UVALDE: US President Joe Biden laid flowers and prayed on Sunday at the makeshift shrine erected in Uvalde to the 19 children and two teachers murdered by a teen gunman after he stormed their elementary school.

Biden, accompanied by his wife, Jill Biden, was in the small Texas town less than two weeks after making a similar trip to the site of another mass shooting — this time targeting African Americans in a racist attack — in Buffalo, New York.

Both wearing black, the first couple held hands in front of a memorial outside Robb Elementary School and walked slowly along the thicket of wreaths, bouquets, white crosses and blown-up photos of the slain children. Biden made the sign of the cross.

Reprising the increasingly familiar role of national mourner-in-chief, Biden was next to attend a Catholic Mass, as well as meet privately with first responders and grieving relatives of the dead.

Applause broke out from a crowd gathered at the school when Biden’s motorcade arrived. However, illustrating the tension in the town after the massacre, there were boos at the appearance of Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott.

“We need changes,” shouted one man.

Biden was not scheduled to speak publicly in Texas, but on Saturday he renewed his call for Congress to overcome years of paralysis to toughen firearms regulations. “We cannot outlaw tragedy, I know, but we can make America safer. We can finally do what we have to do to protect the lives of the people and of our children,” he said in a speech at the University of Delaware.

Harrowing accounts emer­­ged of the ordeal faced by survivors of Tuesday’s att­ack, where the behavior of the police is under severe scrutiny. Ten-year-old Sam­uel Salinas was sitting in his fourth-grade classroom when the shooter, later identified as Salvador Ramos, 18, barged in and announced: “You’re all going to die.” Then “he just started shooting,” Salinas told ABC News.

Texas authorities admitted on Friday that as many as 19 police officers were in the school hallway for nearly an hour before finally breaching the room and killing Ramos.

Published in Dawn, May 30th, 2022