Texas shooting latest news: Trump speaks at NRA meeting as Abbott ‘livid’ over police errors

As police dithered for over an hour on how to respond to the Uvalde shooting, one mother took things into her own hands.

Angeli Rose Gomez, a mother of a second-grader at Robb Elementary School, told The Wall Street Journal that when she heard about the shooting in progress, she drove 40 miles to the school to rescure her two children.

A US Marshal then put her in handcuffs because she was attempting to get inside, with federal agents deeming this intervening in an active investigation.

She knew some local police officers, who convinced the Marshals to uncuff her.

Then, distancing herself from the crowd, she hopped a fence and ran into the school to rescue her children.

To an outsider looking, it might not seem that strange that police in Uvalde are giving their main updates to the public in English.

But that’s a glaring omission, given the local context. As Los Angeles Times writer Fidel Martinez notes, most residents of the small South Texas town speak Spanish as a first language, raising the question: whom are these updates really for?

“Their focus appears to be to exculpate themselves from their abject failure to [national] press,” Mr Martinez wrote on Twitter on Friday.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott says he is “livid” about what he’s learned of the police response to the Uvalde mass shooting—and so are families in the tight-knit South Texas community.

“Law enforcement is going to earn the trust of the public by making sure they thoroughly and exhaustively investigate exactly what happened,” Mr Abbott said on Friday.

As more details about the school shooting emerge, it’s clear multiple law enforcement failures contributed to the tragic final death toll of 21 people.

Officers made bizarre decisions, missed key factors, or failed to follow protocol at seemingly every moment along the way, from long before the shooting to its crucial early moments.

Josh Marcus has the details.

Former President Donald Trump mocked other Republicans for pulling out of the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting in Houston after the shooting in Uvalde killed 21 people earlier this week.

Mr Trump addressed the annual meeting at the George R Brown Convention Center just three days after Salvador Ramos opened fire and killed 19 children and two adults at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

“And unlike some, I didn’t disappoint you by not showing up,” Mr Trump told the crowd to applause.

Eric Garcia has the story.

Donald Trump made a not-so-subtle link between Tuesday’s mass school shooting in Uvalde and the fate of Republicans around the country.

He told the audience at a National Rifle Association event in Houston that the Second Amendment was “under siege” by people who “wish to turn citisens into subjects and take more power for themselves,” a seeming reference to gun control proposals.

As a result, the former president said, Republican voters are going to “vote for tough on crime, pro-Second Amendment candidates in record numbers” in 202, then take back the White House in 2024.

“We are going to protect our communities, protect our schools, and protect our precious children,” he said. “We are going to secure our liberties for ourselves and for every generation.”

Just three days after 21 people were killed in a mass school shooting in Texas, Donald Trump is bragging at an NRA event in Houston about how he was the “best friend” of gun owners while he was in the White House.

Mr Trump highlighted how he deemed gun stores critical infrastructure during the pandemic.

He also spoke about an upcoming Supreme Court decision on self-defence rights, touting how he appointed three conservative Justices to the high court.

“Your rights to self-defence do not end when you step out your front,” he said.

Trump joined Ted Cruz and other Republican officials and gun rights proponents in blaming “evil” and the nation’s mental health – as well as what he characterised as an American culture in decline, a lack of discipline and the erosion of so-called family values – for the epidemic of mass gun violence.

He also claimed that the “only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” – despite more than a dozen police officers on the scene at Robb Elementary that failed to stop the gunman while children called 911 at least nine times over an hour before he was killed.

While speaking at the largest gun rights lobby convention in the US days after a mass killing of schoolchildren in Texas, Donald Trump claims Democrats are rushing to “exploit the tears of crying families” for political reasons.

Without any sense of irony with his own remarks and the American right’s attempts to allow the proliferation of guns at the expense of mass death, the former president condemned what he called a “grotesque effort by some in our society to advance their own extreme political agenda” in the wake of such attacks.

A National Rifle Association rally concert scheduled for Saturday has been cancelled after several performers dropped out in the wake of the Uvalde massacre, according to reports.

In remarks to the NRA’s legislative conference in Houston, the former president condemned the “savage and barbaric atrocity” in Uvalde before asking for a moment of silence and reading the names of the 19 children and two teachers killed in the attack.

The sound of a bell ringing followed each name.

He said the gunman will burn eternally “in the fires of hell.”