Horrific school shooting in Texas [scroll down for UPDATES]
There has been another school shooting, this time in the town of Uvalde, Texas. Fourteen precious and innocent elementary school children and one teacher are dead. The shooter was named Salvatore Romas (or probably Ramos) and was apparently killed by police after barricading himself in the school.
Reports are also that Ramos shot (and perhaps killed?) his grandmother first. But I didn’t find much about that in a quick perusal of the news.
I plan to write more about this later tonight when further facts emerge, but I wanted to put up a quick thread for you to talk about it.
UPDATE 8:25 PM:
More information on the shooter can be found here. I’ve found in the past that the source, heavy.com, tends to be first with these things and tends to be fairly accurate although not entirely so.
Here are a few excerpts:
An Instagram page with pictures of guns appears to belong to the shooter. Although it has not been publicly authenticated by authorities, it was removed shortly after the shootings. The page followed Uvalde High School students, and people who knew the gunman have posted about it on social media…
The Associated Press is reporting that a border patrol agent who was nearby rushed in without backup and killed the gunman…
Abbott said the gunman was an U.S. citizen…
“It is being reported that the subject shot his grandmother right before he went into the school. I have no further information about the connection between those two shootings,” the governor said in the news conference.Gutierrez said on CNN that the grandmother is clinging to life. He said Ramos bought the firearms on his birthday, legally, from a dealer. He said the gunman crashed his car near the school before going inside and opening fire. According to Gutierrez, Ramos was originally from North Dakota…
ABC News reported that the gunfire occurred inside the school, debunking early reports that the shooting occurred outside.
UPDATE 10:35 PM
The death toll is now 18 children and 3 adults. There are many wounded as well.
Roughly 90% of [the school’s] students are Hispanic. About 80% of the children attending come from families who are struggling financially.
The students who were killed are reported to have been second, third, and fourth-graders. This was an act of great evil.
Many of the newspaper articles refer to Ramos as the “alleged” shooter. But at this point, I see no indication that there is any doubt that he was the shooter. And since he is dead, the word “alleged” certainly isn’t being used to protect his rights at a future trial. Perhaps to protect his family? We haven’t heard much if anything about them yet, except for the grandmother he supposedly shot (although that’s not clear, either).
Biden made the usual pro-gun-control speech.
The shooter is no doubt another of those “white supremacists” and “domestic extremists” and “insurrectionists” about whom we are always being warned, in speech after nauseating speech, from Biden, Garland and Mayorkas. Perhaps what is required is some further erosion of our constitutional rights, as well as enhanced surveillance by the FBI of parents not overly pleased with the indoctrination of their children (in schools barely able to teach reading and math and geography) by CRT and radical gender ideology.
White hispanic.
Biden is to address the nation about this tonight. I expect him to make an awful event even worse.
Naturally Democrats are already exploiting the tragedy. I expect nothing less from them
Griffin,
Yep. He could be 100% indigenous but will still be listed as ‘white Hispanic’. Conversely, the three white guys who attacked Kyle Rittenhouse…their race was quickly forgotten
Ackler:
Not just forgotten. From the way the articles were written, without stating the race, a lot of people concluded the victims were black
Neo: “… From the way the articles were written, without stating the race, a lot of people concluded the victims were black.”
I thought that one of the people who so concluded was the black guy who, to avenge what he thought were black victims, drove his SUV through a peaceful parade of white people in Waukesha, killing 6 and maiming many others (November 21, 2021). Somehow that story dropped out of the news cycle very quickly.
There may be no greater evil than the deliberate murder of children.
Anyone who seeks to use such an atrocity for political gain is too mendacious for further association with the civilized. Permanent revocation of their citizenship and mandatory deportation is the appropriate and proportionate consequence for their actions.
They have made of themselves, those who are no longer our countrymen. TWANLOC.
Further to my comment above about Waukesha: the “alleged” murderer, Darrell Brooks, is a career criminal who reacted badly to the news of Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal a few days earlier. According to the New York Post, “…Brooks’ Facebook page, under his MathBoi Fly rapper handle, were mysteriously deleted right after the parade murders, and showed that he had praised Hitler, backed Black Lives Matter — and called for violence against white people.
‘So when we start bakk knokkin white people TF out ion wanna hear it…the old white ppl 2, KNOKK DEM TF OUT!! PERIOD,’ he wrote under his rap name, MathBoi Fly, along with a middle-finger emoji.”
It’s impossible to tell at this early point what may have set this eighteen-year-old on his murderous path. I do always worry about the effects of one unstable person’s actions bringing copycat actions from others — a mass shooting leading to another, or as we sometimes see, teenage suicides cascading after one or two happen.
Something is rotten in the state of Texas: “OH Man Plotted Assassination Of George W. Bush In Dallas: A Columbus man was taken into custody after authorities say he plotted to assassinate former president George W. Bush in Dallas.”
https://patch.com/texas/downtownaustin/s/i9l3g/oh-man-plotted-assassination-of-george-w-bush-in-dallas-reports
According to the FBI, “a man identified as Shihab Ahmed Shihab indicated on his WhatsApp account that he wanted to kill Bush because he blamed the former president for the deaths of many Iraqis and for breaking apart the country following America’s invasion in 2003. The suspect traveled to Dallas in November to record video around the former president’s home.”
Well, with a name like Shihab Ahmed Shihab, I kinda doubt he’s a white Hispanic.
Looks like an Hispanic trans-something (Salvador Ramos).
Has been on the “troubled teen” radar.
Again the questions:
1. What meds has he been on?
2. Who knew he was a threat & knew he meant to carry it out?
3. Did the school have armed security or armed teachers?
And of course…will Beto & Biden do a campaign commercial stop at the school playground to commiserate about “guns killing kids”?
I’m with Neo…give it 72 hours before making any assumptions beyond what is demonstrably true…and do pray for those who mourn.
Geoffrey B notes “those who are no longer our countrymen”.
That has been pretty obvious to me for years. The Union must not hold. We need to split, like the two Germanys after WWII. Or like India/Pakistan in 1948.
If true, thank God for the border patrol agent who rushed in to end this. Fox News says it’s now eighteen dead children.
The Associated Press is reporting that a border patrol agent who was nearby rushed in without backup and killed the gunman…
Fox is reporting that the border patrol officer was a BORTAC officer, from a tactical elite unit, and he did go in with backup. They flanked the shooter from two sides.
Kate has the right idea, reflect and pray deeply for those who are grief stricken tonight.
Decent people are mourning and praying. Biden calls for “gun control.”
Just another ho-hum day at Planned Parenthood, where tens of thousands of pre-term children are killed every year with Democratic Party support.
This is going to gut Uvalde. To lose so many, so young, so suddenly, for less than no reason. Prayers up for the families and their stricken town.
Families’ harts are broken in Uvalde. The shooter is dead. Time to mourn and empathize with the good people of Uvalde. Time to love one another and be kind to each other. Time for prayer and helping people heal. But President Biden goes after the gun lobby. It’s what the Democrats do.
We can never unite if we can’t put politics aside when people need calm reflection, space to grieve, and the concern of their fellow citizens. Our country is in sad shape.
@ PA Cat > “Well, with a name like Shihab Ahmed Shihab, I kinda doubt he’s a white Hispanic.”
Have you noticed the tendency of the press to obfuscate things like that by simply calling a perp “Ohio Man”?
Are they calling the shooter “North Dakota Man”?
If school shootings were such harmful events for conservatives and gun rights advocates in the poll why didn’t they do more to proactively stop those? The problem with many of the safety measures suggested by conservatives in the event of a horrific school mass shooting such as arming teachers or having retired law enforcement officers safeguarding schools were never carrying out in real in red states after the public concern for such issue died down which suggests to me that they were never real solutions just something the conservatives randomly throw into the discussion as an alternative to democrats’ gun bans so they can run the clock buying enough time until public attention shifts to something else. If republicans truly believe they work, can we at least have them implemented somewhere as a test run so we have data to back up their effectiveness?
@ Dave: ” If republicans truly believe they work, can we at least have them implemented somewhere as a test run so we have data to back up their effectiveness?”
We’d love to, but every time we’ve tried the Left won’t permit it.
That said, it’s a much more complicated issue than usually presented: The operating environment has quite specific requirements not present elsewhere, and not everyone is suited, psychologically or physically, to perform the necessary tasks to the degree success in that environment requires.
One example: When the subject comes up for discussion, firearms are frequently regarded as are fire extinguishers – a couple in each hallway, inside locked and secure cabinets to prevent tampering, is adequate, or, worse yet, secured “in the office” where officialdom can maintain control.
If a fire breaks out in a school, evacuation is first priority, extinguishing comes, at best, second, thanks largely to great efforts at non-combustible construction, and training teachers in building evacuation procedures is quite different from proper target identification and good marksmanship under pressure. But should gunfire erupt, if the suitable tool is in a secured cabinet somewhere and not immediately to hand at the scene or the Appropriately Designated Individual is at the other end of the building, the time spent procuring the resource means lost lives.
It is a shibboleth to the Left, assisted by its partners in the media, that “guns are bad;” consequently it’s nearly impossible to conduct a rational discussion of the issue that doesn’t immediately descend into emotional sound bites, especially given the complexity.
But, again, we welcome the opportunity to give it a try; armed staff has proven very successful at preventing school shootings in Israel for the past 40 years, there’s no reason it wouldn’t be just as successful here, assuming it could be implemented properly and not rule-mangled into deliberate failure mode by idealogues on the Left.
So we should just confiscate all guns like the left-wing lunatics want, right Dave? More gun laws will end this? It was already illegal to use a gun to kill people, or to carry a gun in a school where children are present. You want real solutions? Maybe more abortion, then there will be no kids to kill.
If republicans truly believe they work, can we at least have them implemented somewhere as a test run so we have data to back up their effectiveness?
Did it occur to you that these are black swan events and what you’re advocating means a re-allocation of manpower which might be suboptimal from the perspective of public safety?
Read the article by Dr. James Wright, “Second thoughts about gun control”.
Wright and Rossi published one of the first major studies on gun control and concluded that the availability of firearms has no effect on crime or violence.
Uvalde is a large town (population 16,000), predominantly hispanic. It’s crime rate is modest. There were over the period running from the beginning of 2006 to the end of 2019 six homicides therein, for a mean annual homicide rate of 2.7 per 100,000 (about 1/2 the national average). Frequency of rape is above the national mean. Rates of robbery at 47 per 100,000 are about 1/2 the national mean (but high for a non-metropolitan town). Frequency of forcible rape and aggravated assult are about 1.5x the national mean. Room for improvement, but not a peculiarly unsafe place. I’m guessing if you stay out of bars at closing time, you’re good.
I did a DuckDuckGo search on “school shootings stopped by armed guards” and came up with several in several states. The investigation into this crime is still ongoing. There is little information about the shooter; what I have seen so far shows no sign of a father in his life, but it’s early.
Sane people do not think it a good idea to kill innocent people like these children in Texas and the people at the market in Upstate NY. Yet none of the elites talk about examining the mental health of the perpetrators to understand why they did what they did. The cynic in me sees this failure as resulting from the fact that doing that examination work is difficult and will not deliver cheap political points and wins. So all we get is fake outrage and demands for gun-control and gun confiscation.
Uvalde is not far from where I live in San Antonio. My daughter and I are gutted over this, as my daughter hopes soon to move with her son to another small town very much like Uvalde. We both love small towns in rural Texas, having done many book events and markets, and written a whole series set in one (Luna City, which is made up, but based on real South Texas towns.)
What it recalls to us is the church murders in Sutherland Springs, a couple of years ago – perpetuated by an angry, resentful young man with a particular grudge against certain members of that congregation.
The second order consequences
https://www.uvaldeleadernews.com/articles/uvalde-begins-busing-immigrants-to-san-antonio/
I don’t know what the cumulative effect may be, but after something like this, you’re bound to hear someone say, nearly sobbing, “I just don’t want guns in schools!”
As a matter of somebody’s druthers, still meaningless. But the only guns such an emotion can keep out of schools is armed security.
To the extent somebody who thinks–loosely used verb–like this is on a school board, or in a position to make a heartfelt speech to a school board, or on a town council or has some other position of influence, then perhaps armed security is precluded.
Why someone who thinks/speaks like this isn’t humiliated by having it known to sapient humans is a puzzle.
No amount of argument, examples of armed security preventing catastrophe, can prevail over the lament. If it remained a matter solely of someone demonstrating how stupid they are, how much they value the public demonstration of irrational feelings as virtue signaling–or worse, actually believe it as a solution–that would be one thing. But when it shortstops practical solutions, it’s effectively criminal.
Darrell Brooks didn’t need a gun. “Who is Darrell Brooks?” Look him up and figure why you had to look him up.
The concentration of kids in the space between the bus and the school door is pretty high at certain times. If you don’t want to bother getting a gun, your family’s car will do.
It’s frequently noted that many of these murderers are in some way in the mental health system or at least have a psychotropic prescription. Or have had just recently. Not sure what can be done about it but putting together a profile might lead to some ideas.
The would be terrorist came from iraq on q tourist visa in 2020
Needless to say, this erruption proves shambling is unfit for any office including dog catcher
Yep
https://mobile.twitter.com/Cernovich/status/1529252113317888000
Somebody needs to study the archetype of 18 year old boys who shoot up innocents. Who do they communicate with online? Body armor was a consistency of the last two tragedies. Who knew the kid had the guns and how were they paid for?
And even more importantly, schools have to be made safer. Bongino had a great idea of a vestibule entry that could entrap a shooter from entering the interior of the school.
Weve knowm the type for 25 years
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10852875/Portrait-killer-Bullied-Call-Duty-loving-Texas-school-gunman-brawled-repeatedly-school.html
The Secret Service did a study on school shootings and concluded that they are preventable.
https://www.secretservice.gov/sites/default/files/2020-04/Protecting_Americas_Schools.pdf
Steve, I fully agree.
The small town (about 12,000 pop and growing too fast) where I live by has Sheriffs Deputies that rotate (I believe) through the schools. I don’t think Teachers can be armed. HS kids can leave campus so having the doors locked all the time can’t happen.
I really don’t know the answer to stop this from happening. Better mental health evals would certainly help and yes monitoring social media. But that has big gaps too.
I know 18 yr olds can’t buy a handgun (legally) and I think maybe extending that for long guns too be a good idea.
My best friend, my “other brother” has a son somewhere in the autism scale. When he turned 18 he bought an AR15. Friend took it from him. He is now 22 and has bought them again and Friend has taken them away too. I fear sometime I will read or hear that this son has done something like what just happened. They have him on meds and seeing Docs but there is little else they can do.
@ Dave (0132hr)— You have no idea how many school shootings have been thwarted by armed security, or the fear of armed security. None of us do, because these non-events do not generate news.
Some are thwarted when the potential shooter sees the security and re-thinks his project, or at some point in the planning the potential target is chosen by eliminating those where armed security is likely. Neither of these situations will ever appear in the MSM.
Shooters or robbers, they have in common the desire for a soft target.
It’s more a mental health problem than a gun problem.
Being “serious” about school security is … expensive. Intrusive. Inconvenient.
People want an “easy” solution, even tho there is no genuine easy solution. Germans point to far fewer school mass shootings – but their last 100 years of history doesn’t give me confidence that “gun control” works. And in the USA, it certainly won’t.
Nothing reasonable can totally stop the crazies.
We need, as a society, to be more aware of, sensitive to & about, and willing to be more active with more crazy folk – who, like autism, are on some spectrum.
Would those who knew this guy have said he was among those most likely to go crazy?
How crazy, in the pre-crime phase, must one be, to activate gov’t response?
And what are the possible responses to the non-criminals who seem crazy?
More monitoring?
More shooting range shooting under instruction & supervision?
More Big Brothers? More gov’t paid brother-like Uncles?
No one thing is “THE solution” – we need lots of little things. Expecting improvement, fewer mass school deaths, not every year with 0 (tho more years).
I’d like to see more “safety in firearms” instruction in gov’t schools – allowing gun haters to start private schools without such gun instruction, for instance (or they can homeschool).
My daughter has done deliveries to schools for Edible Arrangements, and we have done school events at the middle school in Giddings. Those schools have pretty tight access, especially after the last round of school shootings: sign in at an office just off the foyer (with a plexiglass window between the foyer and office) with a picture ID and have an escort come to the front office, through a secure door, to take you to where you are going. So, I’d like to know how the Uvalde shooter got into a classroom – I don’t think he waltzed in through the school’s front entry, not if Uvalde had the same kind of set-up. Perhaps around through the back, climbed a fence or through a utility entrance. Plenty of questions, all the way around. Perhaps some of them will be answered.
Might there be some viable political solutions? Maybe, but I don’t like the idea of discussing “solutions” with people who
-are anti-self-defense
-clamor for gun control at every report of gun violence no matter how the shooter got the gun, what type of gun was used, or how many people died
-supported two years of appalling government overreach during the Covid pandemic
Any solution – more monitoring of people suspected of mental health concerns, a national gun registry, more gun safety training, red flag laws, gun violence restraining orders, more mental health screenings – would be abused in a society where such people abound.
This is a really good piece from 2018 by Karol Markowicz.
Republicans don’t get to mourn these tragedies because they immediately blamed for them and forced to defend themselves.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/pittsburgh-synagogue-shooting-republicans-fight-blame-game/
Still nothing about any father in Ramos’s life. His mother has drug problems; he began to be strange as he entered adolescence.
We have a national sickness, a spiritual sickness. These shootings and the rising tide of drug addictions are symptoms.
It’s almost always alcohol and other-drug addiction. Such addiction is the underlying cause of 80%+ of misbehaviors. They are NOT a symptom. Intervene early and often in the lives of alcohol/other-drug addicts, and we will prevent most tragedies, and find a usually wonderful human underneath the muck of substance addiction. I elaborate at length here: https://www.preventragedy.com/pages/TAR/029.aprmay07.html
To a degree this reminds me of the Amish shootings in 2006 where a community was targeted for their vulnerability.
The last school I worked in you had to be buzzed in (with security cams at the entrance). The secretary working the entrance always had full view of who you were before you were granted full access to the school if you weren’t faculty or staff. For faculty and staff you had your FOB key to enter. This school was located right outside a major city and was Title 1.
Maybe in small, sleepy towns such safety precautions aren’t taken to that degree, but I always found it reasonable to have such measures in place. Even my parochial school you had to buzzed in and had to state your purpose if you weren’t a student.
I mean, it’s not full proof but I have little doubt that if a shooter were to enter the last school I worked in he’d either be detained or the casualties would’ve been mitigated before all hell broke loose in the hallways and classroom. Even the relatively wealthy high school I interviewed at had at least one line of screening. Not one school I interviewed in the suburbs and city did not have a buzzer and a security lock to the school before fully entering the hallways.
Seems to be bad behavior runs in the family
https://rumble.com/v162cec-school-shooter-grandfather-talks-about-his-grandson-who-shot-and-killed-21-.html
Yes, early intervention for drug or alcohol problems would help a lot. We don’t know yet if the Uvalde shooter was a drug user himself.
My question is more about why so many people begin drug use to begin with.
It’s almost always alcohol and other-drug addiction. Such addiction is the underlying cause of 80%+ of misbehaviors. They are NOT a symptom.
Not buying.
JAW3,
The grade school my kids attended put an intercom system and camera pointed on the front door with a lock controlled from an interior office. Easy. Inexpensive. Not too hard to circumvent with forethought, but it’s a simple way to block some assaults.