Texas shooting latest news: Police ‘waited outside despite pleas for action’

The Texas school shooter who gunned down 19 children and two teachers messaged a woman online just hours earlier saying: “I got a lil secret I wanna tell you.”

Salvador Ramos, 18, appeared to hint at his plans to attack at Robb Elementary in Uvalde in an alleged private Instagram chat with the woman, telling her “I’m about to.”

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The shooter’s gunman has broken her silence following the school attack that killed 19 students and two teachers and says that her son “wasn’t a violent person”, Graeme Massie reports.

Tributes and memorials are being paid to the 21 victims of the shooting. See here:

Nineteen children and two teachers were killed in the school shooting on Tuesday.

Texas police arrested a boy in posession of an AK-47-style pistol and a toy AR-15-style rifle at school on Wednesday, the day after a mass shooting in the state left 21 dead at an elementary school in the small town of Uvalde, Josh Marcus reports.

Police were called on Wednesday morning in the town of Richardson, a Dallas suburb, on reports that a male was seen walking towards Berkner High School holding what looked like a rifle.

President Joe Biden said Wednesday that “the Second Amendment is not absolute” as he called for new gun control measures in the wake of this week’s massacre at a Texas elementary school.

When the amendment was approved, “you couldn’t own a cannon. You couldn’t own certain kinds of weapons. There’s always been limitations,” said the president while speaking at the White House before signing an executive order on policing on the second anniversary of George Floyd’s death.

He that he would visit Texas with first lady Jill Biden in the coming days to “hopefully bring some little comfort to the community.”

“As a nation, I think we must all be there for them,” the president added. “And we must ask, when in God’s name will we do what’s needed to be done.”

After Tuesday’s massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Democratic governors and lawmakers across the country issued impassioned pleas for Congress and their own legislatures to pass gun restrictions.

But aside from a few Democratic-controlled states, the majority have taken no action on gun control in recent years or have moved aggressively to expand gun rights.

That’s because they are either controlled politically by Republicans who oppose gun restrictions or are politically divided, leading to a stalemate.

“Here I am in a position where I can do something, I can introduce legislation, and yet to know that it almost certainly is not going to go anywhere is a feeling of helplessness,” said state senator Greg Leding, a Democrat in the GOP-controlled Arkansas Legislature. He has pushed unsuccessfully for red flag laws that would allow authorities to remove firearms from those determined to be a danger to themselves or others.

Republicans, including Texas governor Greg Abbott, have mostly called for amping up the efforts to address mental health and increase protections at school.

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Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer has quickly set in motion a pair of firearms background check bills in response to the elementary school shooting in Texas.

“Please, please, please damn it — put yourselves in the shoes of these parents just for once,” said Mr Schumer as he implored his Republican colleagues to cast aside the powerful gun lobby.

“If the slaughter of schoolchildren can’t convince Republicans to buck the NRA, what can we do?”

Earlier on Tuesday night, president Joe Biden told the nation it was time to “turn this pain into action” and change gun laws.

“Why are we willing to live with this carnage?” he said, hoarsely and visibly emotional. “Where in God’s name is our backbone, to have the courage to deal with this and stand up to the [gun] lobbies?”

While most Americans support tighter gun laws, fewer are confident that politicians will take action, found a Reuter-Ipsos poll released on Wednesday.

In the poll conducted one day after a Texas gunman killed 21 people at an elementary school, about 84 per cent of respondents said they supported background checks for all firearms sales.

About 70 per cent of 940 participants said they backed “red flag” laws that would allow authorities to confiscate guns from people found to be a threat to public safety. Another 72 per cent supported raising the age to buy a gun from 18 to 21.

However, only 35 per cent of the respondents felt that Congress will act to strengthen gun laws this year, while 49 per cent said they were “not confident” this would happen.

A majority of participants, about 65 per cent, believed that mass shooting incidents happened frequently because of the easy availability of firearms.

Michele Gay was devastated by the massacre at a Texas elementary school and its aching parallels to the 2012 attack in Connecticut when she lost her daughter at Sandy Hook.

Like the Newtown gunman, the attacker in Texas was a young man who shot an older family member he lived with before opening fire with an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle inside a nearby elementary school, slaughtering small and defenseless children.

It was all the more saddening in light of the work she has invested in the years since to promote school safety.

“This one has been particularly devastating for me, for my family, for our community, Sandy Hook. We’re just literally transported back in time,” said Ms Gay, co-founder of the nonprofit Safe and Sound Schools. “I’ve got to dig deep. I’m not going to lie.”

In the decade since 20 children and six educators were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary, some of their loved ones who channeled grief into advocacy have claimed success, gradually, in areas including gun safety, attitudes around gun violence, and mental health awareness. The attack in Uvalde has tested their resolve like no other.

As details of Tuesday’s shooting emerged, Matt Vogl was texting with Jennifer Hensel, whose daughter Avielle was killed in Newtown, and others involved in an advocacy effort named in the girl’s honor, the Avielle Initiative, which promotes efforts to make mental health care more widely available through technology.

“We were all just crying and texting. It’s brutal because it triggers some of the darkest memories we have,” said Mr Vogl, executive director at the National Mental Health Innovation Center in Colorado, where the program is based.

The effort was launched after the Newtown attack by Hensel and her husband, Jeremy Richman, who died by suicide in 2019.

“If I can’t stay optimistic I need to quit and find something else to do. On days like today it’s all you got. The vast majority of people don’t go into schools and shoot them up,” he said.