Ten-year-old Auraleigha Santos focused on staying quiet on Tuesday morning as she hid near the auditorium at Robb Elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, while in a classroom on the other side of the building, an 18-year-old man carrying an AR-15-style rifle kept shooting, and shooting and shooting.
By the time the gunman had finished, 19 of Santos’s classmates and two teachers were dead, and 17 were injured, leaving a predominantly Latino community about 135km (84 miles) west of San Antonio in Texas deeply shaken, and a state and a nation asking, yet again, whether anything would ever change.
Just more than 24 hours after the mass shooting, the state’s most prominent politicians descended on Uvalde for a press conference where Greg Abbott, the state governor, laid the blame on “the status of mental health in our communities” and emphasised that restricting access to guns was not the solution to the problem of gun rampages.
The event was interrupted by Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat former congressman who is challenging Abbott for governor in November’s elections, who began shouting “You are doing nothing!”
O’Rourke accused Abbott and other Republican leaders of not doing enough to stop mass shootings. Last year, Abbott signed laws making Texas one of the most gun-friendly states in the United States.
The gunman, Salvador Ramos, lived in the Uvalde area, had no criminal record, and no history of a mental illness, according to state officials who say they have yet to find a motive for the shooting. Ramos purchased rifles legally the day after he turned 18, officials said.
When asked about gun control during his press conference, Abbott cited the gun homicide rate in Chicago, “I hate to say this, but there are more people who are shot every weekend in Chicago than there are in schools in Texas,” he said.
As Abbott spoke, many businesses in Uvalde were closed, and the mood in the community of about 16,000 people was sombre.
Outside the Uvalde Civic Center, Auraleigha Santos tightly gripped a teddy bear as she recounted her harrowing experience.
“I’m glad I didn’t get killed, but I’m sad my friend got killed,” she said.
Her father, Juan Santos, stroked her hair as she spoke.
“I never would have imagined this happening in this peaceful small community,” said the 29-year-old solar panel installer.
Alyssa Santos, 32, Auraleigha’s stepmum, recalled she had nixed a potential move to San Antonio because of safety concerns.
“I was adamant, it’s not safe, it’s not safe, the gang violence, the crime rates.”
“And now this happened here, I just can’t believe it,” she said (Source: Aljazeera).
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