America’s powerful pro-gun lobby, the NRA, held its annual meeting in Texas on Friday amid controversy, just three days after the horrific shooting at a school in that American state.
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A few hours’ drive from Uvalde Elementary School, where an 18-year-old teenager killed 19 children and two teachers on Tuesday, the NRA is organizing its high mass in the presence of former President Donald Trump.
The former White House tenant confirmed his attendance on Wednesday, saying the United States “needs real solutions and real leadership at this time, not politicians and partisan deliberations.”
“Therefore, I will fulfill my longstanding commitment to speak at the NRA conference in Texas,” he said, promising “an important speech to the American people.”
The pro-gun lobby meeting comes at a time when police are being fired upon by critics who are suspected of taking too long to intervene at Uvalde’s school.
According to a video and numerous testimonies, the parents waited an eternity in front of the school without the police intervening, while high school student Salvador Ramos committed his massacre in a classroom.
“About an hour” after the suspect entered the school, US Border Patrol units arrived, “broke into the school and killed the suspect,” said Victor Escalon, the Texas Department of Security’s regional director.
In the face of extensive press and the pain felt by families, he reiterated that there was “a lot of information, a lot of vacillating points” in the investigation. “It takes days, hours, it takes time.”
He said that contrary to what had previously been mentioned, the perpetrator of the massacre faced “no one”, no police, before entering the school.
Before entering, Mr. Escalon pointed out that he shot the school. “Four minutes later” arrived the first local police on site. “They hear gunshots, take bullets, retreat and take cover,” the police chief said Thursday. It was then Tuesday, 11:40 am, and Salvador Ramos was at Robb Elementary School.
From that moment, parents began to arrive in front of the school.
In a video posted to social media and obtained by Storyful, we can see frustrated parents urging the police to enter the facility at the time of the tragedy. The footage also shows a police officer roughly pushing one of the individuals out of the establishment.
Daniel Myers, a 72-year-old pastor, arrived outside the school with his wife Matilda about 30 minutes after the shooter entered the school.
The on-site parents “were willing to return (to the facility). One of the relatives said, “I was in the military, just give me a gun and I’ll go. I will not hesitate. I’ll go,” he told AFP.
“During this period,” Victor Escalon said during his press conference, police hit by gunfire “were evacuated, staff, students, teachers… Lots of things are happening, it’s complex.” Then, an hour later, the specialized police arrived and killed the young man behind the massacre.
In addition to the 21 dead, 17 people were injured, including three police officers. The shooter had targeted his grandmother with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle before he went to school.
On Thursday, the manufacturer of this weapon announced that it would not be attending the NRA conference.
President Joe Biden will go Sunday with his wife Jill to “share the grief of the community” of this small town, angered by one of the country’s worst gun shootings in recent years.
The tragedy has stunned Uvalde, a mostly Hispanic town of 16,000 people halfway between San Antonio and the Mexican border.
In addition to a similar memorial in front of the school, 21 white crosses were placed around a fountain in Uvalde’s central square to commemorate each of the victims.
Dozens of residents, relatives, students and friends gathered there on Thursday and laid wreaths of flowers, as did Meghan Markle, wife of Britain’s Prince Harry.
“Love you cousin see you next time,” wrote a young girl on the cross, representing one of the victims, Jackie Cazares.
On Tuesday, the sound of the gunshots was “very loud,” Madison Saiz, an 8-year-old student in one of the school’s other classes, told AFP. “When it happened, our teacher told us to go to a corner, and our whole class just did it.”
The shooter’s mother, Adriana Reyes, told ABC that her son is not a “freak” but can be “aggressive” at times. Presented as a victim of harassment, he was “a stalker” himself in high school, two students who knew him told AFP.
In the United States, school shootings are a recurring scourge against which successive governments have been powerless.
The debate over gun regulation in the country has all but stalled amid a lack of hope that Congress will pass an ambitious national law on the issue.
The March for our Lives movement, formed after the Parkland shootings, called a June 11 rally in Washington to demand tougher gun laws.