Responding to the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas
It is our responsibility to provide insightful and reflective comment on tragedies like Uvalde, writes Harriet Williamson
On Tuesday 24 May, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos entered Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and killed 19 children and two adults. It was the second-worst school shooting in US history. Here’s how the Voices desk responded to the horrific event.
When the news broke at around 10pm UK time, our Voices editor, Victoria Richards, immediately addressed how obscenely common these mass shootings have become. “This isn’t the first time I’ve had to write about the death of innocent children at the hands of guns in the supposed land of the free, and it won’t be the last,” she wrote.
At 7am on Wednesday morning, I also responded to the tragedy, focusing on the laxity of Texas’s gun laws compared to the harsh and regressive legislation applied to the people who are pregnant in the same US state. Texas is “pro-life” when it comes to a foetus, but not for the child in a classroom or the person who needs an abortion.
On Voices, we were able to reproduce, with permission, an essay by Kim Kardashian on the massacre in Texas. “I’m urging our leaders to come together and put politics aside and put children first,” she wrote. Kardashian has been outspoken on social media about the horrors of mass shootings before.
For UK readers, it can seem utterly unreal that the private ownership of guns is still fetishised across the Atlantic when so many lives are claimed by gun violence. A particularly staggering statistic is that there have been 199 mass shootings in the US since the start of 2022 – more than one every day. Matthew Feldman wrote about his decision to relocate to Britain, partly due to his native country’s gun laws.
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From our US team based in New York, we had an article from Eric Lewis, examining the relationship between toxic masculinity and gun violence, and Eric Garcia on how the Democrats are unable to pass popular gun safety legislation.
It is our responsibility to provide insightful and reflective comment on tragedies like the Uvalde shooting, and put empathy and compassion at the heart of this coverage.
Yours,
Harriet Williamson
Voices commissioning editor