A deadly elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas

The devastating news emerging from the Covenant School in Nashville resurfaced many troubling facts about America’s exceptional propensity for gun violence. But perhaps one of the most disturbing is that firearms are now the leading cause of death among Americans ages 24 years and under.

While guns have long been a fixture of American life, the emergence of firearms as the leading killer of young people is a relatively new phenomenon.

We now know more about the costly sequence of errors that allowed a shooter to kill 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in May.

A 77-page report by a Texas House investigative committee published on Sunday doesn’t point fingers at any one person aside from the shooter. But it did find “systemic failures” and “egregiously poor decision making,” based on the accounts of 35 witnesses and thousands of documents.

With every detail that emerges about the Robb Elementary massacre, the police response looks worse.

In the days after the shooting, the Uvalde, Texas, police offered conflicting accounts of what took place when officers entered the school building and why it took so long to stop the rampage. The police changed their story repeatedly. Amid the multiple agencies at the scene — the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police, the Uvalde Police Department, the Department of Public Safety, and Border Patrol — it wasn’t clear to some officers involved who was in charge.

The day after the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, Elizabeth, a first grade teacher at a school across the state, looked down at the sidewalk to read what one of her students had scribbled in chalk at the entrance to their school: “If you have a gun, get out pleas.” The child’s message, innocent with its spelling error, was decorated with the drawing of a little white heart.

That day, Elizabeth started locking both doors in her classroom. She told her students not to congregate in the hallway, to stop coming in and out of the room all day long, and “if you have to go to the bathroom, go quick and be back ASAP.”

A bipartisan group of senators hoped to unveil a gun control deal on Friday, in the wake of a string of mass shootings, including those in Uvalde, Texas, and Buffalo, New York. They don’t have one yet, but negotiators are still cautiously optimistic about getting an agreement in the coming days.

“It’ll be a miracle if we get a framework agreement, never mind a final bill,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) told reporters on Thursday. “But miracles sometimes happen!”

Republicans typically respond to mass shootings by loosening gun laws, not tightening them. But after the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, the state became a model for how Republicans could implement gun control.

Florida’s Republican-controlled legislature passed a law, later signed by Republican Gov. Rick Scott, that raised the age to buy long guns, including AR-15-style rifles, from 18 to 21; required a three-day waiting period between when a firearm is purchased and when the buyer can get access to that gun; allowed trained school staff to carry guns; and put $400 million toward mental health services and school security.

In his speech last Thursday about the Robb Elementary School massacre in Uvalde, Texas, President Joe Biden spoke about a young student who’d averted the shooter’s attention by smearing her classmate’s blood on her face.

“Imagine what it would be like for her to walk down the hallway of any school again,” he said. “Imagine what it’s like for children who experience this kind of trauma every day in school, on the streets, in communities all across America.”

It’s difficult to overstate the rhetorical power of the words “Second Amendment” in the current political climate. Despite a number of horrific mass shootings, a near-insurrection, and the rise in visibility of anti-government militia groups — plus the undeniable power of the National Rifle Association — those two words are still invoked to cut off conversation about gun control, treating any regulation of access to guns as an infringement on the protection that amendment grants.

In the wake of horrific mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, Uvalde, Texas, and Tulsa, Oklahoma, calls for federal gun control legislation have been met once again with defenses from firearms owners and advocacy groups like the National Rifle Association that the Second Amendment, the constitutional right to bear arms, is inviolable.

While Senate Democrats attempt to reach a long-shot compromise on gun legislation, blue states are taking their own steps to respond to the recent mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, Uvalde, Texas, and Tulsa, Oklahoma.

New York became the first to pass a slate of new gun control bills before the end of its legislative session on Thursday. California, New Jersey, and Delaware also have legislation in the pipeline.

As the Senate tries to find a compromise on gun control legislation, the House is moving ahead with its own package on the issue, starting with an emergency markup this week.

Although lawmakers are currently on recess, the House Judiciary Committee returned Thursday for an urgent session focused on multiple bills intended to address the age limit for purchasing guns, the sale of large-capacity magazines, and firearm storage. During the markup, committee members approved the package, setting it up for a floor vote as soon as next week.

After a shooter killed 21 people, including 19 children, in the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, last week, the United States is yet again confronting the devastating impact of gun violence. While lawmakers have so far failed to pass meaningful reform, schools are searching for ways to prevent a similar tragedy on their own campuses. Recent history, as well as government spending records, indicate that one of the most common responses from education officials is to invest in more surveillance technology.

In recent years, schools have installed everything from facial recognition software to AI-based tech, including programs that purportedly detect signs of brandished weapons and online screening tools that scan students’ communications for mentions of potential violence. The startups selling this tech have claimed that these systems can help school officials intervene before a crisis happens or respond more quickly when one is occurring. Pro-gun politicians have also advocated for this kind of technology, and argued that if schools implement enough monitoring, they can prevent mass shootings.

The massacre of children at an elementary school in Texas is adding fresh urgency to the conversation about gun control in the United States, which has been politically fraught and lacking in progress. That’s not because of a lack of support for gun control. That support just needs a little bit of parsing.

To be clear: Americans’ views about guns are complicated, and vary significantly by political party and geography. Overall, the vast majority of Americans support the right for private citizens to own guns, and more than 40 percent of households own at least one firearm. That doesn’t mean they’re against tighter rules on their guns. Nearly three-quarters of Americans think that gun violence is a big or moderately big problem, according to a survey last year by Pew Research Center. And a majority of Americans think that the epidemic of school shootings could be stopped with drastic changes in legislation, according to a poll this week by YouGov.

In 2020, while the US grappled with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, the country was experiencing another crisis: Gun violence became the top cause of death among young Americans.

Since the year prior, the rate of firearms-related deaths among American youths under 20 years old increased by 29.5 percent, which was twice as high as the relative increase of gun deaths among the US general population. Yet even with those alarming statistics on gun-related deaths among children, pro-gun rights lawmakers are calling to put more firearms in schools, as a remedy for the country’s school shooting crisis.

“The rate of gun ownership hasn’t changed. And yet acts of evil like we saw this week are on the rise,” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz told crowds at the National Rifle Association’s convention in Houston this week. Cruz’s claim about stagnant gun ownership, which is factually misleading, is among the trove of inaccurate claims made by Republican officials at the NRA’s annual gathering this year, making clear that the string of mass shootings in recent weeks has not influenced their pro-gun convictions, in spite of several slated speakers canceling their participation.

The NRA kicked off its annual convention — featuring firearms exhibitions and speaking appearances from pro-gun Republican officials — on Thursday, only days after a gunman killed 19 school children and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. The group’s decision to go ahead with its yearly gathering drew thousands of protesters outside of the convention’s venue.

When one Robb Elementary teacher heard gunfire explode down the hall, she shouted for her kids to get under the desks as she sprinted to lock the classroom door. “They’ve been practicing for this day for years,” the teacher told NBC. “They knew this wasn’t a drill. We knew we had to be quiet or else we were going to give ourselves away.”

Lockdown drills (or “active shooter drills”) have become standard fare in American public schools, used in more than 95 percent of schools and mandated in more than 40 states. But despite their ubiquity, there’s no federal guidance on exactly how these drills should run, creating significant variation — and controversy — across the country.

Three days after an 18-year-old gunman fatally shot 19 students and two teachers and wounded 17 others in a fourth-grade classroom at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, big questions remain about how police responded to the murders, and FBI and other authorities are being called on to investigate.

In the aftermath of the shooting, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott praised law enforcement for “showing amazing courage,” but bystanders at the scene — some of them parents of victims — soon came forward to say that the police did not do enough, quickly enough. The Uvalde local police, and state police, have also given conflicting accounts of their actions while the shooter was in the school building.

Immediately after the mass shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, the state’s Republican attorney general, Ken Paxton, argued that the best way to prevent such a horror from happening again would have been to arm the school’s staff.

“We can’t stop bad people from doing bad things. We can potentially arm and prepare and train teachers and other administrators to respond quickly,” he said on Fox News.

In the wake of the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting, Congress is once again at a crossroads on gun control, an issue lawmakers have failed to act on for more than a decade.

“I’m hopeful there is growing momentum. But I have failed plenty of times before,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), a leading gun control advocate, told reporters on Thursday.

By now, it’s a vicious, horrific cycle: In the wake of yet another mass shooting, the public reels from a combination of grief, outrage, and frustration. The shooting at an Uvalde, Texas, elementary school on May 24 is the worst school shooting since the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012.

It’s also a reminder of how little has changed since then to enact meaningful gun control legislation. In fact, if anything, gun laws around the country have become radically more permissive: Since 2020, 24 states have passed extreme permitless carry laws, with more likely to follow, despite strong resistance from law enforcement, the public, and gun safety advocates — and despite research suggesting that more permissive laws lead to more gun violence.

In ways big and small — in schools, in homes, in every facet of life — the United States fails to protect and support its children.

School shootings, like the massacre in Uvalde, Texas, that has left 19 students and at least two adults dead this week, are one of the most visceral examples of that failure. A second generation is now growing up in a world where school shootings are part of life. Columbine didn’t lead to meaningful policy change; neither did Sandy Hook; neither did Parkland; and the terrible truth is that Uvalde may not either.

In the wake of yet another unspeakable tragedy, in which 19 children and two teachers were murdered by a gunman in a Texas elementary school, one reason for the US’s steady stream of mass shootings seems obvious.

Right-wing politicians are quick to blame video games, race, mental illness, and literally anything else but guns for America’s high number of mass shootings. While it’s impossible to definitively say, “It’s the guns,” the sheer quantity of firearms in the United States is undeniable. The number of guns appears to be directly related to the number of gun deaths in America.

The satirical newspaper the Onion famously repeats the same headline whenever a high-profile mass shooting occurs in the United States: “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”

It’s a grim reminder that the United States — or, at least, key leaders within government — has chosen to prioritize gun rights over the kinds of laws that successfully protect citizens of many other nations from being struck down by a bullet.

Editor’s note, May 26, 3 pm: This article is no longer being updated. For Vox’s latest coverage of the Uvalde shooting, click here.

An 18-year-old gunman killed 19 students and at least two adults at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday, just 10 days after another mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, that claimed the lives of 10 people.

Nineteen children and two teachers were murdered Tuesday at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, a recurrence of a uniquely American nightmare we seem doomed to repeat again and again and again.

The five children dead and more than 30 injured at Cleveland Elementary in Stockton, California, in 1989 — one of the first of these large-scale tragedies — presaged this terrible trend. Twenty children murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, didn’t stop these occurrences, even though the massacre was so horrific that it seemed, for a moment, that Congress would have no choice but to act. Countless other young people have been killed, injured, and traumatized by school shootings since the late ’90s with such frequency that their stories now often don’t even make headlines unless the body count is high enough.

There is something about a mass shooting at an elementary school, about the slaughter of children like those in Uvalde, Texas, that clarifies the true nature of America’s gun politics.

Nearly 10 years ago, days after the massacre of young kids at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, National Rifle Association vice president Wayne LaPierre gave a defiant press conference where he vowed not to give an inch on gun control. To justify the NRA’s absolutism, LaPierre uttered a phrase that would become one of the defining phrases of the debate over guns.