Texas school shooting: gunman posted plans on Facebook prior to attack – latest updates

The retired police officer who was shot and killed while trying to stop the gunman in the racist attack at a Buffalo supermarket on May 14 was awarded the department’s medal of honor at his funeral on Wednesday, as the country processed another massacre at Uvalde, Texas, that killed 19 children and two adults, the Associated Press reports.

Buffalo police commissioner Joseph Gramaglia also posthumously promoted Aaron Salter to lieutenant, saying his actions — firing multiple times at the shooter, striking his body armor — bought precious time that allowed others in the store to escape.

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;} “Aaron bravely fought evil that day,” Gramaglia said at The Chapel in Getzville, where law enforcement officers from US and Canadian departments Buffalo being on the US northern border] filled a dozen rows.

Services were also held for Pearl Young, a 77-year-old grandmother, great-grandmother and substitute teacher who was devoted to her church.

Salter and Young were among the 10 Black people killed when a white gunman wearing body armor and a helmet-mounted camera targeted shoppers and workers at Tops Friendly Market, in a predominantly Black neighborhood, on a Saturday afternoon. Three others were injured in the attack, which federal authorities are investigating as a hate crime.

The 18-year-old suspect has been charged with murder and is being held without bail. The gunman in Uvalde, Texas, was also 18 and was shot dead by law enforcement.

Salter, 55, of Lockport, was working as a security guard at the store in his retirement, a natural move for the community-minded officer with a loud laugh that “would shock your senses” and who chewed bubble gum just as loudly, said retired deputy police commissioner Kimberly Beaty, who worked with Salter.

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}Aaron didn’t come to work to be entertainment, he came to do his job, but we enjoyed watching him do it.”

Salter retired from the department in 2018 after nearly 30 years. At least one of his bullets struck the suspect’s armor-plated vest but didn’t pierce it, police said.

The Buffalo shooting killed 10 Black people from the neighborhood.

How far government can go in controlling access to firearms has been one of the most divisive issues in the United States, Reuters writes.

It pits those who say restricting the availability of guns will save lives against those who maintain that guns themselves are not the root cause of mass shootings and that the right to bear arms is protected by the US Constitution.

US president Joe Biden urged the US Senate to quickly confirm Steven Dettelbach, his nominee to head the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), whose mission includes enforcing US gun laws.

Dettelbach appeared at his Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday.

Joe Biden sought to reform federal and local policing with a broad executive order on Wednesday, the second anniversary of the death of George Floyd, while goading a seemingly immovable Congress to act on police and gun reform, Reuters writes.

The order directs all federal agencies to revise their use-of-force policies, creates a national registry of officers fired for misconduct and will use grants to encourage state and local police to restrict the use of chokeholds and neck restraints.

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}It’s a measure of what we can do together to heal the very soul of this nation, to address the profound fear trauma, exhaustion particularly Black Americans have experienced for generations,” the US president said.

He had not signed it earlier, he said, because he was hoping Congress would pass a police reform law named after Floyd. The bill collapsed in the US Senate last September under Republican opposition.

The White House police order restricts the use of no-knock entries to a limited set of circumstances, such as when an announced entry would pose an imminent threat of physical violence.

Joe Biden is speaking at the White House about gun safety, around 24 hours after the appalling shooting at the elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.

The US president noted that since he spoke at the White House last night, shortly after he arrived back from his trip to Asia, the death toll in the shooting had risen – now standing at 19 children and two teachers.

“I’m sick and tired of what is going on,” Biden said of the latest mass murder, just nine days after another 18-year-old opened fire on members of the public in the Tops supermarket in Buffalo, New York, in a racist attack that killed 10 Black people.

Biden visited Buffalo after the shooting there and announced moments ago that he and first lady Jill Biden would travel to Uvalde “in the coming days” to offer what comfort they can to “a community in shock and grief and trauma.”

“As a nation I think we all must be there for them, everyone,” he said. “And we must ask, when in God’s name will we do what needs to be done to, not completely stop, but fundamentally change the amount of carnage that goes on in this country. To state the obvious, I’m sick and tired, I’m just sick and tired of what is going on, what continues to go on,” he added.

Biden said he had spent his career, as chairman of the judiciary committee when he was in the US Senate “and as vice president working for common sense gun reforms.”

He said certain such reforms would have a significant impact on the number of deaths across the US but would “have no negative impact on the second amendment”, the long and fiercely-debated US constitutional right to “bear arms”.

“The second amendment is not absolute, when it was passed you [1789] couldn’t own a cannon, you couldn’t own certain types weapons, there have always been limitations. These actions we have taken before have saved lives and they can do it again.

“The idea that an 18-year-old can walk into a store and buy weapons of war designed and marketed to kill is just wrong,” he said.

The alleged shooters in both the Buffalo and Uvalde killings were 18-year-olds who used US military-style assault rifles, readily available in gun stores. The suspect in the Buffalo killings is in custody, charged with murder. The suspect in Uvalde was shot dead by law enforcement inside the classroom of the elementary school where he was firing at children and their teachers.

“It just violates common sense, even the manufacture of them, of that weapon,” he said.

“You know, where is the backbone? Where is your courage to stand up to a very powerful lobby,” he said.

Presumably, the president is referring to the US Congress, where Republicans repeatedly block legislation mandating greater gun controls (and many bills that Biden wants to advance in other areas have been held up by the fact that he has no more than a wafer-thin majority in that chamber, not enough to overcome the filibuster that requires 60 votes to pass most legislation_.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are holding an event at the White House to talk about policing, on the second anniversary of the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by a white police officer. But of course the school mass shooting is very present and vice-president Kamala Harris is talking first before she introduces the president. She echoed Biden’s remarks last night, saying: “We must have the courage to pass reasonable gun safety laws.”

“We must work together to create an America where everyone feels safe in their communituy, where children feel safe in their schools,” Harris said.

Now she has turned to the issue of police killings, addressing herself to the public but also the families of not just George Floyd who are at the White House today, but also Breonna Taylor, who was killed by police gunfire in Louisville, Kentucky, on 13 May 2020, just days before Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis.

Lawmakers are floating the idea of introducing red flag laws as a means of bolstering gun control.

House majority leader Steny Hoyer said that he is planning to bring a bill, initially bought forth by Lucy McBath, a representative from Georgia whose 17-year-old son was killed by gun violence, that would establish a national red flag law.

Under red flag laws, courts will have the right to take away guns from people who are deemed a threat to themselves or others.

Some Republicans seem to be open to the idea of a red flag law. In 2019, Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal introduced a red flag measure that failed to get the necessary votes. Susan Collins, a Republican senator for Maine, said that she discussed potential legislation with Democrat Chris Murphy, according to Axios.

Republicans offer thoughts and prayers – but not gun control to stop the killings

As the cycle of American gun violence took its latest turn on Tuesday, with at least 19 children and two teachers brutally murdered at an elementary school in the small town of Uvalde, Texas, the response from the Republican right came from an all too familiar playbook.

Thoughts and prayers, obfuscation and inaction.

Shortly after the shooting, Republican Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, who for well over a decade has led his party in vehemently blocking a raft of federal gun control measures, decried the “disgusting violence” in Uvalde and said: “The entire country is praying for the children, families, teachers, and staff and the first responders on the scene.”

But prayers aside, there remains little to no hope of commonsense gun control measures making their way into federal law, despite support from the majority of American voters.

Within hours of the bloodshed on Tuesday, many of the national Republican Party’s most outspoken voices on gun ownership recited talking points now rote in the aftermath of mass shootings.

Texas senator Ted Cruz, who also sent prayers to the community in Uvalde, castigated Democrats and members of the media during a brief interview with CNN. “Inevitably when there’s a murder of this kind you see politicians try to politicize it,” he said. “You see Democrats and a lot of folks in the media whose immediate solution is to try to restrict the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens. That doesn’t work. It’s not effective. It doesn’t prevent crime.”

His remarks were almost identical in the aftermath of the Parkland school shooting in Florida back in 2018, which claimed the lives of 17 students and teachers. Despite a grassroots protest movement, in which hundreds of thousands of school children descended on Washington in a March for Our Lives, no federal legislation was passed. Jury selection in the death penalty trial of the Parkland shooter continues this week, a further marker of the trauma these mass shootings leave behind.

Meanwhile, Cruz is set to speak at the National Rifle Association leadership summit on Friday, in Houston, just 280 miles from Uvalde, alongside Donald Trump and Texas governor Greg Abbott.

Other senior Texas Republicans, who have presided over a series of measures aimed at loosening restrictions on firearm ownership in the state, reiterated calls to arm teachers, despite the fact the shooter engaged a number of armed officers as he successfully stormed the school building.

“We can’t stop bad people from doing bad things,” Texas attorney general Ken Paxton told Fox News on Tuesday. “We can potentially arm and prepare and train teachers and other administrators to respond quickly. That, in my opinion, is the best answer.”

Satirical news site the Onion has made all headlines on its front page read: “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens”.

The website first used the headline when writing about the mass shooting at an outdoor concert in Las Vegas in 2017, where 61 people were killed.

The NRA just released a statement on its conference this weekend that confirms it will still be held this weekend in Houston.

“We recognize this was the act of a lone, deranged criminal. As we gather in Houston, we will reflect on these events, pray for the victims, recognize our patriotic members and pledge to redouble our commitment to make our schools secure,” the statement reads.

Lawmakers are responding to the Uvalde shooting on Capitol Hill today. Joe Manchin told reporters that the Senate should pass a bipartisan gun control bill, but said that passing gun legislation would not be an impetus for getting rid of the filibuster.

With the filibuster, Democrats would need at least 60 votes to pass legislation.

Meanwhile Republican Marco Rubio of Florida is digging into his argument that background checks for gun purchases are ineffective.

“The truth of the matter is these people are going to commit these horrifying crimes, whether they have to use another weapon to do it, they’re going to figure out a way to do it,” he told CNN.

The Uvalde shooting was the 27th school shooting this year, according to a tracker maintained by news organization Education Week.

The tracker reports 67 people killed or injured in a school shooting, including 27 people who were killed.

The shootings took place in states across the country, ranging from Washington state to Massachusetts.

At his press conference this afternoon, Greg Abbott said he is “living moment to moment right now” in response to whether he would cancel his appearance at NRA’s conference in Houston this weekend.

Twenty minutes into Greg Abbott’s press conference addressing the Uvalde shooting, Beto O’Rourke, went up to the stage and told Abbott “you are doing nothing”.

O’Rourke could be heard telling Abbott that the shooting was “predictable” because of his inaction and mentioned the 2019 shooting in El Paso where 23 people were killed in a Walmart store.

“This is on you until you choose to do something,” O’Rourke said.

“Sir, you are out of line,” Uvalde mayor Don McLaughlin can be heard shouting at O’Rourke trying to get him to leave the auditorium.

O’Rourke is running against Abbott in November for the gubernatorial seat. He was most recently a House representative before his brief run for president in 2020.

Texas governor Greg Abbott said at a press conference moments ago that the shooter posted on Facebook three times before his attack.

In the first, posted 30 minutes before going to the school, he said he would shoot his grandmother. The second said, “I shot my grandmother.” And the third, posted about 15 minutes before the attack, said: “I’m going to shoot an elementary school.”

Abbott also said the shooter’s grandmother had called the police before he shot her.

On Monday, the day before the shooting, Uvdale carried out its annual tradition of having its graduating high school seniors greet the elementary school students, including those who were killed on Tuesday. Here’s a clip of the celebration: