The event is the second deadliest to date, behind the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting.
MADRID, 25 May. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The attack carried out this Tuesday by an 18-year-old boy identified by the authorities as Salvador Ramos in an elementary school in the Texas city of Uvalde joins the long list of shootings in educational centers in the United States, without the authorities having managed to curb this problem.
Ramos, 18, broke into Robb Elementary School with a gun, killing at least 21 people, including 19 children, although the death toll could increase in the coming hours because several of the injured remain hospitalized. Serious condition.
The shooting is the second deadliest in a school in the United States, only behind the one executed on December 14, 2012 at the Sandy Hook school in Newton, in the state of Connecticut. The attack carried out by Adam Lanza, 20, left 27 dead.
Lanza, who had previously murdered his mother in her home, killed 21 children between the ages of six and seven and six adults, including four teachers, the director and the center’s psychologist. Later, he committed suicide upon seeing the police arrive at the scene.
However, the most fatal shooting in an American educational center took place on April 16, 2007 in Blacksburg, in the state of Virginia, where Seung Hui Cho, a student at Virginia Tech, killed 32 classmates and members of the faculty in two attacks on campus before committing suicide.
The event in Blacksburg thus outnumbered the attack carried out in August 1966 by student and former Marine Charles Whitman, who killed 15 people and wounded 31 at the University of Texas before being killed by police. Previously, he had murdered his wife and his mother.
Incidents of this type are relatively frequent in the North American country, although it was the one recorded on April 20, 1999 at the Columbine Institute in Colorado that set off alarms due to the high number of deaths. In this case, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, students at the center, killed twelve students and one teacher.
The event, which at the time became the deadliest attack on a school in American history, set off a wave of copycat events and linked the name Columbine to the nation’s ongoing gun and crime problem. ease of access to them by even minors.
The latest attack in Texas also exceeds the list of victims of the shooting in February 2018 in Parkland, in the state of Florida, where Nikolas Cruz killed 17 people inside the Stoneman Douglas institute.
Cruz, 19, who had been expelled from the center for his behavior, managed to escape the facility by posing as a student fleeing the attack and was later arrested in a nearby residential area.
On the other hand, the attack carried out in May 2018 against an institute in Santa Fe, Texas, resulted in ten deaths. The person responsible, identified as Dimitrios Pagourtzis, was a student at the center who was later arrested by the Police.
Other violent incidents include the attack in March 2005 at a Red Lake high school in Minnesota, which resulted in the death of five students, a teacher and a security guard. The shooter, Jeff Weise, had previously killed his grandfather and his partner in his home.
In a subsequent incident, Christoher Harper-Mercer, 26, killed eight students and a teacher in an October 2015 attack on a Roseburg, Oregon, high school, before committing suicide after a shootout with U.S. Army forces. security deployed on site.
Also below the ten fatalities are the October 2006 attacks in Nickle Mines, Pennsylvania, where Charles Carl Roberts IV kidnapped and shot ten Amish girls, killing five of them, before committing suicide.
Likewise, Kevin Neal, 43, rammed his vehicle into an elementary school in Rancho Tehama, California, in November 2014, before opening fire inside the center and killing five adults and committing suicide during the chase. rear police.
The attack on the Robb school is thus a reflection of the little progress made by the US authorities in the decade that has passed since the Sandy Hook massacre and also takes place less than two weeks after an 18-year-old follower of theories Supremacists murdered ten African-Americans in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.
In fact, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warned in April that firearms had become the first factor of death for children and adolescents in the North American country, already ahead of car accidents.
A study conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan using data from the CDC, which collects figures from 2020, concluded that 45,222 people died that year in armed incidents, including some 4,300 under the age of 19, reflecting a year-on-year increase in 29.5 percent, more than double the relative increase among the general population.
For its part, the database managed by the non-profit research group Gun Violence Archive, shows that more than 23,000 people, including approximately 1,650 children and adolescents, have died or been injured due to incidents related to weapons in the United States. this year.
In this sense, former President Barack Obama has stressed that “almost ten years after Sandy Hook and ten days after Buffalo, the country is paralyzed, not by terror, but by a gun lobby and a political party – — referring to Republicans — who have shown no willingness to act in any way to help prevent these types of tragedies.”
“Some action should have already been taken, any type of action. It is another tragedy, a quieter one, but no less tragic, for families who have to wait another day,” he said on his Twitter account, before acknowledging that the families in the country “are worried about what might happen tomorrow when they drop off their children at school, take them shopping or in any other public space”.
The current tenant of the White House, Joe Biden, has outlined that “it is time to act” to regulate firearms. “When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?” “Watch your friends die “as if you were on a battlefield.”
“These kinds of mass shootings rarely happen in other parts of the world. Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we keep letting this happen?” turn pain into action.
Along these lines, the Archbishop of San Antonio, Gustavo Garcia-Siller, has asked the authorities to work with the population to put a stop to this situation, which he has described as “too heavy a burden.” “These massacres cannot be considered the new normal,” he has criticized him.
“The Catholic Church consistently advocates the protection of all lives and these mass shootings are the most urgent issue on which everyone in society must act, both elected leaders and citizens,” he settled, according to the American television network CNN.