Uvalde Elementary School Shooting: Families in Texas Grieve Loss of 19 Children in Shooting (Published 2022) (2024)

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The deadliest U.S. school shooting in a decade shakes a rural Texas town.

It was not known how many were killed in the first minutes of the massacre, which was the deadliest in an American school since 20 children and six educators were shot to death at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in 2012. But officials said that the officers had successfully contained the gunman, identified as Salvador Ramos, until more specially trained officers could arrive.

Yet even as the details of the attack became more clear, the motivation behind the eruption of violence remained frustratingly opaque. In the absence of an explanation, there was only deep grief in a community unaccustomed to outside attention, and a raw renewal of the national debate over firearms legislation and the stupefying tally of gun violence in America.

By Wednesday, all of the victims had been identified by the officials, who had yet to release their names, but the toll of the tragedy was only beginning to take shape.

All 21 fatalities occurred in a single area of the school, the authorities said. They included Eva Mireles, a teacher who ran marathons in her free time, and Jailah Silguero, 10, the youngest of four children. “I can’t believe this happened to my daughter,” said her father, Jacob Silguero, crying during an interview. “It’s always been a fear of mine to lose a kid.”

President Biden said he would travel to Uvalde in the coming days to try to comfort the residents. He did not call on Congress to take up gun safety legislation but in remarks on Wednesday said that the “Second Amendment is not absolute” and that previous gun safety laws did not violate its constitutional protections. “These actions we’ve taken before, they save lives,” he said. “They can do it again.”

Still, with little apparent opening at the federal level, states controlled by Democrats moved to introduce their own changes. In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul said she would work to raise to 21 — “at a minimum” — the age for buying AR-15-style weapons like the one the Texas gunman used. In California, the State Senate advanced a bill along party lines, proposed by Gov. Gavin Newsom and modeled on Texas’ restrictive abortion law, that would let private citizens sue those who make or sell outlawed ghost guns, ghost gun kits and assault-style weapons.

“This state is leaning in,” Mr. Newsom said. “We’re leaning forward.”

In Uvalde, top Texas officials gathered for an emotional news conference that began with calls for unity in the aftermath of the killing. “It is intolerable and unacceptable to have in this state anybody who would kill little kids in our schools,” said Gov. Greg Abbott, who has celebrated the loosening of gun regulations in Texas and pushed for a new law last year that allows most Texans to carry a gun without a permit.

But the somber tone that Mr. Abbott sought to strike was upended by Beto O’Rourke, the Democrat challenging Mr. Abbott’s re-election, who blamed the governor for the repeated carnage in the state. “The time to stop the next shooting is right now and you are doing nothing,” Mr. O’Rourke said.

“Sit down, you’re out of line and an embarrassment,” the lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, responded.

The interruption and resulting vitriol from the stage, filled almost entirely with Republican officials, revealed in an instant the entrenched battle lines over gun ownership and mass killing in the United States.

“I hate to say this but there are more people who are shot every weekend in Chicago than there are in schools in Texas,” Mr. Abbott said later. He criticized “people who think that, well, ‘Maybe we just implement tougher gun laws — it’s going to solve it,’” saying that “Chicago and L.A. and New York disprove that thesis.”

Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois responded later by pointing to evidence that “the majority of guns used in Chicago shootings come from states with lax gun laws.”

Mr. Patrick said limiting entrances to just one at smaller schools could be a solution to keeping students safe. He also suggested arming teachers. Mr. Abbott stressed the need for better mental health care, though he did not propose how to improve access to it in the state.

Yet in the case of Mr. Ramos, there was little to raise official alarm ahead of the shooting, officials said. No history of mental illness. No apparent criminal record. “We don’t see a motive or catalyst right now,” said Steven McCraw, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety.

But those who knew the gunman said he had been slipping away: He appeared to have dropped out of high school and often frightened co-workers at a fast-food restaurant where he worked. When picked on, he would lash out in response. Acquaintances said he frequently missed class and had few friends.

“He would curse at the customers, at the managers, even at me,” said Jocelyn Rodriguez, 19, an employee at the Wendy’s restaurant. She recalled that he once told her, “I’m going to shoot up the Wendy’s,” but she never took his threats seriously. “I thought he was joking.”

Two weeks ago, she said, he stopped showing up to work.

He purchased an AR-style rifle at a local retailer on May 17, a day after his 18th birthday. Then he bought another one on May 20, officials said. In between, he bought 375 rounds of ammunition.

He had been messaging obliquely about his plans with a 15-year-old girl in Germany who he had recently met online. The girl, who asked to be identified only by her nickname, Cece, said he had video-called her in the days around his birthday from a gun store, where he told her he was buying a rifle. Mr. Ramos also showed her, on the video call, a black bag that appeared to hold many magazines of ammunition and at least one gun.

On Tuesday morning, parents dropped their children off at Robb Elementary, a cheerful brick schoolhouse near the edge of Uvalde where everyone was preparing for summer break.

Narcedalia Luna and her 8-year-old grandson, a third grader, attended an end-of-the-year awards program in the school’s cafeteria. But her grandson told her that he wanted to go home early. So they did. “I gave in and I’m glad I did,” she said.

They returned to their home on Diaz Street.

Along that same short street, less than half a mile from the school, Mr. Ramos lived in a modest home with his grandmother. On Tuesday morning, Mr. Ramos texted the girl in Germany just after 11 a.m., apparently annoyed that his grandmother was calling AT&T about his cellphone. “Ima do something to her rn,” he wrote. The screenshots do not show Cece replying, but at 11:21 a.m., Mr. Ramos sent another text: “I just shot my grandma in her head,” followed immediately by another: “Ima go shoot up a elementary school rn.”

Mr. Ramos, officials said, had picked up one of the weapons he had bought, and shot his 66-year-old grandmother in the face.

The injured woman rushed to a neighbor’s house for help while Mr. Ramos sped off in her pickup truck, bringing with him a bag of ammunition and the two weapons. Ms. Luna said another neighbor spotted the grandmother with “blood on her face running across the street.”

The truck Mr. Ramos was driving, officials said, crashed at high speed next to the school at roughly 11:30 a.m.

As he approached the school, officials said, he encountered an Uvalde school district officer. There were conflicting reports, state police officials said, as to whether there was an exchange of gunfire at that point.

As the gunman approached, Juan Paulo Ybarra Jr. said, his little sister, a 10-year-old student at Robb Elementary, had been inside her fourth-grade class, watching a movie. He said she looked out of the classroom window and saw a man outside with a gun, then alerted her teacher. Soon the classroom could hear gunfire aimed toward nearby windows, she told him.

Mr. Ybarra said his sister described how she and her fellow classmates jumped out of the window, one by one, and ran to a funeral home across the street, seeking refuge.

The gunman entered the school. After he was inside, two officers from the Uvalde Police Department arrived, engaged the gunman and were immediately met with gunfire, officials said. Both were shot.

Soon, scores of police officers responded to the scene, but the gunman had barricaded himself inside what Mr. Abbott described as internally connected classrooms. It would take a tactical team, including specialized Border Patrol agents, to finally breach the room.

As they entered, one of the agents held up a shield so the other agents could file in behind, an official briefed on the investigation said. Three of the agents fired their weapons once they were in the room, striking the gunman several times and killing him shortly after 1 p.m.

In Uvalde, which lies in a rural area near the Mexican border dotted with desert willows and bigtooth maples, there are so few places to host large events that the governor’s news conference took place in the same high school the gunman had attended.

Classes were supposed to let out on Thursday for the summer. Instead the year ended early as parents were faced with the unthinkable, waiting for hours on Tuesday for the dreaded confirmation about the fate of their children, some having provided DNA swabs to prove their relationship.

“They were beautiful, innocent children,” said George Rodriguez, who had ties to two children killed in a shooting: a niece and a 10-year-old boy, Jose Flores, who he said had been like a grandson. Mr. Rodriguez said a counseling session at the local civic center had offered little relief from the pain of losing the boy whose photo he kept in his wallet, “my little Josécito.”

Reporting was contributed by James Dobbins, Jesus Jiménez, Michael Levenson, David Montgomery, Josh Peck, Frances Robles, Edgar Sandoval, Michael D. Shear, Eileen Sullivan and Glenn Thrush. Susan C. Beachy, Jack Begg and Kirsten Noyes contributed research.

Irma Garcia, one of the killed teachers, was like a ‘second mom’ to her students.

Nothing in the hospital.

So Mr. Martinez, 21, kept driving, trying to hold out hope that Tia Garcia, as he referred to his aunt in Spanish, was alive. Eventually he heard his mother yell at his father, a retired Border Patrol officer who had been receiving updates from the Sheriff’s Office.

“Just tell me, is she coming home?” Mr. Martinez recalled his mother, Claudia Martinez, asking. “Tell me right now.”

“My dad said, ‘She won’t be coming home,’” Mr. Martinez recalled. “I mean, I almost had to pull over. Really, it was so traumatic.”

Then came the official word from the authorities. His aunt, a teacher of more than two decades and a mother of four, had been killed in the country’s deadliest school shooting in a decade. Nineteen students and two teachers, including Ms. Garcia, were dead.

Mr. Martinez said the authorities had told his father, Carlos Martinez, that when officers entered the classroom where the massacre occurred, they had “found her body there, embracing children in her arms pretty much until her last breath.”

His family gathered on Tuesday evening in Ms. Garcia’s home, processing the news together. A sister of Ms. Garcia’s screamed “Irma” over and over, begging God to bring her back.

“Everybody was in shambles,” John Martinez said.

On Wednesday, he was trying to remember his favorite memories of her: How she would crack jokes at family gatherings, sing her favorite classic rock tunes and help him with homework. She loved barbecue and country cruises to Concan along the Frio River.

Ms. Garcia had been like a “second mom” to both Mr. Martinez and her students, he said. The family was confident she had tried her best to save them in those final moments.

“I can’t believe it,” he said. “It feels like a nightmare.”

His family’s grief only worsened on Thursday.

Joe Garcia, Ms. Garcia’s husband, dropped off flowers at his wife’s memorial that morning, Mr. Martinez said. He had been ruptured with grief when he lost his wife of 24 years. They had raised four children together: the oldest 23, and the rest teenagers.

When Mr. Garcia, 50, got back home, he “pretty much just fell over” and died of a heart attack, Mr. Martinez said.

“I’m really in shock right now.”

Teacher Eva Mireles is remembered for going ‘above and beyond’ to help students.

Ms. Mireles, she said, threw herself into the work. “She used every teaching method she knew to help Gabby reach her highest potential,” she said. “She never saw that potential as lower than anyone else’s in her classroom. She made sure Gabby was included. She was just above and beyond as far as teachers go.”

The mother and teacher stayed in close touch over the course of that third-grade year, and their bond continued through the subsequent years, even as Gabby and Ms. Garcia moved to San Antonio, where they now live. Ms. Garcia said that Ms. Mireles would sometimes reach out at Christmastime; Gabby had given her a Christmas tree ornament, and when Ms. Mireles took it out to hang it up she would be reminded of Gabby and reach out to ask about her former student. “I want you to know I treasure it so much,” she would say of the ornament.

Ms. Garcia watched the news unfold this week in stunned disbelief. She did not hold the news back from Gabby. And she said she knew that her daughter understood what had happened. At one point, Ms. Garcia said, Gabby said that she loved Ms. Mireles for having taken care of her. And Gabby said she hoped that Ms. Mireles had not felt too much pain.

‘Why the kids?’ In close-knit Uvalde, it’s everyone’s loss.

Xavier’s classroom, where a nightmare erupted when a gunman burst in and killed 19 children and two teachers, reflected the close-knit character of Uvalde, a Mexican American ranching town in southern Texas where lives are braided together by generations of friendships and marriage.

There was Xavier and his elementary-school sweetheart, who was also killed in the shooting. There were cousins Jackie Cazares, who had her First Communion two weeks ago, and Annabelle Rodriguez, an honor-roll student. There was Amerie Jo Garza, a grinning 10-year-old whose father said she “talked to everybody” at recess and lunch.

On Wednesday, their deaths united Uvalde in anguish as families began to grapple with the toll of the deadliest school massacre since the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., 10 years ago.

“Why? Why him? Why the kids?” Leonard Sandoval, 54, Xavier’s grandfather, said as he stood outside the family’s home, holding one of Xavier’s younger brothers by his side as relatives and friends trickled up the driveway to drop off bottled water and fried chicken.

They remembered Xavier as an exuberant baseball and soccer player who jumped at the chance to help his father do landscaping work or dance around on TikTok videos with his siblings and cousins.

Everyone in Uvalde, a town of about 15,200 about 60 miles from the country’s southern border, seemed to know one of the children who had been gunned down. Or had gone to high school with one of the victims’ parents or grandparents. Or had lost several family members.

“I lost two,” George Rodriguez, 72, said in between sobs as he climbed out of his Domino’s pizza delivery truck to greet a friend on Wednesday afternoon. “My grandson and a niece. I lost two.”

“I know, I know,” Mr. Rodriguez’s friend, Joe Costilla, replied. “We lost our cousin too.”

The scene replayed itself again and again across the leafy neighborhoods of modest homes surrounding the elementary school where about 90 percent of the 500 students are Hispanic.

Cousins, aunts and uncles pulled up in pickup trucks. Crying friends shared long hugs on families’ front lawns. Mourners drove from house to house and made phone call after phone call, stitching together an unofficial roster of the dead before law enforcement officials had publicly identified the victims.

“If you drive through town, you can already feel it’s different,” said Liza Cazares, whose husband lost two 10-year-old cousins in the attack. “Those were 21 lives that we can’t get back.”

Mr. Rodriguez said he had attended counseling at the civic center early on Wednesday, but it offered him little reprieve from the pain. Instead, he said he asked his supervisor at Domino’s if he could pick up a shift.

“I just could not stay home and think about what happened all day,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “I had to work and try to distract my mind.”

He pulled a photo from his wallet showing 10-year-old Jose Flores — “my little Josécito” — whom Mr. Rodriguez said he had raised as a grandson. The boy wore a rose-colored T-shirt saying, “Tough guys wear pink.” Mr. Rodriguez broke down crying.

Mr. Costilla said he was a cousin by marriage of Eva Mireles, a beloved teacher at Robb Elementary who befriended children and adults with the same ease. She loved running marathons and teaching her fourth graders, having spent the last 17 years as a teacher, Mr. Costilla said. She had a daughter in her 20s and three dogs.

“She was really close to us,” Mr. Costilla said. They spent many weekends together barbecuing in his backyard, and would have fired up the grill again this upcoming Memorial Day weekend.

“But now she’s gone,” Mr. Costilla said.

Until this week, Uvalde was perhaps best known as the hometown of the actor Matthew McConaughey and John Nance Garner, a vice president under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1970, it became a center of anti-discrimination protests after Hispanic high school students staged weeks of walkouts.

San Juanita Hernandez, 25, a fifth-generation resident, said her teachers often invoked Uvalde’s history and famous names as they urged her and other students to do great things.

“Any homeroom teacher, football coach, would say, ‘Which one of you is going to bring us fame and put us on the map?’” Ms. Hernandez said.

Despite the proximity to the border and the presence of a U.S. Customs and Border Protection station in Uvalde, residents and city officials said most people were born in the area and had deep ties to the region’s ranching history. In the neighborhood around Robb Elementary, more than 40 percent of residents have lived in the same house for at least 30 years, according to census data.

The shared loss reverberating across Uvalde drew people to a 10 a.m. Mass on Wednesday at Sacred Heart Catholic Church. As they headed into the building, Rebecca and Luis Manuel Acosta said the shooting had taken a crushing toll on a community where it seemed there was no more than a few degrees of separation among families.

“I feel so afraid,” Ms. Acosta, 71, said. “I feel so much for those mothers.”

The close connections extended to the 18-year-old gunman, who the authorities say carried out the massacre before he was fatally shot by a Border Patrol agent. Ronnie Garza, a county commissioner, said he had known the suspect’s grandmother, who was wounded before the shooting spree at the school. He said one of his grandchildren had also known the suspect, who attended Uvalde High School.

“We are a community of faith, blue collar, agriculture workers,” Mr. Garza said.

As in much of Texas, gun ownership is sown deeply into Uvalde’s culture and government. Uvalde County, which includes the city, has elected conservative Democrats, but also twice voted for former President Donald J. Trump. The City Council passed a measure in October allowing city workers to bring a properly registered gun to work with them, and the Uvalde Police Department has handed out free gun locks to try to prevent accidental shootings, according to The Uvalde Leader-News.

Some residents said it was inappropriate to debate the nation’s gun policies when families were still waiting to bury their children. Others said they were infuriated by the slaughter of 19 young children after other recent mass shootings in Texas, including at a church in Sutherland Springs in 2017 and a high school in Santa Fe in 2018.

“All everybody wants to say is we’ll pray for you and we’re sorry for your loss, but that’s not good enough anymore,” said Rogelio M. Muñoz, who served on the City Council for 14 years. “Something needs to change. But what infuriates me is I know nothing is going to happen. Nobody’s going to do a damned thing about it.”

In Alfred Garza III’s darkened living room, a clutch of Mr. Garza’s friends from high school sat talking and trading memories as Mr. Garza grieved his daughter, Amerie Jo.

Mr. Garza, who works at a used car dealership in Uvalde, said he was on a lunch break on Tuesday when Amerie Jo’s mother told him she could not get their daughter out of the school because it was on lockdown.

“I just went straight over there and found the chaos,” he recalled, adding that he waited for hours before learning from the Texas Rangers that Amerie Jo had been killed. When he got home, he started to go through her pictures.

“That’s when I kind of had the release,” he said. “I started crying and started mourning.”

Reporting was contributed by Richard Fausset, Robert Gebeloff, David Montgomery, Christina Morales, Campbell Robertson, Jazmine Ulloa and John Yoon.

Democrats hit pause on gun control vote, hoping for a compromise.

But with the Republican position more intractable than ever, calls for negotiations to find some response to the recent horrors in Uvalde, Texas, and Buffalo, N.Y., left few lawmakers with much hope that Congress would produce anything meaningful.

“Please, please, please, damn it, put yourselves in the shoes of these parents for once,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, pleaded with his Republican colleagues, as he made the case for at least expanding background checks on gun purchasers.

Polls show that the proposal has support from as many as 90 percent of Americans, including many G.O.P. voters, but Republicans have effectively blocked action on it for the better part of a decade. Their stance reflects the potency of the issue of gun rights for the Republican base voters, whose zeal for the 2nd Amendment means that any G.O.P. lawmaker who embraces even the most modest form of gun control runs the risk of a primary challenge that could cost him his job.

Still, after Mr. Schumer initially cleared the way for a quick vote to put Republicans on the spot on background checks, he pulled back on Wednesday and said there was no point in doing so, given that their opposition was already “crystal clear.” Instead, he said he would try to find a consensus proposal that could draw in enough Republicans to break the inevitable filibuster.

“The plan is to work hard at a compromise for the next 10 days,” Senator Christopher S. Murphy of Connecticut, who has led the Democratic charge for gun safety legislation since Sandy Hook, said on Twitter on Tuesday. “Hopefully we succeed and the Senate can vote on a bipartisan bill that saves lives. But if we can’t find common ground, then we are going to take a vote on gun violence. The Senate will not ignore this crisis.”

On Thursday, the Senate will face the first test, moving to take up legislation approved by the House last week after the racist mass shooting in Buffalo, to bolster federal resources to prevent domestic terrorism. Mr. Schumer said if Republicans do not filibuster the procedural motion just to take up the measure, he will open the bill up to amendments from both parties to address gun violence.

There was little sign that a consensus was in the offing.

Republicans proposed the now-familiar litany of alternative responses — tighter “red flag” laws to make it easier for law enforcement to confiscate weapons from the mentally ill, more aggressive mental health interventions, and more armed guards at schools — many of which Democrats regard as woefully inadequate.

And Democrats questioned whether they could find any common ground with Republicans on more substantial gun violence measures, after previous proposals ultimately went nowhere.

“We’ve been burned so many times before” when it came to negotiating a bipartisan compromise, Mr. Schumer said.

The echoes between the Newtown, Conn., mass shooting at Sandy Hook in December 2012, which left 20 children and six adults dead, and the Uvalde, Texas, violence, which killed at least 19 children and two teachers, are painful. In both cases, a loner from the community attacked an elementary school, overpowering children and adults with an arsenal.

After Newtown, then-Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was charged with persuading a bipartisan coalition of at least 60 senators to act, and break a threatened filibuster by Republicans. On Tuesday night, a seemingly anguished President Biden made the case for “common sense gun laws,” including an assault weapons ban, and declared, “It’s time to turn this pain into action.”

But in remarks on Wednesday, Mr. Biden, too, appeared to hang back rather than call for specific action by Congress, referring vaguely to the need to show “backbone” and challenge the powerful gun lobby.

Then, as now, bipartisan legislation existed, written by Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, and Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, to impose universal criminal background checks for gun purchasers at gun shows and in internet sales. Then, as now, the barrier was the Senate’s requirement of 60 votes necessary to overcome a filibuster.

But in the intervening years, the partisan lines between Republican and Democrat have only hardened, not only on gun rights but on the much broader question of how to balance individual liberty against collective responsibility. On gun control, climate change, taxation and pandemic safety mandates, Republicans have seemingly decided individual rights trump a collective, societal response, regardless of the cost.

“Maybe it’s a personal responsibility not to shoot people with guns,” said Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, “and maybe people who don’t live up to that responsibility ought to be in prison for a very, very long time — like forever.”

Beyond elective office, some Republicans seemed to have had enough. Bill Frist, a former Tennessee senator who served as majority leader from 2003 to 2007, wrote on Twitter: “I can’t imagine this is what the Founding Fathers hoped for or intended. We can find ways to preserve the intent of the Second Amendment while also safeguarding the lives of our children.”

Such sentiments were hard to find among elected Republicans.

Mr. Schumer framed his call for negotiations as strategic. A quick vote on House-passed legislation to strengthen background checks would all but certainly be filibustered. Republicans would complain about wasting time with political show votes. Democrats would castigate Republicans for their opposition. Nothing would be accomplished, and the Senate would move on.

Negotiations, at least, could keep gun safety a live issue for a while.

“When things like this happen, I think it awakens sensibilities to the bigger picture — I will not say greater good, but the greater collective response,” Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia, said of the Uvalde bloodshed. “I think that’s what we’re all probably grappling with right now.”

But it was not clear that much had changed. Mr. Manchin indicated that he was not dropping his opposition to changing the Senate filibuster rules, which would allow Democrats to push through gun control legislation over unified Republican opposition. He insisted that, with good will, a broad compromise could be reached and such a move would be unnecessary.

“If we can’t get 70 or 75 senators that won’t vote to have a common sense protection of your children and grandchildren, what in the world are we here for?” Mr. Manchin demanded. “What’s your purpose for being in the United States Senate? If it’s not at least to protect the children?”

The initial start to talks has begun. Mr. Murphy reached out to Mr. Toomey and Senator Susan Collins of Maine, two of the four Republicans who voted for the bipartisan background check bill co-sponsored by Mr. Manchin in 2013.

“My interest in doing something to improve and expand our background check system remains,” Mr. Toomey told reporters.

The April 2013 vote for universal background checks garnered 54 votes. But eight of the “yes” votes for the bill have been replaced over the past decade by the potential votes of conservative Republicans.

On the other hand, five of the 2013 “no” votes have been replaced by Democrats — two in Georgia, one in New Hampshire, one in Arizona and one in Nevada.

But with a 60-vote threshold to clear in the Senate, the odds were still long. There was little indication that the murdered children of Uvalde, Texas, would shake the near-unanimous opposition to any measure limiting access to guns.

Asked what he would tell the parents of the slain children, Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama, told reporters, “I’m willing to say that I’m very sorry it happened. But guns are not the problem, OK? People are the problem. That’s where it starts, and we’ve had guns forever. And we’re going to continue to have guns.”

The two Democratic opponents to changing the filibuster rule, Mr. Manchin and Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, appeared similarly unmoved on that position.

“Despite the fact that there is always heated rhetoric here in D.C., I do think there is an opportunity for us to actually have real conversations and try and do something,” without ditching the filibuster, Ms. Sinema said, speaking to reporters on Capitol Hill.

The heated language extended far beyond Washington.

On Wednesday, Beto O’Rourke, the former Democratic representative now challenging Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, confronted the governor and other state officials who oppose gun control measures during their visit to Uvalde, interrupting their news conference to castigate them for “doing nothing” to address gun violence.

At the Capitol, some Republicans rushed to propose solutions that would sidestep the issue of guns altogether. Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, went to the Senate floor to request agreement to take up his bill to establish a federal clearinghouse on school safety best practices. Democrats refused.

As lawmakers talked past each other, it was not clear that anything under discussion would address the recent mass shootings. Republicans have long favored more armed guards, arguing that the only way to stop a bad person with a gun is to ensure more good people have guns. But in Buffalo and Uvalde, the gunmen were confronted by armed guards, who were unable to prevent the slaughter. For all the talk of red flag laws, the killer in Texas did not appear to have any known mental health issues.

Likewise, the most recent mass shootings were apparently perpetrated with guns lawfully purchased, which would not have been subject to additional scrutiny under Democratic background check bills.

Legislation that would have directly impacted the possibility of carnage — bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines — are no longer a main feature in Democrats’ gun safety agenda, although Mr. Biden has mentioned them repeatedly in recent days.

Parents face a haunting question: Is any schoolchild safe?

Now, Ms. Belliard had to consider just what she would tell Victoria on their walk to school the next morning: Listen to your teachers. Get down on the floor. Remember the drills you do in class.

“She’s young, but she understands — sometimes too much,” Ms. Belliard said Wednesday outside of Victoria’s school, P.S. 4 Duke Ellington in Washington Heights. “To take your child to school, and then come back to see them dead, it’s not fair. It should not be that way.”

Victoria was standing at her grandmother’s side.

“It’s sad that a lot of children died that way. Those children had a big life ahead of them,” the girl said. “When I hear that kind of stuff it makes me scared.”

In New York and across the country on Wednesday, children, parents and caregivers grappled with the aftermath of the deadly shooting in Uvalde, Tex., where an 18-year-old gunman killed 19 children and two teachers before being shot dead by authorities.

They hugged their children a little tighter, and lingered a little longer at drop-off. They could imagine too easily a gunman bursting into their own child's classroom. And they were once again faced with a haunting question: Is there anywhere in America where schoolchildren can truly be safe?

Some schools around the country took extra precautions in the wake of the shooting. Schools in Texas and Florida banned backpacks from buildings on Wednesday. Officials in states including Georgia and Virginia sent extra officers to schools as a precaution. In New York City, home to the nation’s largest school system, officials are considering ways to tighten security, including locking school doors after children have arrived for the day.

The shooting has cast a somber tone over the final days and weeks of the school year.

“Sometimes I don’t know what to say publicly,” Deborah Gist, the superintendent of schools in Tulsa, Okla., wrote in a Facebook post. “I feel a huge responsibility to use the right words. How, though, do I express the horror, outrage, frustration, disappointment, pain, and fear that an event like the shooting in Uvalde brings? It is a parent’s, a teacher’s, a principal’s, and a superintendent’s worst nightmare.”

In New Jersey on Wednesday morning, Cindy Cucaz, 47, received a message from the principal at her daughter’s high school in Belleville that said the local police department would be at drop off and dismissal.

“Hoping this brings some comfort and relief to students, teachers, administrators and parents,” Ms. Cucaz, who works in medical billing in Manhattan, read from an email sent to the student body.

But Ms. Cucaz said it would do little to relieve her fear from the moment her daughter, Catalina, 17, left for school until she returned home in the afternoon.

“I send her off every day with prayers that she comes back in one piece. Because of how the world is,” Ms. Cucaz said. “I just pray that she comes home.”

In Buffalo, not far from where a racist gunman killed ten Black people at a nearby supermarket less than two weeks ago, the shooting in Texas piled fear atop fear. Patricia Davis paused before she dropped off her 13-year-old son at school on Wednesday morning.

Be careful, she told him. If anything happens, “just fall on the floor.”

As she drove away, she could not help wondering: “Am I going to see my son again?”

“All of it is senseless,” Ms. Davis said. “We’re not safe anywhere, it just makes you want to stay home and lock yourself up and not go out for anything.”

The Texas shooting also rekindled the long-smoldering grief around the devastating shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., a decade ago that left six staff members and 20 children dead, some as young as 6 years old.

Scarlett Lewis, whose six-year-old son, Jesse, was killed in the Sandy Hook shootings, said learning about every mass shooting is “like a punch in the gut every single time” that reactivates the pain and grief.

“For me, it never gets easier,” Ms. Lewis said. “Especially because they’re all preventable. It’s so difficult to lose a child and you always have that pain.”

In New York City, even with some of the strictest gun laws in the country, some parents said they were on high alert after the Texas shooting, the massacre in Buffalo, and a mass shooting on a crowded subway car in April, in which a gunman opened fire during rush hour in a subway car in Brooklyn, shooting 10 people and injuring at least 13 more.

“The feelings are just everywhere at this point,” said Victor Quiñonez, whose 11-year-old daughter attends a school in Brooklyn. “It’s anger, it’s frustration, it’s sadness.”

“It’s just difficult because there’s absolutely a sense of vulnerability for everybody in this country, because you can’t control what people do,” he said.

For some New York City parents, the shooting in Texas added to the emotional toll that gun violence in neighborhoods already takes.

Maria Urena said a shooting outside her 11-year-old son’s school in Maspeth, Queens, prompted a lockdown and an urgent message to parents. She could not reach her son, Chris, and a sickening panic set in.

“Us moms in the morning, you don’t know what is the last thing you told your kid in the morning. You could have gotten upset with your kid — ‘don’t do this, don’t do that,’” she said.

“You don’t know, that could be the last thing you ever told your child.”

New York City students and teachers are trained regularly on how to behave during a mass shooting, but city officials pledged to explore ways to tighten security at city schools.

The city schools chancellor, David C. Banks, said the school system was considering locking building doors after children have arrived for the day.

“The buildings are still open, so if somebody meant to do harm, they would be stopped by a school safety officer,” Mr. Banks said, “but they are already in the building.”

He and Mr. Adams said the city was also exploring technology to better detect guns being secreted into schools.

Parents have also struggled with how to reassure their children that it is safe to return to class.

In Buffalo, José Esquilin, 43, was sitting at his desk when his daughter, Avalynn, 7, came in with her eyes wide after watching news of the Texas school shooting on television in the living room.

“‘Is this here? Did this happen here? They killed the kids? Is this going to happen at my school?’” she asked, according to Mr. Esquilin. He explained to her that there were many schools across the country, and that these shootings were rare.

When she replied that the same thing had already happened in their neighborhood, Mr. Esquilin paused.

“As a parent, like, what can you say? It’s true. It’s hard dealing with this.”

Sarah Maslin Nir, Sarah Mervosh, Corey Kilgannon and Ali Watkins contributed reporting.

Friends share their pain: ‘What did these poor children do to anyone?’

Mr. Costilla extended his arms and allowed George Rodriguez, 72, to fall out of the truck and into his hug.

“I lost two,” Mr. Rodriguez said in between sobs. “My grandson and a niece. I lost two.”

“I know, I know,” his friend responded. “We lost our cousin, too.”

In a town with a population of about 16,122, and where mostly multigenerational Latinos can trace family trees in a single breath, such encounters played out across Uvalde, a close-knit community not far from the Mexico border. Mr. Rodriguez said he had attended counseling at the civic center earlier in the day, but it offered him little reprieve from the pain. Instead, he said he asked his supervisor at Domino’s if he could pick up a shift.

“I just could not stay home and think about what happened all day,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “I had to work and try to distract my mind.”

A day earlier he had learned that two of the children who perished in one of the worst school shootings in U.S. history had close ties to him, 10-year-old Jose Flores, whom he said he had raised as a grandson, and a niece he identified only as Adriana. He pulled a photo from his wallet that showed the boy he called “my little Josecito,” wearing a pink T-shirt that read “Tough guys wear pink,” and broke down in tears.

Not long ago, Mr. Costilla moved to a quiet cul-de-sac of mostly one-story homes where roosters crow to live near his cousin, Eva Mireles, a longtime teacher. He shared with Mr. Rodriguez about his own loss. His 10-year-old son did not attend Robb Elementary School, but was close to Ms. Mireles, a well-known figure in the neighborhood who befriended children and adults alike with ease. She loved running marathons and teaching fourth grade, having spent the last 17 years in the profession, he said. She had an adult daughter in her 20s and three dogs.

“She was really close to us,” Mr. Costilla told his friend. They had spent countless weekends together, barbecuing in his backyard and jogging when possible. Memorial Day weekend was not going to be different, he said. “But now she’s gone.”

Mr. Rodriguez told him he needed to get back to his job. He looked around exasperated and inspected a receipt with an address where he was supposed to deliver a pizza. “I can’t focus,” he said rubbing his head. “All I can think is of the little ones who were killed that way. What did these poor children do to anyone? They were beautiful, innocent children.”

Debunking 3 Viral Rumors About the Texas Shooting

1. No, the shooting was not a staged ‘false flag’ operation.

Hours after the attack on Tuesday, far-right figures spread misinformation claiming that the shooting was a “false flag” attack. Among their unfounded claims were that the shooting had been orchestrated to draw local law enforcement away from the border, allowing criminals and drugs to cross into the United States, and that gun-control advocates had organized the tragedy to stoke public outrage.

Other social media posts alleged that parents shown in news clips awaiting news of their children appeared to be insufficiently emotional and were crisis actors being paid to play a role. The two teachers who were killed were also accused of being crisis actors.

Claims of crisis actors and false flags in school shootings are not new: The conspiracy theorist and broadcaster Alex Jones of Infowars has lied for years that the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., was staged by the federal government, with people pretending to be survivors and victims’ parents. Last year, Mr. Jones lost four defamation lawsuits filed by victims’ families, many of whom have been harassed by his believers.

2. No, there is no evidence that the gunman was transgender.

Hours after the attack, a post on the fringe online message board 4chan circulated claiming that the gunman was transgender. Numerous photographs falsely claiming to show the gunman wearing women’s clothing were attached.

The authorities have said the gunman was male.

The unfounded claims made their way to Telegram channels of far-right militia groups such as the Proud Boys, where people falsely claimed that the shooting was a result of hormone therapy undertaken by the gunman.

By Wednesday, the claims that the gunman was transgender had been amplified by high-profile people such as Representative Paul Gosar, an Arizona Republican who was censured last year by the House after he posted a video that depicted him killing a Democratic lawmaker. Mr. Gosar’s Twitter post on the matter has been deleted.

Photos of dark-haired transgender women circulated alongside images of the gunman’s face, accompanied with false accusations that they were the same person. “There is an overwhelming number of individuals who are posting images of this person, who was the shooter, and information about the nature of them being transgender,” Stacy Washington, the host of the SiriusXM show “Stacy on the Right,” said on Tuesday night. She added: “We don’t have definitive proof, but I’d say, this many pictures? My goodness. There’s something going on here.”

On Tuesday, a transgender artist said on Reddit that people online “just took my photos and used it to spread misinformation.” After the artist posted other photos as proof, an account on Twitter that discusses gun rights deleted a post that had included the artist’s photo and apologized.

A 22-year-old transgender student living in New York also reported that photos of her were falsely linked to the gunman. She posted photos of herself on Twitter to prove her identity and asked people to stop saying the photos of her were of the gunman.

“Im very close to crying,” she posted at one point.

The Trans Safety Network, a research group that monitors threats against the transgender community, said in a statement on Wednesday that it had identified photos of three transgender people wrongly linked to the gunman and confirmed that all three were alive.

Mr. Gosar and Ms. Washington did not respond to requests for comment.

3. No, the gunman was not an undocumented immigrant.

False claims that the gunman was born outside the United States began to circulate within hours of the shooting. Spread largely on white nationalist Telegram channels and Gab accounts, the claims alleged that he was an undocumented immigrant in the United States, even after authorities including Roland Gutierrez, a Texas state senator, confirmed that the gunman was born in North Dakota.

Two Telegram groups with ties to white supremacist figures claimed Wednesday that the gunman had “illegally penetrated” the country from the Mexican border. The groups, which each have thousands of followers, went on to falsely claim that the gunman was undocumented in the United States.

“Did he cross the border illegally?” Code of Vets, a veterans organization, posted on Twitter. “Our nation has a serious national security crisis evolving.”

Later, the group added a post noting that “the shooter has been confirmed to be a citizen” while stating: “Mental health must be addressed. Our border must be secured.”

Mr. Gosar also said the gunman had been in the country illegally.

The Texas gunman texted a friend that he had shot his grandmother and was about to ‘shoot up’ a school.

Mr. Ramos turned 18 on May 16, and the girl said that he had video called her in the days around his birthday from a gun store, where he told her he was purchasing an AR-15 rifle. In the following days, Mr. Ramos obliquely referred to doing something with the gun, though she said she was never clear about what. On Monday evening, the night before the shooting, she said, he told her that a package had arrived from an online order and sent her a picture of a large cardboard box that he later said contained ammunition that would expand on impact. Cece said Mr. Ramos also showed her, on a video call, a black bag that appeared to hold many magazines of ammunition and at least one gun.

On Tuesday morning, the two spoke on a video call just before 10 a.m., according to the girl’s phone logs. She said Mr. Ramos showed her the outfit he was wearing, which was all black. He said he could not tell her his secret until his grandfather had left the house.

At 11:06 a.m., he texted her that he was “waiting for” his grandmother, who he said was “on the phone with AT&T” about his cell phone. He referred to her with a vulgar expletive. “Ima do something to her rn,” he wrote. The screenshots do not show Cece replying, but at 11:21 a.m., Mr. Ramos sent another text: “I just shot my grandma in her head,” followed immediately by another: “Ima go shoot up a elementary school rn.”

Cece said she read the messages as soon as he sent them but was “curious” about whether he was serious. It was only after the shooting appeared on the news that she asked a friend in the United States to contact U.S. authorities, a delay she said she now regrets.

“Maybe I could’ve changed the outcome,” she said. “I just could never guess that he’d actually do this.”

Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said on Wednesday that Mr. Ramos had shot his grandmother in the face before driving off in a pickup truck that was registered to her. Mr. Ramos’s grandmother survived and called the police as he headed for Robb Elementary School, less than a mile away, and began shooting students and teachers inside a fourth-grade classroom.

Mr. Abbott said that Mr. Ramos had posted on Facebook that he had shot his grandmother and was going to shoot people at an elementary school, but a Facebook spokesman said that the governor was inaccurately referring to what the company said were “private messages.” It was unclear if the messages that the spokesman and governor appeared to be referring to were sent on Facebook, by text message or on another messaging platform.

To verify that she was speaking with Mr. Ramos, Cece provided screenshots of a video call that appeared to show Mr. Ramos’s face as well as a screenshot of a message he had sent her from an Instagram account that he had used to message others.

When Cece saw news of the attack, she said, she got in touch with another friend that she had befriended on Yubo and asked her to contact the authorities, she said.

Cece said that Mr. Ramos, in their previous conversations, had suggested that he had a poor relationship with both his mother and his grandmother and that he had previously punched his older sister, kicked his grandmother and shoved an ex-girlfriend.

Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

The N.R.A., mired in scandal, is gathering in Houston this weekend.

The convention will put a spotlight on Wayne LaPierre, who has led the organization for more than three decades, but who has been fighting for his job amid an ongoing court fight with Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, where the N.R.A. was chartered. The N.R.A. has also faced a financial squeeze as it spends tens of millions of dollars a year on legal fees, and it has been challenged by rival groups seeking to raise their profiles while the N.R.A. is weakened.

Mr. LaPierre is facing a leadership challenge at the convention from Allen West, a former congressman who would likely push the organization even further to the right, but a victory by Mr. West would be a major upset, given how many LaPierre allies sit on the N.R.A.’s board.

The tragedy in Uvalde will hang over the proceedings.

“Our deepest sympathies are with the families and victims involved in this horrific and evil crime,” the N.R.A. said on Twitter on Wednesday. “On behalf of our members, we salute the courage of school officials, first responders and others who offered their support and services.”

The group called the massacre “the act of a lone, deranged criminal” and said it would “pray for the victims, recognize our patriotic members, and pledge to redouble our commitment to making our schools secure.”

Mr. LaPierre, for his part, has had little to say about mass shootings. In a rare in-depth interview with The New York Times in 2019, he said that for years, “Wayne would be the guy going out there in the media” after mass shootings, but after a while “I started to feel like you just didn’t get a fair shot anymore to have your say.” But the topic of Uvalde may be hard for him to ignore when he addresses the convention on Friday. Few expect any significant retreat on policy; in recent years, the N.R.A. has presided over a move among red states to do away with laws requiring permits for gun ownership.

Some legal experts think Mr. LaPierre might not have too many more conventions ahead of him, with Ms. James seeking to have him removed for violating New York law related to charities in the ongoing court battle — and after the N.R.A. lost a last-ditch bid last year to move the matter to bankruptcy court.

Many of the N.R.A.’s practices were laid out in the bankruptcy case. Mr. LaPierre testified that he didn’t know his former chief financial officer had received a $360,000-a-year consulting contract after leaving under a cloud, or that his personal travel agent, hired by the N.R.A., was charging a 10 percent booking fee for charter flights on top of a retainer that could reach $26,000 a month for Mr. LaPierre’s globe-trotting, N.R.A.-funded travel to places like the Bahamas and Lake Como in Italy. Mr. LaPierre’s close aide, Millie Hallow, a felon, was even kept on after being caught diverting $40,000 in N.R.A. funds for her son’s wedding and other personal expenses.

The N.R.A. has said it has undertaken a reform drive, and overhauled its operations. But Harlin D. Hale, the chief of the federal bankruptcy court in Dallas, who presided over the case, called Mr. LaPierre’s move to file for bankruptcy without telling the group’s board of directors, or his own chief counsel or chief financial officer, “nothing less than shocking.”

In recent years, the N.R.A.’s financial struggles have intensified as its legal fees escalated. The organization was far quieter in the 2020 election than it was in 2016, when it played a leading role in getting Mr. Trump elected. By 2018, gun control groups were outspending the N.R.A. Other gun groups have become more assertive, including those that are more strident than the N.R.A., like the Gun Owners of America. Following the Uvalde massacre, the group accused the left of politicizing the tragedy and called for arming teachers.

But, in many ways, the battle Mr. LaPierre has fought for decades has already been won. Even minuscule gun reforms are typically considered taboo among Republicans, so while many other advanced democracies look on with bewilderment, gun violence continues to escalate in America. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut summed up the feelings of many Democrats when he expressed a sense of helplessness on the Senate floor Tuesday, asking, “What are we doing?”

The gunman was in the school for an hour before police killed him, an official says.

The only sign of the gunman’s plan, the governor said, was revealed roughly 30 minutes before he arrived at the school, when he posted on Facebook that he was going to shoot his grandmother. In a second post on Facebook, Mr. Abbott said, the gunman said that he had shot his grandmother. And in a third post, the gunman said he was going to shoot an elementary school.

Gov. Abbott’s description of the gunman as posting on Facebook was quickly disputed by Andy Stone, a spokesman for Meta, Facebook’s parent company. “The messages Gov. Abbott described were private one-to-one text messages that were discovered after the terrible tragedy occurred,” he wrote on Twitter.

The gunman was inside the school for roughly an hour before a tactical unit from the Border Patrol shot him several times, killing him, according to Steven McCraw, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety. Mr. McCraw declined to lay out a specific timeline of the incident, but said that officers had contained the gunman inside adjoining classrooms, and it took time to assemble a specialized team to breach the classroom.

A state police official said that the gunman, who crashed his grandmother’s pickup truck around 11:30 a.m. outside the school, was dead by shortly after 1 p.m.

“They did engage immediately,” Mr. McCraw said of officers at the school. “They did contain him in a classroom, and they put the tactical stack together in a very orderly way, and of course breached and assaulted the individual.”

Four Border Patrol agents from a tactical team who entered the school eventually killed the gunman, an official briefed on the investigation said after the news conference. One of the agents held up a shield so that the other agents could file in behind. Three of the agents fired their weapons once they were in the room, the official said.

An investigation of the shooting had yet to reveal a motive, Mr. McCraw said.

The news conference was dramatically interrupted at one point by Beto O’Rourke, the former Democratic congressman who is running for governor of Texas, who was escorted out after shouting ensued from state officials. “You’re doing nothing,” Mr. O’Rourke said. “This is totally predictable.”

Governor Abbott, a Republican who signed a wide-ranging law in 2021 that ended the requirement for Texans to obtain a license to carry handguns, said that although the gunman had no known history of mental issues, he believed that “anybody who shoots somebody else has a mental health challenge” and that the Uvalde area lacks sufficient access to mental health care.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, also a Republican, said limiting entrances to a single door at smaller schools could be a solution to keeping students safe. He also suggested arming teachers “where schools want it.”

“No matter what you do, there’s going to be someone to find another area that’s vulnerable,” Mr. Patrick said.

Asked whether an 18-year-old should have access to weapons like the AR-style gun used in the shooting, Mr. Abbott said that people that age have been able to purchase a “long gun” in his state for more than 60 years.

J. David Goodman contributed reporting.