Elementary School Shooting in Uvalde Texas

Blessed said:
We are all shocked, horrified and confused when this happens. There are many mentally ill people out there that ask for help and never get taken seriously. They are ignored or neglected by their families, teachers, doctors and society in general. Then they do the something that makes someone, anyone listen. Why are we not paying attention to those that are suffering. Most people have no desire to hurt anyone. They just want someone to listen, help them, get them the care they need to function in society. I am horrified by this young mans actions but he had been struggling for a long time to do something so horrific.

We need to stop looking the other way, we need to make authorities/doctors, teachers at school to step up to identify children that are the victims of bullies. Those that also suffer at home from hunger, abuse and neglect. We need to be aware of the things in society that makes daily normal life impossible. It comes down to if you see something, say something. Be advocate to all.
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Very well said. I have been espousing this line for decades. We ignore/shun those weird/quite types. We do nothing about the incredible amount of bullying that goes on in schools.
Then we wonder why events like this happen.
It is put in the too hard basket and will continue to remain there.
What is wrong with society if we keep electing Politicians who do nothing at all to stop this despicable situation.
Why can they not be removed from office? Surely someone has to stand up and tell these despicable politicians that what they are doing/not doing goes against the values of a democratic society.
 

Blessed said:
Come on people, stop looking at the state, the color of their skin. This is about the mentally ill. This happens when mentally ill people get to the breaking point. They just want us to see and know the pain they were in and we did nothing to help them. Would anybody in their right mind do this, I don't think so.
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In 1996 Australia there was a mass murderer who shot and killed 35 people at Port Arthur in Tasmania. He also shot and injured another 23 people.
This is what was known about Martin Bryant
Born in Tasmania, Australia, as the firstborn to Maurice and Carleen Bryant, Bryant was known to be a strange person even at an early age, with his temper being unmanageable and his focus always distant.

A violent and disruptive child, he was frequently bullied at school and he was known for causing trouble himself.

Bryant was suspended from elementary school in 1977 and came to attend a special-education unit at high school, where he continued to deteriorate academically and behaviourally. During elementary school, Bryant was found to possess a low IQ of 66 and was possibly autistic.
At the age of 14, he was given an air rifle by Maurice, which he enjoyed using, frequently using it to shoot at traffic from a distance and allegedly to brutally kill parrots.

More attention needs to be shown towards those who "don't fit in"
 
It looks like all schools need to be fortified. Starting at the gate, which needs to be some distance from the school building.
Have every parent use an entrance card to activate the gate.
Each child to be admitted individually.
Armed guards at every school.
This sounds really scary but extreme measures need to be taken.
 

What next?

Babies dead because of guns in the wrong hands, but I think
that nothing will change, just like the other times.

Our news reports 19 Children and 2 adults dead, R.I.P.

My condolences to all involved.

America is a strange place in many ways, you cannot drink any
alcohol, until you are 21 years old, yet you can buy guns when
you are 18 years old and ammunition, then go and kill unarmed
children, the rules need swapping over, I believe.

Stop all gun sales to civilians, until they are 30 years old, or for
ever, I realise it is not a solution, there are too many guns out
there.

I am so sad about this and thinking how it can be stopped, I
am no saint, but I never owned a gun, or killed anybody.

Mike.
 
Bretrick said:
It looks like all schools need to be fortified. Starting at the gate, which needs to be some distance from the school building.
Have every parent use an entrance card to activate the gate.
Each child to be admitted individually.
Armed guards at every school.
This sounds really scary but extreme measures need to be taken.
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sounds like something extreme has to happen.., however the Buffalo killer chose a supermarket not a school.. so you can't build a wall around every public area unfortunately... might be just a better idea to Ban guns... ...but I'm not going there because it's a contentious subject
 
R.I.P The young teachers robbed of their lives.. Irma Garcia Left... and Eva Mireless

58253691-10850557-image-a-96_1653457357771.jpg
58246191-10850557-Eva_Mireles_who_for_five_years_was_the_co_teacher_with_Irma_Garc-a-15_1653458999164.jpg


Tragically... and Ironically Eva's husband Ruben Ruiz, a veteran detective and SWAT team member currently serving as a police officer with the school district, held regular active shooter drills for the schools.

Irma had been a teacher for 24 years, a mother of 4 ..She was nominated as teacher of the year for the 2018-19 awards, organized by Trinity University.
 
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I agree that we desperately need care for people with mental illness and that violent movies and games are harmful to children, but not all killers have classifiable mental illnesses, and some serious mental illnesses don't strike until the late teens or early twenties, so parents may just be beginning to notice that something is wrong.

Lot's of odd, eccentric people are perfectly harmless and some murderers are described as nice regular guys by friends and neighbors. Lots of people with mental illness are harmless. There are mentally ill people in other countries where shootings are rare.

We will never be able to tell in advance which people will do something like this.

We could assign individual armed guards to each child and someone could shoot both the guard and the child. In recent mass shootings the security guard was just the first person shot.

Police and active duty military, maybe some ranchers, need guns. No one else does. "To protect my family," doesn't hold water when that gun is more likely to harm a family member than protect them. I'll bet many of those children had fathers with guns.

We have to quit letting the NRA run our country and buy back the guns.
 
If we can surround our White House and Supreme Court building with razor wire and have a guard at the gate, then, by all means, get going on our schools. No one gets in without proper ID. Sad to have come to this, but I'd pay and extra tax for it to keep my child safe. Until we begin sending our mentally ill back to the institutions closed back in the 80s, we have to seek the alternative.
 
Lewkat said:
If we can surround our White House and Supreme Court building with razor wire and have a guard at the gate, then, by all means, get going on our schools. No one gets in without proper ID. Sad to have come to this, but I'd pay and extra tax for it to keep my child safe. Until we begin sending our mentally ill back to the institutions closed back in the 80s, we have to seek the alternative.
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Agree here.
 
Della said:
I agree that we desperately need care for people with mental illness and that violent movies and games are harmful to children, but not all killers have classifiable mental illnesses, and some serious mental illnesses don't strike until the late teens or early twenties, so parents may just be beginning to notice that something is wrong.

Lot's of odd, eccentric people are perfectly harmless and some murderers are described as nice regular guys by friends and neighbors. Lots of people with mental illness are harmless. There are mentally ill people in other countries where shootings are rare.

We will never be able to tell in advance which people will do something like this.

We could assign individual armed guards to each child and someone could shoot both the guard and the child. In recent mass shootings the security guard was just the first person shot.

Police and active duty military, maybe some ranchers, need guns. No one else does. "To protect my family," doesn't hold water when that gun is more likely to harm a family member than protect them. I'll bet many of those children had fathers with guns.

We have to quit letting the NRA run our country and buy back the guns.
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What makes you think the gun oqners will sell back?
 
morgan said:
Many countries have looked up to the US in the past. America you have let us down with your refusal to amend your gun laws. These school shootings don't happen anywhere else in the world, to my knowledge.
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Unfortunately we had one here in the UK in Scotland my home country, in fact in the village next to where I was born .. The Dunblane massacre 26 years ago ..in a tiny Scottish primary school in the village of Dunblane... where the killer shot 16 tiny infant kids and their teacher and then shot himself... horribly tragic, and totally unexpected here.. but it's only happened once thank God , and I hope it never happens again


here's the full story....
The gunman, Thomas Hamilton, lived in the town. On the day of the massacre, he drove into the school parking lot at about 9:30 in the morning. He cut the cables on a telephone pole and then entered the school, carrying four handguns and 743 rounds of ammunition and wearing shooting earmuffs. He fired a couple of shots as he made his way to the school gym, where teacher Gwen Mayor had just taken her 29 Primary 1 (equivalent to American kindergarten) students for their physical education class. Hamilton entered the gym and immediately opened fire, wounding physical education teacher Eileen Harrild and teaching assistant Mary Blake and injuring and killing several children. Harrild and Blake took shelter inside a cupboard in the gym, bringing as many children with them as they could, as Hamilton continued his fusillade. When an adult and an older student tried to look inside the gym to find out what was going on, Hamilton fired toward them and then left the gym, firing toward the library cloakroom and into a mobile classroom, where the students lay on the floor at their teachers’ instruction. Hamilton then returned to the gym, dropped the gun he had been using and chose another one, which he used to kill himself. The entire attack took place over a period of less than five minutes. Mayor and 15 children were killed outright, and another child died in the hospital. A further 15 people, the vast majority of them children, were wounded.


A motive for the massacre was never established. Hamilton had become an assistant Boy Scout leader at the age of 20 but soon came under suspicion because of his behaviour toward boys. After further complaints, he was required to leave the Boy Scouts, which angered him. He repeatedly asked to be allowed to return, to no avail, and he wrote letters of protest to various government authorities, claiming persecution. In the meantime, he became a gun collector, and he organized several boys’ clubs, in which he taught shooting, gymnastics, and sports. Though his clubs were initially popular and well-attended, his reportedly strange behaviour as well as his apparently pedophilic activities eventually alienated club members and their parents, and the clubs shut down. Some reports also indicate that he had been turned down as a volunteer at Dunblane Primary School. Tennis star Andy Murray was a student at Dunblane when the slaughter took place, and he later said that he had attended Hamilton’s boys’ clubs as a child.


In the aftermath of the massacre, residents of Dunblane initiated the Snowdrop Campaign (named for the spring flower that was in bloom at the time of the mass shooting) to seek changes in British gun laws. The campaign’s petition gathered some 750,000 signatures, and a letter written by the mother of one of the slain children was printed in two national newspapers. In February 1997 Parliament responded by passing a law banning private ownership of handguns above .22 calibre, and in November 1997 the ban was extended to all handguns. In addition, security requirements for gun clubs were expanded. Following the passage of those laws, the incidence of gun killings in the U.K. dropped significantly.
 
hollydolly said:
..further to @Della 's post, not everyone who is diagnosed with a mental illness, comes from sane parents either... so lots of mental health issues will go undetected.. because the parents or grandparents have their own issues..

Whether this boy was mentally ill is open to conjecture.
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It appears he had been radicalised by the White Replacement movement. He may have been a misfit but that does not automatically lead to a diagnosis of mental illness. This seems to have been a classic race hate crime, for which he will never stand trial.
 
Warrigal said:
It appears he had been radicalised by the White Replacement movement. He may have been a misfit but that does not automatically lead to a diagnosis of mental illness. This seems to have been a classic race hate crime, for which he will never stand trial.
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I'm going to piggy back off your reply Warrigal. I am so sick and tired of the response to shootings when the shooters are White they are "mentally ill". When it's persons of color...they are "thugs". I'm not saying you are guilty of those descriptions at all, but I noticed that some here on SF were. I think maybe those individuals no longer participate here but they are not the only ones who have made those kinds of distinctions.

I agree with you that the racist shooter wasn't necessarily mentally ill. He was filled with hatred and that prompted him to commit a heinous, evil act. A friend of mine is also tired of what she calls the "Twinkie Defense" being enacted for these murderers.
 
hollydolly said:
Unfortunately we had one here in the UK in Scotland my home country, in fact in the village next to where I was born .. The Dunblane massacre 26 years ago ..in a tiny Scottish primary school in the village of Dunblane... where the killer shot 16 tiny infant kids and their teacher and then shot himself... horribly tragic, and totally unexpected here.. but it's only happened once thank God , and I hope it never happens again


here's the full story....
The gunman, Thomas Hamilton, lived in the town. On the day of the massacre, he drove into the school parking lot at about 9:30 in the morning. He cut the cables on a telephone pole and then entered the school, carrying four handguns and 743 rounds of ammunition and wearing shooting earmuffs. He fired a couple of shots as he made his way to the school gym, where teacher Gwen Mayor had just taken her 29 Primary 1 (equivalent to American kindergarten) students for their physical education class. Hamilton entered the gym and immediately opened fire, wounding physical education teacher Eileen Harrild and teaching assistant Mary Blake and injuring and killing several children. Harrild and Blake took shelter inside a cupboard in the gym, bringing as many children with them as they could, as Hamilton continued his fusillade. When an adult and an older student tried to look inside the gym to find out what was going on, Hamilton fired toward them and then left the gym, firing toward the library cloakroom and into a mobile classroom, where the students lay on the floor at their teachers’ instruction. Hamilton then returned to the gym, dropped the gun he had been using and chose another one, which he used to kill himself. The entire attack took place over a period of less than five minutes. Mayor and 15 children were killed outright, and another child died in the hospital. A further 15 people, the vast majority of them children, were wounded.


A motive for the massacre was never established. Hamilton had become an assistant Boy Scout leader at the age of 20 but soon came under suspicion because of his behaviour toward boys. After further complaints, he was required to leave the Boy Scouts, which angered him. He repeatedly asked to be allowed to return, to no avail, and he wrote letters of protest to various government authorities, claiming persecution. In the meantime, he became a gun collector, and he organized several boys’ clubs, in which he taught shooting, gymnastics, and sports. Though his clubs were initially popular and well-attended, his reportedly strange behaviour as well as his apparently pedophilic activities eventually alienated club members and their parents, and the clubs shut down. Some reports also indicate that he had been turned down as a volunteer at Dunblane Primary School. Tennis star Andy Murray was a student at Dunblane when the slaughter took place, and he later said that he had attended Hamilton’s boys’ clubs as a child.


In the aftermath of the massacre, residents of Dunblane initiated the Snowdrop Campaign (named for the spring flower that was in bloom at the time of the mass shooting) to seek changes in British gun laws. The campaign’s petition gathered some 750,000 signatures, and a letter written by the mother of one of the slain children was printed in two national newspapers. In February 1997 Parliament responded by passing a law banning private ownership of handguns above .22 calibre, and in November 1997 the ban was extended to all handguns. In addition, security requirements for gun clubs were expanded. Following the passage of those laws, the incidence of gun killings in the U.K. dropped significantly.
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Thank you for this information, so many sad events in the world.
 
It is the second deadliest shooting in US history after the infamous Sandy Hook massacre in 2012 - which saw 26 people killed - and has once again left people asking how someone could commit such a heinous crime.

As the country tries to make sense of the tragedy, stories about Ramos are beginning to emerge from those who knew him best, painting the picture of loner with a propensity for self-harm and violence, who was from an unstable home, including an alleged drug-using mother.

Texas State Senator Roland Gutierrez said in a local television interview that the school shooter was born in North Dakota, but attended high school in Uvalde.

Neighbors and classmates say his behavior spiraled into the bizarre and macabre as he entered his later teenage years, with one friend telling Good Morning America: 'He had scars on his face and someone asked him, 'Are you ok?' and he just said with a smile 'I did it myself, I liked how it looked.'

He began dressing in dark clothes and military boots and used his BB gun to target random people, one local claimed.

There are around 15,000 residents in Uvalde which sits roughly 80 miles west of San Antonio, around an hour's drive from the US-Mexico border.

The would-be mass murderer lived on Hood Street, less than three miles from the Robb Elementary school.

More than one-third of residents in the city live at or barely above the federal poverty line.

According to Ramos' neighbor Ruben Flores, 41, the shooter and his mother would often have screaming matches, with police being called to the home on multiple occasions.
In since deleted Instagram videos, Ramos had allegedly filmed his mother interacting with police.

Classmate Nadia Reyes claimed: 'He'd call his mom a b***h and say she wanted to kick him out... He'd be screaming and talking to his mom really aggressively.'

Flores, meanwhile, told the Washington Post how he had tried to be a father figure to Ramos but that the situation at home only worsened as he got older.

Ramos' grandmother, who owned the house on Hood Street, was reportedly in the process of evicting the mother over her drug use in the days before Tuesday's killing spree. Flores said Ramos had moved into his grandmother's home across town some months earlier.

She would be Ramos' first victim on Tuesday, but the 66-year-old is reported to have survived after being 'critically shot'.

By all accounts, Ramos had been a relatively normal child until the eighth grade, with his 'best friend' from that period, Stephen Garcia, branding him the 'nicest' and 'shyest kid' who 'just needed to break out of his shell.'

Reportedly Ramos was bullied for a stutter and lisp. Classmates also allegedly called him with gay slurs. At one point, he uploaded a picture of himself wearing eyeliner.

'He would get bullied hard, like bullied by a lot of people,' Garcia told the Post, 'Over social media, over gaming, over everything.'

When Garcia had to move away, Ramos began to change, dressing in all black and donning large military boots.
 
I don’t think anyone would disagree that we need stronger gun control laws. Anyone that is taking opioids or opiates is on their state’s database. What would be wrong with having a database for anyone receiving psychological care for depression or any other psychotic disorder. The Psychiatrist, psychologist or family doctor who treats his/her patients with antidepressants should also be on a database.

We could also put doors comparable to the impenetrable doors on airplanes into the cockpits on the entrance doors to schools. Before getting into a school, the person would have to show ID and the child would have to agree to go with that person. If they are not a parent, they will need a note from the parent and the school officer in charge would have to verify the parent’s note with a phone call. If they cannot verify the note with the parent’s number on file, the door stays locked.
 

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