Time to stand up to gun lobby, says Joe Biden

A visibly shaken Joe Biden called on Americans to stand up to the US gun lobby after a teenager killed 19 schoolchildren and two adults at a Texas primary school.

Grief-stricken children and parents gathered in the Texan town of Uvalde after the massacre at a local elementary school. Picture: Reuters

A visibly shaken Joe Biden called on Americans to stand up to the US gun lobby after a teenager killed 19 schoolchildren and two adults, including at least one teacher, at a Texas primary school.

Salvador Ramos, an 18-year-old high school student, shot his 66-year-old grandmother before entering the grounds of Robb ­Elementary School at Uvalde around lunch on Tuesday (Wednesday AEST), carrying at least one assault rife, shooting students aged between seven and nine ­before being shot dead by police.

“It’s time to turn this pain into action for every parent and citizen in this country,” the US President said, without proposing any particular changes to America’s patchwork of notoriously permissive gun laws. “As a nation we have to ask: when in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby … Why are we willing to live with this carnage” he added, glancing sadly at his wife Jill buy his side.

Ramos, who had posted multiple imagines of guns on social media in the weeks leading up to the shooting, drove to the school before committing a massacre that has devastated the largely Hispanic town of about 16,000 people 130km outside San Antonioand near the Mexican border.

“This is just evil,” Uvalde resident Rey Chapa told The New York Times at the scene. “I’m afraid I’m going to know a lot of these kids that were killed.”

Adolfo Hernandez said his nephew had been in a classroom during the shooting. “He actually witnessed his little friend get shot in the face,” he told the paper. The friend, he said, “got shot in the nose and he just went down, and my nephew was devastated.”

The shooting came less than two weeks after 18-year-old gunman Peyton Gendron shot and killed 10 shoppers in a racially ­motivated ­attack in Buffalo, New York, inflaming an already heated national debate about gun control at the same time as crime has been rising.

“I am sick and tired. We have to act. And don’t tell me we can’t have impact on this carnage,” Mr Biden said in the Oval Office hours after arriving back in Washington from Japan and ordering flags on public buildings be flown at half-mast.

This latest massacre, to which police haven’t ascribed any ­motive, was the third worst school or university shooting in the US, ­behind the 2012 murder of 26 students and teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, and the 32 students killed in Virginia Tech university in 2007.

“These kinds of mass shooting rarely happen anywhere else in the world. Why? They have mental health problems, domestic disputes, they have people who are lost, but never happen with kind of frequency they happen here,” Mr Biden said.

Pete Arredondo, police chief of the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District, said several adults and students had also been injured and were being treated in hospital, suggesting the final death toll could rise.

The 27th school shooting this year will intensify debate between Democrats, who typically support tough limits on guns, and Republicans, who tend not to, potentially elevating the policy issue five months out from midterm congressional elections in November. Mass shootings have risen from 417 in 2019 to 693 in 2021.

The shooting occurred on the day of the biggest days of primary voting across the US, including in Texas, whose Governor, Republican Greg Abbott, is due to attend the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting in Houston on Friday. Texas Attorney-General Ken Paxton, speaking after the massacre, said teachers should be armed with guns, dismissing policies to reduce the number of guns as unrealistic. “If we’re going to save these kids, we have to have people prepared and trained to act appropriate and quickly,” he said on cable news.

Democrat Joe Manchin from Western Virginia, who holds a key balance of power vote in the Senate, said it made “no sense at all why we can’t do common sense things and try to prevent some of this from happening”.

Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell, a well-known supporter of gun ownership rights, said he was “horrified and heartbroken” by the tragedy but didn’t indicate he would support any reform.

Former president Barack Obama, in a tweet, blamed the lack of progress on toughing US gun laws on “a gun lobby and a political party that have shown no willingness to act in any way that might help prevent these tragedies”.

Gun laws vary by state; debate revolves around the extent of background checks on gun buyers, the types of guns that can be bought, and how they are stored.

The constitutional right to carry a gun in the US, enshrined in the US constitution, has frustrated attempts to reduce the spread of firearms. About three in 10 Americans own what experts estimate to be a national total of more than 400 million guns; 40 per cent of households say they live in a household with access to a gun, according to Pew Research.

More than 50 per cent of Americans said they believe US gun laws should be stricter, according to a late 2021 Gallup poll.