One year after the massacre at Robb Elementary, in Uvalde Texas, in which 21 people died, the community still mourns and demands greater gun control.
We need to speak, for our daughter, our family, the future of our children, maybe this can make a change… 19 children killed. Something is wrong here,” Christina Zamora, whose daughter Mayah survived the shooting, told NPR.
On May 24, 2022, Salvador Ramos, 18, entered the campus and shot at a group of minors.
Armed with an AR-15 rifle, the attacker killed 19 children and two teachers.
This case is the third deadliest shooting at a US school after the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007 and the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012.
It is also the deadliest in the Texas state.
Besides, This is a case in which the main victims were young children, first, second and third grade.
So far this year, 704 minors have been killed in the United States in firearm-related incidents, according to the Gun Archive Violence count.
In the same period last year, that is, from January to May 24, 2022, 650 had died from the same cause.
In 2020, firearms incidents became the leading cause of death among minors, surpassing car accidents, according to the report Current causes of deaths among children and adolescents in USA, prepared by the specialized publication The New England Journal of Medicine.
Between 2019 and 2020, the increase in incidents in this age group was 29.5%, twice the increase among the general population.
Mayah developed a fear of this world that we had never seen. When someone knocks on the door, fear suddenly kicks in,” Christina said.
According to NPR, the Zamora family chose to sue the authorities, the school district, the gun store and the manufacturer of the rifle used by Ramos, the Daniel Defense gun shop.
They were massacred by an 18 year old boy. Something is wrong here,” Christina insisted.
A SCAR IN THE TISSUE
In the elementary school incident, the police made omissions and delayed entering the campus.
One month after the tragedySteve McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, admitted the opportunity to detain the attacker just three minutes after he entered Robb Elementary School, but he let it go.
In addition, he described the response of the agents as an “abject failure”.
The videos of the security cameras captured that for 77 minutes the agents did not act pto bring down the attacker.
It was even a Border Patrol police officer who killed Salvador Ramos.
Given this, for Arlene Ramírez Uresti, an expert in International Relations and an academic at the Universidad Iberoamericana, the Uvalde tragedy has had a profound impact on the community.
It is a blow to the social fabric. Violence is terrible in all its forms, but when it is in a community way there is sociologically a wound in the social fabric and it is difficult not only to overcome it but also to generate a social pact, an agreement, between society” he lamented.
The specialist pointed out in an interview with excelsior that Uvalde, Texas, is a resilient migrant community with stories of effort.
This tells us that there is something that is reiterative: and that is where the United States has to work, since Columbine reflects the lack of a social policy of prevention”, assured Ramírez Uresti.
It is an urgent issue to attend to, which I hope could be separated from the political issue,” he stressed.
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