Department’s budget and priorities, Cardona started his testimony by addressing the shooting.

“After Columbine, after Sandy Hook, after Parkland, after each of these and other massacres, we as educators did our best to look parents in their eyes and assure them that we’ll do everything to protect their babies,” Cardona said, referencing school shootings in Colorado, Connecticut and Florida.

But he said all the actions taken in response to those earlier deadly school shootings — including active shooter drills, online early detection tools and more secure building entrances and perimeters — “are no match for what we’re up against.”

Providing no specifics, he said, “we need action now” to protect America’s children. “Let’s not normalize this,” he said. “Let’s use every ounce of influence that we have to get something done to help prevent this from happening again.”

By The Associated Press

Hundreds of students at Oxford High School, the Michigan school where four were killed in November, walked out Thursday and formed a ‘U’ on the football field to show support for students and families in Uvalde, Texas.

“We went through the same thing. I lost a lot of friends. I thought it would be respectful to help other people through it,” sophomore Andrew Sholtz told The Detroit News.

A gunman killed 19 children and two teachers this week at Robb Elementary School in Texas.

Oxford school officials knew a walkout was planned and worked to ensure students would be safe, spokeswoman Danielle Stublensky said.

She said it was part of a national effort by Students Demand Action, a group calling for changes in gun laws.

“As a community, our hearts are with Uvalde and we understand why some of our students chose to participate in the national walkout,” Stublensky said.

A 16-year-old boy has been charged with murder in the Oxford school shooting. His parents have been charged with involuntary manslaughter under a theory that they made a gun accessible to Ethan Crumbley and failed to respond to signs of mental distress.

By The New York Times

Armed school police officers. Lockdown drills. High-tech apps for monitoring bullying and students’ social media posts.

Like many school systems across the country, the school district in Uvalde, Texas, put in place a plethora of recommended safety practices meant, in part, to deter school shootings. But they were of little use Tuesday, when a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School.

The district’s detailed safety plan illustrates that despite the widespread “hardening” of schools over the past two decades, mass shootings continue with sickening frequency.

“These security measures are not effective,” said Jagdish Khubchandani, a professor of public health at New Mexico State University who has studied school violence. “And they are not catching up to the ease of access with which people are acquiring guns in the pandemic. All records are being broken in gun sales.”

By The Associated Press

Joe Biden, then the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, surveyed the collection of black, military-style rifles on display in the middle of the room as he denounced the sale of guns whose “only real function is to kill human beings at a ferocious pace.”

That was nearly three decades ago, and Congress was on the verge of passing an assault weapons ban. But the law eventually expired, and guns that were once illegal are now readily available, most recently used in the slaughter at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.

The tragedy, which came less than two weeks after another mass shooting at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, has refocused Biden’s presidency on one of the greatest political challenges of his career — the long fight for gun control.

Over the years, Biden has been intimately involved in the movement’s most notable successes, such as the 1994 assault weapons ban, and its most troubling disappointments, including the failure to pass new legislation after the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Now his White House, which was already trying to chip away at gun violence through executive orders, is organizing calls with activists and experts to plot a path forward.

“He understands the history of the issue. He understands how the politics have shifted,” said Christian Heyne, vice president of policy at Brady, the gun control advocacy organization. “He feels a sense of missed opportunities from the past, and he understands that this is his last chance to have an impact on gun violence in America.”

Even for a politician known for his passion, Biden’s reaction to the latest shooting in Texas has been searing.

“Where’s the backbone, where’s the courage to stand up to a very powerful lobby?” Biden said Wednesday as he called for Congress to pass new laws.

Stef Feldman, a deputy assistant to the president, said the cascade of deaths — from Buffalo to Uvalde to everyday shootings that don’t generate nationwide headlines — only increases the urgency of the administration’s efforts.

“Every story that we hear about individuals lost to gun violence provides more energy, more of a drive to continue the work,” she said. “If we can save even one life by pushing a little harder on a creative policy idea, it’s worth it.”

But executive action — such as Biden’s order targeting ghost guns, which are privately made firearms without serial numbers — might be the best the White House can do if Republicans in the Senate remain opposed to new restrictions and Democrats are unwilling to circumvent filibusters.

More challenges could come in the courts, and even the ghost gun rules may become tied up in litigation.

By The Associated Press

Democrats’ first attempt at responding to the back-to-back mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde, Texas, failed in the Senate Thursday as Republicans blocked a domestic terrorism bill that would have opened debate on difficult questions surrounding hate crimes and gun safety.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. tried to nudge Republicans into taking up a domestic terrorism bill that had cleared the House quickly last week after mass shootings at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, and a church in Southern California targeting people of color. He said it could become the basis for negotiation.

But the vote failed nearly along party lines, raising fresh doubts about the possibility of robust debate, let alone eventual compromise, on gun safety measures.

By The Associated Press

Medical assistant Angel Garza rushed to Robb Elementary School soon after a gunman opened fire on a classroom of grade schoolers and immediately found a girl covered in blood among the terrified children streaming out of the building.

“I’m not hurt. He shot my best friend,” the girl told Garza when he offered help. “She’s not breathing. She was just trying to call the cops.”

Her friend was Amerie Jo Garza — Angel Garza’s stepdaughter.

By Amanda Kaufman, Globe Staff

The National Rifle Association won’t allow attendees to bring guns, gun accessories, or knives when former president Donald Trump speaks at its annual conference on Friday in Houston, the group said in a statement.

The NRA is continuing with its conference in the wake of an elementary school shooting in Texas that killed at least 21 people.

The Secret Service is taking control of the venue and will use magnetometers before attendees enter the hall, the NRA said.

A similar ban on guns was implemented in 2018 when then-vice president Mike Pence spoke at the annual convention, NPR reported.

By The Washington Post

In the hours after at least 19 children and two teachers were killed at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, in the deadliest mass shooting at an American school in nearly a decade, Republicans in Congress joined the world in mourning the latest gun massacre.

But as some offered their thoughts and prayers to the families of the victims, critics have been quick to point out the millions of dollars that GOP lawmakers have taken from the National Rifle Association in contributions over the years.

Nineteen current or recent Republican senators, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Ky., and Sens. Rob Portman, Ohio, and Joni Ernst, Iowa, have taken at least $1 million each in campaign contributions from the NRA over their careers, according to data compiled by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence in 2019.

Among the others is Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, who expressed how “grief overwhelms the soul” in an attack like the one in Texas, and acknowledged on Twitter that his offer of prayers and condolences were “grossly inadequate” and that answers were needed. It didn’t take long for critics and liberals to slam him for taking more than $13 million in NRA contributions, according to Brady.

“Grief does not overwhelm the soul nearly as much as $13M from the NRA overwhelms your bank account,” wrote Jemele Hill, a contributing writer for the Atlantic. “The answer you seek is the money you continue to take.”

By The Associated Press

Law enforcement authorities faced questions and criticism Thursday over how much time elapsed before they stormed a Texas elementary school classroom and put a stop to the rampage by a gunman who killed 19 children and two teachers.

During the siege, which ended when a U.S. Border Patrol team burst in and shot the gunman to death, frustrated onlookers urged police officers to charge into the school, according to witnesses.

“Go in there! Go in there!” women shouted at the officers soon after the attack began, said Juan Carranza, 24, who watched the scene from outside a house across the street.

By Amanda Kaufman, Globe Staff

At a prayer vigil in Uvalde, Texas, on Wednesday night in the wake of the fatal shooting of 21 people at an elementary school, a journalist peppered Republican Senator Ted Cruz about what the Senate would do after the tragedy, prompting Cruz to walk away from the exchange.

“Is this the moment to reform gun laws?” Sky News reporter Mark Stone asked Cruz.

“You know, it’s easy to go to politics,” Cruz replied.

When Stone replied that gun reform is “at the heart of the issue,” Cruz responded that he understands that’s “where the media likes to go.”

As the exchange continued, Cruz claimed that “if you want to stop violent crime, the proposals the Democrats have, none of them would have stopped this.”

Stone continued to press Cruz on why mass school shootings are a problem unique to America.

“You’ve got your political agenda. God love you,” Cruz responded, before walking away.

As Stone continued to press him, saying “it is just an American problem,” Cruz told him to “stop being a propagandist.”

In the wake of the shooting on Tuesday, Cruz rejected calls for gun control legislation, dismissing questions ­about what Congress will do as attempts to “politicize” the tragedy. The Senate has not acted on a House-approved bill that would require tighter background checks on people who try to buy guns.

Republican lawmakers have repeatedly resisted attempts to enact tighter restrictions on access to guns, in part because of the outsize influence of lobbyist groups. The National Rifle Association has contributed large sums to lawmakers, Senate Republicans in particular.

By The Associated Press

The father of a child killed by a shooting rampage at a Texas elementary school says police were slow to move in and were unprepared.

Javier Cazares is the father of fourth-grader Jacklyn Cazares, one of 19 youngsters who died along with two teachers in a classroom at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde.

Cazares says he raced to school when he heard about the shooting and arrived while police were still massed outside the building. Cazares says he was upset that police weren’t charging and raised to idea of going inside himself with several others.

However, authorities say the shooter, Salvador Ramos, had fired at a school security officer outside and once in the school he shot at two arriving police officers, who were injured.

Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw says law enforcement did immediately “engage” Ramos and contained him inside the locked classroom.

The standoff ended when the 18-year-old shooter was killed by a Border Patrol team.

By Brian MacQuarrie and Travis Andersen, Globe Staff

Another deadly mass shooting at an American school is prompting a new wave of anger and laments from politicians, and also a frustrated sense that even this latest slaughter will not undermine the power of the National Rifle Association and others to block further gun control.

“Fear sells,” said John Rosenthal, president of Stop Handgun Violence, a Massachusetts-based advocacy group. “The NRA still has a big name. They may not have as much money now, but they still have a big stick.”

The shooting deaths of 19 children and two adults at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday intensified scrutiny of the gun-rights lobby once again. But previous mass shootings in US classrooms — including 2012 in Newtown, Conn., and 2018 in Parkland, Fla. — failed to bring about significant national firearms legislation, despite public pressure.

By James Pindell, Globe Staff

In the wake of the 22nd mass shooting at school in the country this year, this one in Texas, Democratic politicians and activists swung from the fences, repeating a now-familiar set of lines.

They wondered how it is that 90 percent of the country backs expanded background checks for gun purchases, but Congress hasn’t acted to do that? Or how it is that the AR-15, the apparent weapon of choice by mass shooters, is still legal? Or why it is that someone who is not old enough to buy beer is allowed to purchase one?

But after this many years of chatter by Democrats who “refuse to stay silent,” maybe it’s time to do the opposite. Perhaps it’s time to create an uncomfortable silence for those who block legislation that could prevent another mass tragedy.

By The Washington Post

The town of Uvalde, where a gunman killed 19 children and two adults Tuesday, is represented by a range of politicians. It is rural, largely Hispanic and encompassed by political districts that lean conservative, but not by much.

Texas has some of the loosest gun laws in the nation. Uvalde, though, has elected politicians with a mix of views on the issue – including a Democratic state legislator who regularly votes with Republicans to loosen gun laws, and a top Republican senator who has sought compromise with Democrats in Washington on background checks.

By The Associated Press

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee was quick to react to this week’s carnage at a Texas elementary school, sending a tweet listing the gun control measures the Democratic-controlled state has taken. He finished with: “Your turn Congress.”

But gun control measures are likely going nowhere in Congress, and they also have become increasingly scarce in most states. Aside from several Democratic-controlled states, the majority have taken no action on gun control in recent years or have moved aggressively to expand gun rights.

That’s because they are either controlled politically by Republicans who oppose gun restrictions or are politically divided, leading to stalemate.

By The New York Times

For more than a decade, as mass shooting has followed mass shooting in the United States, Democrats in Congress have proposed gun restrictions to try to prevent the next tragedy, hoping that the fresh outrage and anguish of another massacre would finally yield some consensus.

Each time — after gun massacres at concerts, grocery stores, a Bible study and, most wrenchingly, elementary schools — they have failed amid Republican opposition.

“We have these truly horrific moments, and then it seems like very little happens because of Republicans in Congress doing the gun lobby’s bidding,” said Robin Lloyd, managing director of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

“We have had the biggest challenges in getting something done at the federal level,” she added, noting that there has been more action in the states, with more than 450 pieces of legislation signed into law since the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

Here is a look at a decade’s worth of failed efforts in Congress to address gun violence after mass shootings.

By The New York Times

Just three days after the massacre in Uvalde, Texas, the National Rifle Association will gather in Houston for its first annual meeting in three years, as the organization remains mired in costly legal battles stemming from a corruption scandal.

Former President Donald Trump is scheduled to address the convention for the sixth time, and Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas is slated to make an appearance.

The convention will put a spotlight on Wayne LaPierre, who has led the organization for more than three decades, but who has been fighting for his job amid an ongoing court battle with Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, where the NRA was chartered. The NRA has also faced a financial squeeze as it spends tens of millions of dollars a year on legal fees, and it has been challenged by rival groups seeking to raise their profiles while the NRA is weakened.

By Felice J. Freyer, Globe Staff

More than two years of pandemic. A war in Ukraine that has led to fears of a global escalation. Deep political division, open racism, and economic worries at home. Mass shooting after mass shooting, more than 200 so far this year.

In a time when bad news feels unrelenting, the killing of 19 children and two teachers in a Texas elementary school has sent many of us reeling.

And no matter how far removed we might personally be from the events, experts say, they still take a toll on our mental health.

By Peter Abraham, Globe Staff

Red Sox reliever Matt Barnes lives in Newtown, Conn., not far from where Sandy Hook Elementary School once stood.

His wife, Chelsea, is a physical therapist who has treated people in town who were in the school on Dec. 14, 2012, when 26 people were murdered, 20 of them children,

So the subject of school-age children again falling victim to senseless gun violence resonates with Barnes personally.

When the latest school shooting claimed 21 victims in Texas on Tuesday, Barnes turned to Instagram and reposted passionate comments made by Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn) and Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr calling for stricter gun control.

“She didn’t deserve that,” said a tearful Angel Garza, stepfather to Amerie Garza.

By Yvonne Abraham, Globe Staff

In this broken country, life is cheap.

Look at the beautiful faces of the fourth-graders killed in Tuesday’s massacre in Uvalde, or the kind smiles of the elders cut down in Buffalo, or the bright eyes of the teens killed in Parkland, or the baby-toothed grins of the first-graders murdered at Sandy Hook, and try to say it isn’t so.

In America, Republicans and their fellow travelers fetishize zygotes and fetuses for political gain, and leave the already-born to fend for themselves. They watched a pandemic kill a million people, striking deadly poses on masks and vaccines to run up their electoral margins. They deny legions of their fellow citizens access to the decent health care and good food that could save lives.

By Jim Puzzanghera and Pranav Baskar, Globe Staff and Globe Correspondent

In the wake of yet another mass shooting, this time one that killed at least 19 children at a Texas elementary school, the Senate on Wednesday appeared poised to do what it has reliably done for years as the tragedies continue to mount — nothing.

There was plenty of talk about the senselessness of the massacre, the need to find ways to prevent future tragedies, and what Democratic Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer called the “very slim” chance of achieving some bipartisan compromise. But with what appeared to be still-solid Republican resistance to any sort of gun safety legislation, senators prepared to leave for their Memorial Day recess with little prospect of reaching a deal to expand background checks.

By The Associated Press

As the mother of a girl killed at Sandy Hook, Michele Gay was devastated by the massacre at a Texas elementary school, with its aching parallels to the 2012 attack in Connecticut.

It was all the more saddening in light of the work she has invested in the years since to promote school safety.

“This one has been particularly devastating for me, for my family, for our community, Sandy Hook. We’re just literally transported back in time,” said Gay, co-founder of the nonprofit Safe and Sound Schools. “I’ve got to dig deep. I’m not going to lie.”

In the decade since 20 children and six educators were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary, some of their loved ones who channeled grief into advocacy have claimed success, gradually, in areas including gun safety, attitudes around gun violence, and mental health awareness. The attack in Uvalde has tested their resolve like no other.

Like the Newtown gunman, the attacker in Texas was a young man who shot his caretaker before opening fire with an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle inside a nearby elementary school, slaughtering small and defenseless children.

As details of Tuesday’s shooting emerged, Matt Vogl was texting with Jennifer Hensel, whose daughter Avielle was killed in Newtown, and others involved in an advocacy effort named in the girl’s honor, the Avielle Initiative, which promotes efforts to make mental health care more widely available through technology.

“We were all just crying and texting. It’s brutal because it triggers some of the darkest memories we have,” said Vogl, executive director at the National Mental Health Innovation Center in Colorado, where the program is based. The effort was launched after the Newtown attack by Hensel and her husband, Jeremy Richman, who died by suicide in 2019.

“If I can’t stay optimistic I need to quit and find something else to do. On days like today it’s all you got. The vast majority of people don’t go into schools and shoot them up,” Vogl said.

By Bloomberg News

In the wake of the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, in which 19 students and two teachers were killed, students across the country are once again planning to walk out as a form of political action against gun violence.

The non-profit Students Demand Action, a subsidiary of Everytown for Gun Safety, have registered a call to action that students, parents, teachers and school staff walk out of their classrooms and campuses on Thursday, May 26, at 12 p.m. Eastern time, 9 a.m. Pacific.

The collective action follows years of walkouts and organizing by students, notably the March for Our Lives rallies that drew an estimated 1.2 million protesters in the wake of the 2018 school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

“We won’t accept a country where gunfire can ring out at any moment, whether it’s while grocery shopping at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, a party in San Bernardino, or graduations across the country,” organizers for Students Demand Action wrote on their website. “We deserve more.”

According to Everytown for Gun Research, gun violence on school campuses disproportionately affects schools with higher enrollment rates for students of color, and particularly Black students.

By Deanna Pan, Globe Staff

What measures could be taken to curb the scourge of gun violence in America — and why has so little changed despite the continued onslaught of mass shootings? Here are four steps federal and state leaders could take now.

By The New York Times

The massacre in Texas cast a pall over confirmation hearings Wednesday for Steven Dettelbach, President Joe Biden’s pick to run the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, but it may have improved his chances of being confirmed.

White House officials knew the hearings would be a make-or-break moment for Biden’s stalled agenda on gun control. With unanimous Republican opposition expected, they cannot afford a single Democratic defection in an evenly divided Senate.

The dynamic shifted less than 24 hours before Dettelbach appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee, when an 18-year-old man wielded a semi-automatic rifle to kill 19 schoolchildren, a teacher and another adult at a school in Uvalde.

The shooting raised the stakes of the fast-tracked hearing, bringing into even starker relief the differences between Dettelbach, a mainstream Democrat who supports his party’s call for renewal of an assault weapons ban, and Republicans who have portrayed him as a threat to Second Amendment rights.

Republicans, who had been expected to grill him over his previous support for a renewal of the federal assault weapons ban, adopted a notably less confrontational tone than they did in their harsh questioning of David Chipman, the administration’s first ATF nominee, who was forced to withdraw in the fall for lack of Democratic support.

And in the hours after Dettelbach’s testimony, two of the three members of the Democratic caucus who were seen as undecided — Jon Tester of Montana and Angus King of Maine — praised his restrained appearance before the committee and suggested they were leaning toward supporting him, according to Democrats.

It is still not clear where the remaining member, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., stands. But White House officials have said they are cautiously optimistic that he will support Dettelbach — partly because he had backed Chipman, who was a far more polarizing nominee.

By Amanda Kaufman, Globe Staff

President Biden said Wednesday that he and his wife, Jill Biden, will travel to Uvalde, Texas, in the coming days to meet with the families of the victims of the elementary school shooting there and “bring a sense of comfort to the community in shock and grief and in trauma.”

Biden made the comments before signing an executive order on policing on the second anniversary of George Floyd’s murder.

“As a nation, we all must be there for them. Everyone,” Biden said of the families in Texas. “And we must ask when in God’s name will we do what needs to be done to if not completely stop, fundamentally change the amount of carnage that goes on in this country.”

“The idea that an 18-year-old could walk into a store and buy weapons of war designed and marketed to kill is, I think, just wrong. It violates common sense.”

“Where is the backbone? Where is the courage to stand up to a very powerful lobby?” Biden continued.

By Amanda Kaufman, Globe Staff

Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday called for the passage of “reasonable gun safety laws” in the wake of the shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, that left 19 children and 2 teachers dead.

”Enough is enough,” Harris said as she spoke at an event at the White House during which President Biden was set to sign an executive order on policing on the second anniversary of the murder of George Floyd.

”As the president said last night, we must have the courage to stand up to the gun lobby and pass reasonable gun safety laws,” Harris said. “We must work together to create an America where everyone feels safe in their community, where children feel safe in their schools.”

By The Washington Post

Leaders around the world condemned the shooting at an elementary school in Texas that killed 19 children and two teachers, describing it as “senseless” and “inconceivable” and calling out and comparing U.S. gun policy with that in other nations where mass shootings are less frequent.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, whose country is battling Russia’s invasion, said it was “terrible, to have victims of shooters in peaceful time.”

Zelensky, speaking remotely during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, said he was “deeply saddened by the news of the murder of innocent children in Texas.” His foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said Ukraine “shares the pain of our U.S. friends” as his country also loses “innocent young lives” because of the war.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canada would be mourning with Americans. After the deadliest mass shooting in modern Canadian history in 2020, Trudeau announced a ban on more than 1,500 makes and models of “military-style assault weapons,” including the AR-15.

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett also said Israel “mourns together” with the American people. British Foreign Minister Liz Truss said she was “horrified.” Stavros Lambrinidis, the European Union ambassador to the United States, called the violence “senseless.” Mexico’s government condemned the shooting – and pointed to the predominantly Hispanic population of the Texas town. About 100 miles from Texas’s border with Mexico, Uvalde County is home to a large Mexican American population.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador sent his “condolences, pain and solidarity,” as well as “a big hug” to the families of the victims.

He said it still was not known whether Mexican nationals were among the victims – but added that he has no doubt that many of the victims are of Mexican origin. “Just look at the surnames; they are children, grandchildren of Mexicans and it hurts us a lot,” he said.

Mexico’s foreign affairs secretary said that an official was in Uvalde waiting for news about any Mexican nationals who might have been affected.

“The horror. This will continue to happen as long as weapons are readily available. Whether its the 1st economy in the world, the 15th or the 190th. Parents lose their children. We all lose. The only winner is the gun industry. let’s hold them accountable,” wrote Salvador Tinajero, a deputy legal consultant for the Mexican secretariat of foreign affairs.

German chancellor Olaf Scholz called it an “inconceivable massacre” on Twitter on Wednesday, and French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted that “19 victims were under age 10.”

“Children and teachers were murdered in a cowardly attack in their Texas school,” Macron said. “We share the shock and grief of the American people, and the rage of those who are fighting to end the violence.”

By The New York Times

Jackie Cazares and Annabelle Rodriguez were cousins in the same classroom at Robb Elementary School. Both girls were among those killed Tuesday in a shooting at the school in Uvalde, Texas.

Jackie, who had her first Communion two weeks ago, was the social one, said Polly Flores, who was Jackie’s aunt and Annabelle’s great-aunt. “She was outgoing; she always had to be the center of attention,” Flores said. “She was my little diva.”

Annabelle, an honor roll student, was quieter. But she and her cousin were close, so close that Annabelle’s twin sister, who was home-schooled, “was always jealous,” Flores said. “We are a very tight family,” she said. “It’s just devastating.”

The girls were among 21 people killed, 19 children and two adults, in the massacre Tuesday.

By Bloomberg News

A majority of Americans support stricter gun control laws, but deep partisan distrust means the shooting deaths of 19 school children and two teachers in Texas on Tuesday are unlikely to inspire cooperation on the issue.

About 60% of voters in a Morning Consult poll last week — after a White supremacist armed with a semi-automatic rifle killed 10 Black people in a racist attack in Buffalo, New York — said they support stricter gun control laws. But that number is down from 66% in 2019, after mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, and before President Joe Biden was elected.

The change is statistically significant, given the poll’s margin of error of 2 percentage points, and is confirmed by polling over time by Gallup and others.

Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, said previous polling showed substantial support among Republicans for gun control. “The problem is, they don’t trust the Democrats to administer it,” he said.

Democratic pollster Fred Yang of Hart Associates observed the same thing the last time a Democrat was in the White House. He conducted a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll on the issue in 2015 and found 52% of those surveyed said the Democratic Party was “outside the mainstream” on guns, compared to 38% who said the Republican Party was outside the mainstream.

That’s despite the fact that most people agree with Democrats on many specific gun measures.

Those include expanded background checks, favored by 92% of Democrats and 70% of Republicans, according to a Pew Research Center poll last year; and preventing people with mental illness from purchasing guns, supported by 90% of Democrats and 85% of Republicans.

Republican support drops sharply for other measures, like national gun registries or banning high-capacity magazines and assault-style weapons.

By Bloomberg News

The latest US mass shooting at a Uvalde, Texas elementary school creates a new point of political pressure on a U.S. Supreme Court that has signaled it will soon limit state and local governments’ ability to enact gun control measures.

The dispute, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen, is the oldest outstanding case currently pending before the justices, having been argued back in November. Tuesday’s mass shooting may affect the timing of the ruling should a justice want to reference it in their opinion, but the justices aren’t likely to delay the release due to optics, legal scholars say.

“It’s hard to find a time to issue an opinion expanding gun rights that won’t be marred by a mass shooting,” said Second Amendment scholar and UCLA law professor Adam Winkler. “We have a lot of mass shooting in the United States. They seem to happen every few weeks, depending on how you count them they tend to happen even more frequently.”

There have been 213 mass shootings in 2022 alone, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which tracks online gun violence incidents and defines a mass shooting as an event in which four or more people are killed or injured with a firearm. The attack Tuesday that left 19 children and two teachers dead came 10 days after a gunman killed 10 people in a racist attack at a supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y., the state in which the case before the justices originated.

By Bloomberg News

The Uvalde, Texas, elementary school shooter posted on Facebook that he was going to shoot his grandmother, then posted that he had done it, Texas Governor Greg Abbott told journalists Wednesday in Uvalde. The shooter then posted that he was going to shoot an elementary school.

A spokesman for Facebook said that the posts Abbott referred to were actually direct messages to a specific person.

They “were private one-to-one text messages that were discovered after the terrible tragedy occurred,” spokesman Andy Stone posted on Twitter. “We are closely cooperating with law enforcement in their ongoing investigation.”

By the Associated Press

Beto O’Rourke interrupted a press conference Wednesday about the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, calling the shooting “totally predictable when you choose not to do anything.”

O’Rourke was escorted out while members of the crowd yelled at him, with one man shouting profanities at O’Rourke. The Democrat is challenging against Gov. Greg Abbott in this year’s election.

Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said to O’Rourke: “You’re out of line and an embarrassment.”

O’Rourke, as he was being escorted out, turned around, faced the stage, pointed his finger and said: “This is on you until you choose to do something different. This will continue to happen. Somebody needs to stand up for the children of this state or they will continue to be killed just like they were killed in Uvalde yesterday.”

Abbott says the gunman who killed 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school warned on social media minutes before the attack that he was going to shoot up a school. He says the shooter used an AR-15 in the attack Tuesday at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde.

The news conference was attended by several elected Republican officials.

By the Associated Press

The governor of Texas says the gunman who killed 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school warned on social media minutes before the attack that he was going to shot up a school.

Gov. Greg Abbott says the shooter, an 18-year-old, used an AR-15 in the attack Tuesday at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde.

About 30 minutes before the shooting, the shooter made three social media posts. According to the governor, the shooter posted that he was going to shoot his grandmother, then that he had shot the woman, and finally that he was going to shoot an elementary school.

Seventeen people were also injured in the attack.

Abbott says the shooter had no known criminal or mental health history.

“Evil swept across Uvalde yesterday,” the Republican governor said at a news conference attended by other Republican political officials.

Watch live video out of Uvalde, Texas, as officials give an update one day after the shooting:

By Travis Andersen, Globe Staff

Tuesday’s attack at a Texas elementary school that killed 19 children and two teachers prompted impassioned calls for tougher gun laws while also shifting the focus on the gun lobby, with reform advocates viewing the influence of groups like the NRA on lawmakers as an obstacle to change.

“Congress’s unconscionable priority of guns over lives has resulted in 45,000 killed last year, 212 mass shootings in 2022 so far this year, and [19] more elementary school children and two adults today,” said John Rosenthal of Stop Handgun Violence, a Massachusetts nonprofit that backs stricter gun laws, in a statement following the killings.

But despite the negative headlines, polls showing broad support for gun reform, and frequent calls for change after each mass shooting the country endures, groups like the NRA, which still plans to hold its annual convention in Houston this weekend, remain significant players on the political scene.

By Sahar Fatima, Globe Staff

In the aftermath of Tuesday’s shooting in Uvalde, Texas, where a gunman murdered 19 children and two teachers in a fourth-grade classroom, Texas politicians had plenty of thoughts and prayers to offer.

But their words fell flat for many people who believe lawmakers must do more to stop the violent pattern of mass shootings in the country, particularly when many of those same leaders have consistently expressed unequivocal support for guns and rejected calls for more restrictions on weapons capable of slaughtering dozens in quick succession.

By The Associated Press

Former President Donald Trump says he’ll “deliver an important address to America” at the National Rifle Association’s annual convention in Texas on Friday.

The Republican leader posted on his social media network Wednesday that “America needs real solutions and real leadership in this moment, not politicians and partisanship.”

Houston’s Democratic mayor, Sylvester Turner, says some people want the city to cancel the NRA meeting, but he says they can’t break the contract.

The greater question, he says, is why politicians still plan to speak there after the shooting in Uvalde. Gov. Greg Abbott and Sen. Ted Cruz are among other Republicans scheduled to address a leadership forum sponsored by the NRA’s lobbying arm.

“So, it’s not about us canceling the convention,” Turner said. “It’s about elected officials at the highest level in our state going and speaking and endorsing those policies and that’s wrong. And you can’t pray and send condolences on one day and then be going and championing guns on the next. That’s wrong.”

By The Associated Press

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer swiftly set in motion a pair of firearms background-check bills Wednesday in response to the school massacre in Texas. But the Democrat acknowledged Congress’ unyielding rejection of previous legislation to curb the national epidemic of gun violence.

Schumer implored his Republican colleagues to cast aside the powerful gun lobby and reach across the aisle for even a modest compromise bill. But no votes are being scheduled.

“Please, please, please damnit – put yourselves in the shoes of these parents just for once,” Schumer said as he opened the Senate.

He threw up his hands at the idea of what might seem an inevitable outcome: “If the slaughter of schoolchildren can’t convince Republicans to buck the NRA, what can we do?”

The killing of at least 19 children plus a teacher at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, has laid bare the political reality that the U.S. Congress has proven unwilling or unable to pass substantial federal legislation to curb gun violence in America.

In many ways, the end of any gun violence legislation in Congress was signaled a decade ago when the Senate failed to approve a firearms background check bill after 20 kindergartners were shot and killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Despite the outpouring of grief Wednesday after the starkly similar Texas massacre, it’s not at all clear there will be any different outcome.

By The New York Times

Pretty much Alfred Garza III’s entire family — parents, girlfriend, sister, aunt and more — had gathered in the room when the Texas Rangers broke the horrible news late Tuesday: His 10-year-old daughter, Amerie Jo Garza, the girl who loved Play-Doh, was among the victims of the Robb Elementary School shooting.

Amerie Jo was “full of life, a jokester, always smiling,” her father said in brief phone interview. She did not talk a lot about school but liked spending time with her friends at lunch, in the playground and during recess.

“She was very social,” he said. “She talked to everybody.”

The family’s loss came after two years of losing several loved ones to COVID-19.

“We were finally getting a break, nobody was passing away,” Garza said. “Then this happened.”

Garza, who works at a used-car dealership in Uvalde, Texas, where a gunman killed at least 19 children and two teachers at the school Tuesday, said he was on a lunch break when Amerie Jo’s mother told him she could not get their daughter out of the school because it was on lockdown.

“I just went straight over there and found the chaos,” he said.

By Matt Stout, Globe Staff

The top Democrat in the Massachusetts House said Wednesday that Texas lawmakers need to “look deep into their souls” following the killing of 21 people, including 19 children, at an elementary school in their state, which has reignited calls for greater gun control measures.

“They certainly are not examples of a state that I would want to live in,” House Speaker Ronald Mariano told reporters outside the State House, where lawmakers and others gathered for a scheduled event honoring victims of anti-Asian violence that was organized by the House Asian Caucus.”I think they have to look deep down into their souls and see, what are they doing to stop this?” Mariano said of state lawmakers in Texas. “What are they doing to bring Texas into the mainstream of American culture and American life?”

Mariano, a Quincy Democrat, touted that Massachusetts itself has “probably the strongest [gun] permit laws in the nation,” citing a 2014 bill he said he helped negotiate.

But he said legislative actions need to go beyond tightening measures around who is legally allowed to buy a firearm, citing another mass shooting in Buffalo, N.Y. this month within a predominantly Black neighborhood.

”What generates that hate? Those are the systemic issues that we have to start to address,” Mariano said. “It is frightening to me that you always come back to the gun situation, which is important . . . and still, we feel helpless in trying to stop these mass shootings.

“It’s an underlying sickness in individuals that we have to identify and get at,” he said, “to see if we can treat people.”

Meena Bharath, chairwoman of the Asian American Commission, lamented how people, bombarded by repeated mass shootings and attacks, often continue on after these events “behaving as if this loss of life is normal.”

“This is anything but normal,” she said. “These repeated acts of violence, while people are going about their lives, are driven by hateful rhetoric and are seeping into our communities and attacking the very soul of America.”

By The Associated Press

The National Rifle Association holds its annual convention in Houston, Texas, starting on Friday. Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner says some people want the city to cancel the meeting, but he says they can’t break the contract.

The greater question, Turner says, is why Texas politicians still plan to speak there after the shooting in Uvalde. Gov. Greg Abbott and Sen. Ted Cruz have been scheduled to address a leadership forum sponsored by the NRA’s lobbying arm.

“So, it’s not about us canceling the convention,” Turner said. “It’s about elected officials at the highest level in our state going and speaking and endorsing those policies and that’s wrong. And you can’t pray and send condolences on one day and then be going and championing guns on the next. That’s wrong.”

By The Associated Press

Schools around the country have increased security as a precaution after the killings of 19 children and two teachers in Texas.

In Connecticut, where the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting killed 20 first graders and six educators, state police said they were sending extra troopers to schools Wednesday, although no specific threats had been received.

“This assault on the most innocent of our citizens is deeply disturbing and heartbreaking,” Connecticut state police Col. Stavros Mellekas said in a statement. “At this time, our focus will be on protecting all school populations here in our state.”

Schools in Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Virginia, Maryland, and Florida also were among those increasing security and offering counseling.

“Last night, I hugged my two kids a little tighter,” New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker said in a statement. “This morning, I gave them an extra kiss before sending them off to school. … How many more must die in our schools, in our supermarkets and in our streets before the U.S. Congress acts to help address this carnage?”

By The Associated Press

Majority Leader Chuck Schumer took to the Senate floor Wednesday in the aftermath of the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting to call out the Republicans’ decades-long opposition to gun control legislation.

“Maybe the thought of putting yourself in the shoes of these parents instead of in the arms of the NRA might let you wriggle free from the vise-like grip of the NRA to act on even a simple measure,” the New York Democrat said. “For the sake of these children, these 9-year-olds, these 10-year-olds, these 11-year-olds, these beautiful children, please, damn it.”

The Democrats’ desperate pleas to Republican colleagues reflect a long history of congressional inaction on gun control since a gunman killed 20 schoolchildren in Newtown, Connecticut, nearly a decade ago. Democratic lawmakers have introduced countless proposals that would have required a background check of the gunman in Texas. All failed to pass, mostly due to the filibuster.

Schumer pledged Wednesday to move forward with or without Republican lawmakers. “If we can’t find a good, strong bill that has bipartisan support, we will continue to pursue this issue on our own,” he said.

By Kara Baskin, Globe Staff

I originally wrote this column a year ago, after mass shootings in Colorado and Georgia. Since then, absolutely nothing has changed: Yesterday, 19 children and two teachers were murdered in a mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.

As parents, we walk a constant tightrope between shelter and rage. There is the desire to protect our children, to preserve innocence, the one true currency of youth. We send them off each day with blind faith, hoping that today isn’t their turn. Until actual change arrives, we’re left to teach them how to cope with the unthinkable. So, yet again, here’s how.

By The Associated Press

A man whose 15-year-old son was killed in the 2018 school massacre in Parkland, Florida, said Wednesday that he’s in physical pain thinking of what parents of children killed at a Texas elementary school are going through.

“I know what those families had to endure sitting in a room waiting to hear that their child is laying in a school on a floor. It is heartbreaking, heartbreaking,” Tom Hoyer said as he stood outside the courtroom in Fort Lauderdale where jury selection for the penalty trail for the murderer, Nikolas Cruz, is underway.

“I hope their journey through all of this is a lot faster than ours,” Hoyer said as his voice broke and his knees shook.

His son Luke was among 14 students and three staff members killed on Valentine’s Day 2018 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

By The Associated Press

The man who killed 19 children and two teachers in Texas bought his guns legally days before the attack and soon after his 18th birthday, a law enforcement briefing said.

He bought one AR-style rifle from a federally-licensed gun dealer in the Uvalde area on May 17, according to a state police briefing given to Sen. John Whitmire. The next day, he bought 375 rounds of ammunition, and bought a second rifle on May 20.

Officers recovered one of the rifles from the gunman’s truck and the other was found in the school, according to the briefing. It says he dropped a backpack with several magazines full of ammunition near the school entrance, and that he was wearing a body-armor style vest but that it had no hardened plates inside.

By The Associated Press

Actor Matthew McConaughey was born in Uvalde, Texas, where a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers on Tuesday. He responded by calling on Americans to act now to control an “epidemic” of mass shootings.

“Once again, we have tragically proven that we are failing to be responsible for the rights our freedoms grant us,” McConaughey posted on his Instagram account. “We cannot exhale once again, make excuses, and accept these tragic realities as the status quo.”

The actor doesn’t describe any specific laws or policies he wants adopted. He doesn’t mention gun control.

“As Americans, Texans, mothers and fathers, it’s time we re-evaluate,” he wrote. “We have to rearrange our values and find a common ground.”

“This is an epidemic we can control, and whichever side of the aisle we may stand on, we all know we can do better. We must do better. Action must be taken so that no parent has to experience what the parents in Uvalde and the others before them have endured.”

By Christina Prignano, Globe Staff

According to the Gun Violence Archive, an organization that tracks gun injuries and deaths, as of Tuesday there were 212 shootings that injured or killed more than four people so far this year.

By John R. Ellement and Adria Watson, Globe Staff

Leaders of public schools and police departments across Massachusetts vowed to support students and teachers in the aftermath of the Uvalde elementary school mass shooting.

In social media postings and in e-mails to parents, police chiefs said they had dispatched officers to some schools in hopes of making their communities feel safer as the nation reels from the murder of at least 19 elementary students and two teachers in the Robb Elementary School Tuesday.

By The Associated Press

The gunman who killed 19 children and two adults inside an elementary school in Texas an elementary school carried a long rifle with multiple rounds of ammunition and wore a “tactical vest” as body armor, Lt. Christopher Olivarez of the Texas Department of Public Safety said.

It “shows the intent of this evil person going into this school and having complete disregard for human life,’’ Olivarez told NBC’s “Today” show.

All the children and teachers who died were inside a single classroom where the shooter barricaded himself, Olivarez said on CNN.

The San Antonio Express-News reported that the shooter also also bought 375 rounds of ammunition, according to state Sen. John Whitmire, who was briefed on the shooting.

By The Associated Press

Distraught families gathered at a local civic center and turned to social media to mourn and to make desperate pleas for help finding missing children as the death toll in a gruesome school shooting at a Texas elementary school rose to at least 19 students and two teachers.

By nightfall, names of those killed during Tuesday’s attack at Robb Elementary School in the town of Uvalde began to emerge. One man at the civic center walked away sobbing into his phone “she is gone.” On the backside of the building, a woman stood by herself, alternately crying and yelling into her phone, shaking her fist and stamping her feet.

By The Washington Post

Former president Donald Trump is scheduled to headline a forum at the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting in Houston this Friday – about a four-hour drive from where a shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, killed at least 19 children and two teachers on Tuesday.

The Memorial Day weekend event is the year’s largest for the gun lobby meeting after cancellations due to the coronavirus pandemic. It’s set to take place over three days and “showcase over 14 acres of the latest guns and gear,” according to its official website.

“The National Rifle Association is pleased to announce that former President Donald Trump will headline a star-studded cast of political heavyweights at the NRA Institute for Legislative Action,” the body said in a statement in May.

By Jeneé Osterheldt, Globe columnist

This is one of the deadliest school shootings in American history, only second to Sandy Hook Elementary School where a gunman killed 20 first-graders and six adults a decade ago.

This country was founded violently and since we won’t acknowledge it, teach it, and make a new way, violence is our lifestyle.

By The Washington Post

A veteran educator whose dedication to a student with Down syndrome left a lasting impression. A jubilant 10-year-old whose dancing and joking lit up his family’s home. A fourth grader who had just made the honor roll.

The names of those slain by a gunman at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday – including at least 19 children and two teachers – were only beginning to emerge in the hours afterward, as the grief-stricken community of 16,000 about 80 miles west of San Antonio tried to process what happened. Just days before summer vacation, an 18-year-old opened fire in a classroom, unleashing carnage not seen at a U.S. school in nearly a decade.

By Shannon Larson and Christina Prignano, Globe Staff

In his address to the nation Tuesday night on the mass shooting at a Texas elementary school, President Biden recalled his visit as vice president in 2012 to Newtown, Conn., where a gunman killed 20 school children and six adults.

The president was not the only leader to reflect on the horror nearly 10 years ago at Sandy Hook Elementary School, as he made a plea for the United States to embrace gun control legislation.

Former president Barack Obama and Connecticut Senators Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal also invoked Sandy Hook in their comments about the latest deadly mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

By Jeremy C. Fox, Maya Homan, and Madison Mercado, Globe Correspondents

The mass school shooting Tuesday in Uvalde, Texas, that killed at least 19 children and two adults prompted a swift response on social media from public officials, law enforcement, and gun safety advocates in Massachusetts, who expressed horror, sadness, and frustration at the nation’s lack of gun control measures.

Members of the state’s congressional delegation, the Legislature, Boston city councilors, local police departments, and others spoke out on Twitter and elsewhere about the Texas tragedy and the litany of mass shootings that have preceded it, each one followed by calls for change that has not come.

By The Associated Press

Lamenting a uniquely American tragedy, an anguished and angry President Joe Biden delivered an urgent call for new restrictions on firearms after a gunman shot and killed at least 19 children at a Texas elementary school.

Biden spoke Tuesday night from the White House barely an hour after returning from a five-day trip to Asia that was bracketed by mass shootings in the U.S. He pleaded for action to address gun violence after years of failure — and bitterly blamed firearm manufacturers and their supporters for blocking legislation in Washington.

By The Associated Press

An 18-year-old gunman who killed 19 children and two teachers at a Texas elementary school barricaded himself inside a classroom, “shooting anyone that was in his way,” an official said Wednesday, describing the latest in a gruesome, yearslong series of mass killings at churches, schools and stores.

Police and others responding to Tuesday’s attack broke windows at the school in an effort to allow students and teachers inside to escape, Lt. Christopher Olivarez of the Texas Department of Public Safety said Wednesday on NBC’s “Today.”

Olivarez told CNN that all victims were in the same fourth-grade classroom at Robb Elementary School. Eventually, the shooter was killed by law enforcement.