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- BBC News World
Updated 1 hour
image source, EPA
Visibly distressed and frustrated, Joe Biden questioned the lax gun laws in the US.
“They watched their friends die as if they were on a battlefield.”
It was one of the devastating phrases of the president of the United States, Joe Biden, in his first statement following the shooting that this Tuesday left at least 19 elementary school children and two teachers dead at Robb Elementary School, in Uvalde, Texas.
“They will live with it for the rest of their lives,” he added.
“There’s a lot we don’t know yet, but we do know that parents will never see their children once more,” Biden said.
“Losing a child is like having a piece of your soul ripped out. There is an emptiness in your chest, you feel that you are going to be absorbed by it… It is never the same,” he lamented.
“As a nation we have to ask ourselves when in God’s name are we going to stand up to gun lobbyists; when in God’s name are we going to do what we know deep down we have to do.”
image source, Archyde.com
Following the shooting, the students were transported to a civic center near Robb Elementary School where they were reunited with family members.
The shooting occurred following an 18-year-old man identified as Salvador Ramos entered armed and began shooting.
Ramos, a US citizen and resident of Uvalde, apparently died following confronting police at the school.
A butchery
The US president gave the statement accompanied by his wife, Jill Biden, following returning from a trip to Japan.
“These kinds of mass shootings rarely happen in other parts of the world. Why?” the president asked.
“They have mental health problems and domestic disputes in other countries; they have people who are lost, but these kinds of mass shootings never happen as often as they do in America. Why are we willing to live with this carnage? “, she asserted.
And he said the idea that an 18-year-old might walk into a store and buy two assault weapons “is just plain wrong.”
So far, the shooting in Uvalde is the second with the highest number of victims in a school in the last decade in the United States. Biden recalled in his speech how another shooting at the Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut ten years ago left 26 people dead, including 20 children.
He noted that since then there has been 900 shootings with firearms in American schoolsnsesincluding the one at Parkland High School in 2018 with 17 deaths.
The president mentioned some of the schools that have been the focus of massacres: Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida; Santa Fe High School, in Texas; and Oxford High School in Michigan.
“The list goes on and on when you include mass shootings in places like movie theaters, houses of worship, or, as we saw just ten days ago, in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.”
“I’m sick and tired of it,” he lamented, visibly frustrated.
What has Biden done to address gun violence?
Biden has previously said he wants to see a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and mandatory background checks for all gun sales.
image source, Getty Images
Joe Biden shows off the components of a “ghost gun” at a White House event in April.
But so far he has been unable to persuade Congress to pass “common sense” gun reforms, focusing instead on executive actions he can take without approval from the legislative chambers.
His government has focused its efforts on selling untraceable DIY “ghost gun” kits.
In April, he signed an order requiring the kits to have serial numbers, making them legally a firearm.
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