NEW DELHI, May 25: At least 22 people including 19 school children, all of one class and were seated in one room, were killed in a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Texas in the United States on Wednesday. The shocking episode was 199th such incident in the first five months in the US in the current year, according to the statistics widely shared on Twitter.
The gunman, who was killed by the police, has been identified as 18-year-old Salvador Ramos. Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) officials said the gunman was believed to have shot his grandmother before heading to Robb Elementary School around noon where he abandoned his vehicle and entered with a handgun and a rifle, wearing body armour.
The shooter was a victim of bullying who “lashed out violently at strangers before buying two semi-automatic rifles on his 18th birthday. Friends and relatives said Salvador Ramos, 18, was bullied “over a childhood speech impediment” and “suffered from a fraught home life”. It is also believed that he dropped out of school on numerous occasions due to bullying.
Two parents from the elementary school who knew Ramos said he was a reclusive man with a “temper.” They described him as a “serious” man who often talked back to his mother in his younger years, but said they were shocked that he would carry out such an attack.
In one Instagram story he put footage of him screaming at his mother, saying she was trying to kick him out of their home, a high school classmate said. “He posted videos on his Instagram where the cops were there and he’d call his mom a b**** and say she wanted to kick him out,” he said. “He’d be screaming and talking to his mom really aggressively.”
The scale of the destruction has horrified the people across the world. “199mass shootings so far this year. That’s an average of 10 shootings every single week. Cue the empty posturing and hollow condolences from the powers that be. Sickening,” t some tweets said.
“There have been 199 mass shootings in the US in 2022. There have been 27 school shootings. There have only been 144 days this year,” another tweet said. Despite recurring mass-casualty shootings, multiple initiatives to reform gun regulations have failed in the US Congress, leaving states and local councils to strengthen – or weaken – their own restrictions. The US suffered 19,350 firearm homicides in 2020, up nearly 35 per cent on 2019, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in its latest data.
(Manas Dasgupta)