On Sunday, President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden will go to Uvalde, Texas, to speak with residents following a horrific shooting at Robb Elementary School that killed at least 19 children and two adults.
According to White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, they will meet with community leaders and victims’ relatives.
On Wednesday, Biden stated that the pair will be traveling to Texas in the coming days.
‘Jill and I will be traveling to Texas in the coming days to meet with the families, let them know we have a sense of their pain, and hopefully bring some, a little comfort to the community,’ Biden said. ‘As a nation I think we all must be there for them.’
‘And we must ask, when it god’s name will we do what’s needed to be done,’ he said.
The Bidens last visited the scene of a mass shooting nine days ago when they went to Buffalo, New York.
Biden expressed his frustration with the record number of mass shootings in the United States.
‘I’m just sick and tired, sick and tired of what’s going on,’ he said on Wednesday.
In emotional remarks at the White House, he reminded people the Second Amendment is ‘not absolute.’
‘When in God’s name will we do what needs to be done to, if not completely stop, fundamentally change the amount of the carnage that goes on in this country?,’ Biden said.
And he snapped back at critics who are demanding their Second Amendment right to bear arms amid fresh calls for more stringent gun laws.
‘The Second Amendment’s not absolute,’ the president said. ‘When it was passed you couldn’t own a cannon, you couldn’t own certain weapons. There’s always been limitations.’
On Wednesday, Jill Biden, a teacher, asked for ‘common sense’ to protect children.
‘The sudden senseless massacre in an elementary school, little children and their teachers, Eva and Irma,’ she said. ‘Let us pray that God cradles those broken families in the palm of his hand.’
‘But let us also pray to use the will and courage God gives each of us to act united with common sense to protect our children,’ she added.
Tuesday’s shooting in Texas saw gunman Salvador Ramos kill 19 children, and two adults, including special ed teacher Eva Mirales, before he was shot dead by a cop.
Each of the victims – all aged under 11 – were killed inside a single classroom, the Texas Department of Public Safety revealed Wednesday, as authorities continue to assess the situation and identify all the victims.
Ramos, who just days before the attack and shortly after his 18th birthday, bought two AR-style rifles and paraded them on social media. He indiscriminately rained bullets on the room, before being fatally shot himself by police.
It is the deadliest elementary school shooting since the 2012 Sandy Hook killing.
Meanwhile, Texas cops revealed that there was no armed guard on campus when Ramos arrived on Tuesday, which allowed him to walk ‘unobstructed’ through an unlocked door and into the building where he slaughtered 21 people.
At a press conference on Thursday afternoon, Victor Escalon, the Regional Director for the Department of Public Safety South Texas, said Ramos walked through an unlocked door ‘unobstructed’ and that there was no guard ‘readily available’.
It contradicts earlier reports that he fired at a school resource officer.
Ramos entered the school at 11.40am, 12 minutes after crashing his truck outside the school and walking towards campus with his AR-15. That is when police were alerted to the scene.
At 11.44am, the first cops entered the school. Ramos shot at them and they retreated.
It’s unclear if he had already shot the kids and teachers in the fourth grade classroom by then, or if he went on to attack them after those cops retreated.
It then took an hour for specialized SWAT teams to arrive. At 1.06pm, the incident was declared over after Ramos was shot dead.
In the meantime, 150 cops were gathering outside. Some of them were filmed pinning parents to the floor and some were even placed in handcuffs, according to witnesses.
Javier Cazares, whose nine-year-old daughter was murdered, says cops were ‘just standing there’ and waiting for protective shields to arrive at the scene before they went in.
‘They said they rushed in and all that, we didn’t see that,’ he told The New York Times, adding that many were ‘just standing there.’