“The people who were victims, their families, spent three hours and 40 minutes with me. They waited all that time. Some arrived two hours early,” Biden told reporters at the White House. “The pain is palpable. I think a lot of that is unnecessary. I’m going to keep pushing.”
Meanwhile, the chairwoman of the House Judiciary subcommittee on crime has called hearings on Capitol Hill to give families a chance to tell their stories and seek ways to prevent mass shootings.
“We will take a comprehensive look at Uvalde and the incident that occurred last Tuesday,” said Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.), whose Houston-based district is several hours from Uvalde and Robb Elementary School, the location of the shooting Jackson Lee attended church with President and First Lady Jill Biden in Uvalde on Sunday.
Jackson Lee said the purpose of the hearings, which could also take place in Texas, would be to determine “the facts” of what happened and propose solutions. “We can do a number of things,” he said in an interview, adding that his focus right now is on the “grief and pain” of families.
The congresswoman noted that the nation celebrated Memorial Day on Monday by honoring the men and women who fell in battle. “We have children killed as if they were in battle,” she said. “And that is not typical of this nation.”
One of the survivors Biden met with on Sunday was 9-year-old Jaydien, who hid under a desk in her classroom. In an interview Monday, Jaydien, who goes by his first name only because he is a minor, said he asked the president: “Could you make our schools safer and send more police, please?” .
“I’ll try,” Biden said, according to Jaydien and his grandmother, Betty Fraire, whose last name is different from her grandson’s.
The boy had one more request: Could the president also make sure teenagers can’t carry rifles because, the boy said, “it’s dangerous.” Biden’s response: “I’m working on it.”
Biden on Monday reminded reporters of a visit he made to a trauma hospital in New York, where he was shown X-rays of gunshot victims. “A 9mm bullet blows the lung out of the body,” she said. “There is simply no rational basis for [a high-caliber weapon] in terms of self-protection, hunting”.
Authorities have said Uvalde gunman Salvador Rolando Ramos, 18, bought more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition days before the shooting. More than 300 bullets were found inside the school, according to police.
“It doesn’t make sense to be able to buy something that can fire up to 300 rounds,” Biden said.
He added that the Second Amendment, which protects the right to bear arms, “was never absolute,” noting, “You couldn’t buy a cannon when the Second Amendment was passed.”
At the same time, the president acknowledged that much of the power to impose gun safety regulations rests with Congress, where lawmakers have debated the issue for years. “I can’t ban a gun. I can’t change background checks. I can’t do that,” Biden said.
He added that he thinks “things have gotten so bad that everyone is becoming more rational about it. At least that’s my hope and prayer.”
Some lawmakers have indicated that Uvalde’s attack could prompt Congress to take at least limited action.
“There are more Republicans interested in talking about finding a way forward this time than I’ve seen since Sandy Hook,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) told ABC’s “This Week,” referring to a school shooting in Connecticut a decade ago that killed 20 students and six adults, but did not lead to the passage of sweeping legislation at the federal level.
Jackson Lee, whose crime panel is part of the Judiciary Committee, said he will seek to advance gun safety legislation, including a proposal to require a seven-day waiting period for the purchase of assault weapons like the one used in Uvalde. .
On May 24, a variety of federal and local law enforcement agencies responded to reports of shots fired outside and inside the school.
But officers waited more than an hour, through multiple 911 calls from students, to break into the classroom where the shooter and many of his victims were locked up.
Authorities have said school district Police Chief Pete Arredondo mistakenly treated the attack as a barricade situation rather than an active shooter situation once the initial gunfire stopped.
Arredondo has not spoken publicly since the shooting. He was recently elected to the Uvalde City Council and he was supposed to be sworn in Tuesday night. On Monday, the mayor of Uvalde released a statement saying the council meeting had been canceled so the community could focus on grieving.
State Sen. Roland Gutierrez, a Democrat representing Uvalde, said Monday that he will send a written request to Steven C. McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, for a full ballistics report, demanding to know “exactly what what time, what officer and from what agency showed up, and where they were parked” at the school.
He said the best equipped and trained officers who responded to the incident should have stepped in when it became clear the school’s police force was unprepared to handle an active shooter, he said.
“There were clear, clear protocol violations here,” he said.
“I want to make sure that we have access to all the evidence as quickly as possible so that we can conduct a thorough investigation,” he said. “It’s not going to bring these kids back, of course, but we need to make sure we get the answers so this never happens again.”
Villegas reported from Uvalde. Seung Min Kim and Monika Mathur in Washington contributed to this report.
Reference-www.washingtonpost.com