The teenager who killed 19 children and two adults warned in a private message on a social network shortly before the event that he was going to shoot up an elementary school, Texas Governor Greg Abbott said Wednesday.
Abbott described Salvador Ramos as a mentally challenged 18-year-old dropout who held up Robb Elementary School in the small Texas town of Uvalde on Tuesday. The slaughter ended when a US Border Patrol agent shot Ramos dead.
However, the governor said that authorities never discovered mental problems in Abbott, despite the fact that some media reported that he had once randomly shot people on the streets of Uvalde with an air gun and threw eggs at cars.
Those who knew him say he was angry that he hadn’t completed enough classes to graduate this week with his classmates.
Abbott reported that 30 minutes before entering the school, Ramos posted a message on Facebook saying, “I’m going to shoot my grandmother” (with whom he lived) and shot her in the face. The woman, Celia Martinez, 66, survived the attack and is hospitalized in serious condition.
Moments later, he said in another message, “I shot my grandmother,” and in a third, “I’m going to shoot up an elementary school,” Abbott added.
Andy Stone, a spokesman for Meta, the parent company of Facebook, clarified that the text messages were sent to one person, but did not clarify which of Meta’s platforms Ramos used.
Ramos crashed his car into a ditch near the school and police officers employed by the school district “confronted the gunman.” There are conflicting reports as to whether they exchanged fire. The assailant entered the school with an assault weapon and killed all of his victims in the same fourth-grade classroom, a police officer told CNN.
According to Abbott, 17 other people were injured in the attack, but none were in danger of death. A spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety said those injured included “many children” who survived the shooting in his classroom.
The debate over stricter gun control laws in the United States is one of the most heated in the country. At the end of Abbot’s press conference, a gun supporter, his Democratic opponent for the November election, Beto O’Rourke, yelled at him, “You’re not doing anything” to prevent gun violence.
“Abbott made it easy to carry guns in public,” O’Rourke said on Twitter. “The time to stop the next slaughter is now.”
President Joe Biden said Wednesday that he will visit Texas with the first lady “in the next few days” and expressed that “the idea that an 18-year-old can walk into a store and buy weapons of war designed to kill (…) It is wrong and violates common sense.”
“The Second Amendment is not absolute,” Biden said in calling for new limits on gun purchases. When the constitutional amendment was written “nobody could own a cannon, nobody could own certain kinds of weapons. There are always limitations,” he added.
It remains unclear whether this latest carnage has changed the minds of some Senate Republicans, who have in the past blocked more restrictive measures on firearm purchases favored by Biden and other Democrats.
At least 10 Republicans would have to join the 50 Democrats in the Senate to pass gun control legislation.
Some lawmakers have talked about trying to strike compromises that would require deeper background checks for gun buyers or a ban on online gun sales, but so far nothing looks promising.
[Con información de AP y Reuters]
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