A child smearing her friend’s blood on herself in an attempt to play dead. Agonised parents waiting to learn if their children had survived. The death of teacher Irma Garcia’s husband immediately after she was shot and killed, leaving their four children orphaned. It has been more than a week since Salvador Ramos stormed Robb Elementary School in Uvalde armed with a semiautomatic rifle, but the true nature of the tragedy — and the horror — is still coming into focus.
It would be wrong to say that the death of two teachers and 19 children in Uvalde has reignited a national debate over guns and gun control. It had already been reignited ten days earlier — by another mass shooting in Buffalo. Instead, the Texas shooting has only further polarised that debate, encouraging both sides to double down on their attempts to use senseless killings to justify their own political beliefs.
We hear the familiar arguments for stricter gun controls. We hear the usual counter-arguments for arming teachers. Senator Ted Cruz has called for single-point entries to schools. The exact opposite has been proposed by security expert Graeme Wood, who wants more exits so that students can escape. Last Friday, at the National Rifle Association (NRA) meeting in Houston, Donald Trump claimed that the country needs “a top-to-bottom security overhaul at schools across our country” to prevent active shooters. Meanwhile, outside the event, protestors (including Democratic politician Beto O’Rourke) held the NRA responsible for the exceptional frequency and scale of gun violence in the United States.
Political consensus, it would appear, seems a distant prospect. On Monday, the Canadian government banned the sale of handguns and proposed legislation that will require most owners of “military-style assault weapons” to turn over their rifles to the government. On the same day in Washington, President Biden was asked if talks between Republicans and Democrats would produce bipartisan gun legislation. He responded: “I don’t know.”
With America’s politicians evidently incapable of meaningful action on the central issue of access to firearms, it seems we have little option but to focus on other ways to prevent school shootings. Chief among these is fixing America’s failing mental health system. Texas Governor Gregg Abbott certainly appears to have learned this the hard way. After the Uvalde shooting, he demanded: “We as a state, we as a society, need to do a better job with mental health.” Yet there was also a certain emptiness to his words: a month before the attack, Abbott transferred $211 million away from the state’s Health and Human Services Commission, which oversees mental health programmes.
Consider this. Before Salvador Ramos dropped out of high school, there were clear indications that something was wrong. Students who knew him observed that he had changed from a quiet kid with a few friends into a hostile aggressor. While he did not have any reported mental health issues, the warning signs were there, particularly in his online behaviour. On Yubo, a social media app which includes livestream videos and chatrooms, Ramos was nicknamed “the Yubo school shooter”. He harassed girls in chatrooms, threatening to rape, murder, and kidnap them. On TikTok, a classmate told The Wall Street Journal, Ramos posted a video where “he was seated in the passenger seat of a car holding a bag with what appeared to be a dead cat in it”. The same behaviour surfaced on Instagram, where he posted pictures of him self-harming.
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