At Least 19 Children, 2 Adults Killed in Texas Elementary School Shooting

A South Texas town is reeling Tuesday after at least 21 people—including 19 students and two adults—were killed and an unknown number of others wounded in a mass shooting by a lone gunman at a local elementary school.

“They failed our kids again,” Fred Guttenberg, father of Parkland school shooting victim Jaime Guttenberg, said during an MSNBC interview after Tuesday’s massacre. “How many more times are we gonna sit back?… How many more times?”

Julián Casto, a former Democratic San Antonio mayor and U.S. housing and urban development secretary, said on the same network that “this has become part of who we are as a country.”

“The free availability of guns has not made us safer in the United States or here in the state of Texas,” he added.

The shooting occurred at Robb Elementary School in the town of Uvalde, 85 miles west of San Antonio. Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott said in a statement that the shooter—who early reports indicate might have had a rifle and a handgun—shot and killed his grandmother before going on a rampage at the school at around 11:30 am.

“He shot and killed, horrifically and incomprehensibly, 14 students and killed a teacher,” Abbott said of the shooter, relating the known death toll at the time.

The gunman, who multiple law enforcement sources identified as 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, was fatally shot by law enforcement responding to the crime scene.

The governor also said that two police officers sustained non-life-threatening injuries during an exchange of gunfire with the shooter.

Around 600 second- through fourth-grade students attend Robb Elementary School. Distraught parents rushed to the campus trying to locate their children in the wake of the shooting.

“We can’t find my daughter,” Brandon Elrod, the father of a missing 10-year-old girl, told ABC 6. “She might not be alive.”

Pete Arredondo, police chief of the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District, said during an afternoon press conference that several adults and students had been injured in the attack.

“At this point, the investigation is leading to tell us that the suspect did act alone during this heinous crime,” he said.

According to the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), Tuesday’s incident was the second-deadliest U.S. school shooting of the past decade, behind the December 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Connecticut, in which 28 people were killed. The 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, which took 17 lives, now ranks third.

GVA says there have been at least 212 mass shootings and at least 7,584 gun deaths—including 411 children under the age of 12—in the United States so far this year.

Data released Monday by the Federal Bureau of Investigation revealed that U.S. active shooter incidents in 2021 soared by more than 50% from 2020 and nearly 97% from 2017.

Originally published at Commondreams.org, written by Brett Wilkins.