It’s been a year since the horrific shooting at Uvalde, Texas. Salvador Rolando Ramos grabbed an AR-15 rifle and decided to kill nineteen students at Robb Elementary School and two teachers. The police response numbered 400 officers, including local and federal law enforcement. The timeline of the response to this active shooter event was a fiasco, revised nearly a dozen times, pointing to a disturbing aspect of this shooting: the officers refused to respond appropriately. They waited in the hall near the room where Ramos barricaded himself. The death toll would not have been as high if officers responded to the event as they should.
There were stories that they were waiting for the keys. It later was revealed that the door wasn’t even locked. Security cam footage showed officers waiting in the hall for over an hour while Ramos continued to murder students inside the classroom. There were tragic stories of multiple 911 calls coming from the students inside. The fallout led to the resignation of the Uvalde School District police chief. Still, families of the victims feel that they’ve been stonewalled on new information regarding the investigative efforts into this shooting (via NBC News):
Parents have been fighting for a full accounting, but a promised city investigation hasn’t happened and a lot of information is bottled up in the district attorney's own investigation.
As some facts have come out, they've often contradicted “official” versions of what happened. Jesse Rizo, Jacklyn's uncle, said he feels the trickling out of facts are the spirits of the slain children answering the questions of their parents and loved ones.
Rizo, who has joined Cazares in his activism for accountability and reform, said the year after the massacre has been a series of letdowns.
“All of these things are coming down the pipeline and you are like, damn, that’s a letdown, that’s a letdown, that’s a letdown. And so you begin to wonder if you have it wrong,” he said. “What am I doing? Why am I not good enough to convince these people that their actions are wrong. For a little bit, you start believing that.”
But Rizo said they somehow re-energize to keep up their fight, because they are trying to save somebody else’s life, prevent someone else’s grief. "That’s the reason to hope," he said. "Hope and faith is the only thing we have left."
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There have been bits and pieces of new information, including a grisly discovery at the crime scene where Ramos had written “LOL” on the wall in the victims’ blood. It shocked the nation, but Ramos was another shooter with a long history of mentally disturbing behavior, including social media posts reportedly showing him murdering cats. He was known to law enforcement as well. The article also included efforts regarding new gun control legislation, but the bill to increase the age limit to buy long guns stalled and is unlikely to reemerge soon. The shooting also highlights again how this is a mental health issue, which liberals dismiss wholly, claiming that the mentally ill are the ones who are more likely to be the victims of violence. That may be, but it also cannot be denied that some of the worst mass shootings were committed by people who were insane.
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