--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Wednesday, May 25th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Nineteen children and two adults are dead after the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas yesterday. Others were injured, some seriously. The gunman was 18 years old. He was shot and killed by a U.S. Border Patrol agent who was working nearby.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The gunman is also suspected of shooting his grandmother before going to the school. He reportedly, legally, purchased two rifles and ammunition last week. President Biden addressed the nation after the killings.
--:-- Shamita Basu: As a nation, we have to ask, when in God's name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby? when in God's name we do what we all know in our gut needs to be done. It's been 3,448 days, 10 years since I stood up at a high school, a grade school in Connecticut, where another government massacred 26 people, including 20 first graders at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Since then, there have been over 900 incidents, gunfires reported on school grounds. Texas Governor Greg Abbott also responded to the shootings.
--:-- Shamita Basu: When parents drop their kids off at school, they have every expectation to know that they're going to be able to pick their child up when that school day ends. There are families who are in mourning right now, and the state of Texas is in mourning with them for the reality that these parents are not going to be able to pick up their children.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We're only beginning to learn the stories of the victims as their families and people in the community grieve and remember them. One was fourth-grade teacher Eva Morellas. She was married with a child of her own. A parent of one of her students remembers her as a beautiful person and dedicated teacher, someone who went above and beyond for her students.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Some of the victims were as young as 9 or 10 years old. Their families were waiting for hours for any news at a civic center in town. Reporters said you could hear grieving families from the parking lot.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This is one of the worst school shootings in American history. It stands out both for the number of people killed and how young most of the victims were. It's the deadliest school shooting since Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut almost 10 years ago.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That state senator Chris Murphy spoke on the Senate floor yesterday, just hours after the shooting. This isn't inevitable. These kids weren't unlucky. This only happens in this country and nowhere else. Nowhere else do little kids go to school thinking that they might be shot that day.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Murphy was newly elected to the Senate when the shooting at Sandy Hook happened. In the years since, he's advocated for gun safety bills. He called on his colleagues to do something.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I'm here on this floor to beg, to literally get down on my hands and knees and beg my colleagues. Find a path forward here. Work with us to find a way to pass laws that make this less likely.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Jennifer Masia is a journalist at The Trace, which covers gun violence. We asked her to reflect on what legislation has been proposed since Sandy Hook.
--:-- Jennifer Masia: A few months after Sandy Hook, Congress did try to implement universal background checks because almost a quarter of our gun sales don't necessitate background checks. So that was seen as, the lowest common denominator sort of legislation, not too controversial. It didn't pass by just a few votes.
--:-- Jennifer Masia: Forty-six senators, including five Democrats, voted against that bill in 2013. And since then, it's fallen on individual states to come up with their own rules. Democratic-led states have, by and large, passed stronger gun laws. Republican-led states have largely relaxed gun laws.
--:-- Jennifer Masia: Your state's gun law is only as strong as the closest state that has a weak gun law. So I'm in New York. Pennsylvania has much weaker gun laws. Ohio has weaker gun laws. Somebody could easily drive into those states from New York and get a gun.
--:-- Jennifer Masia: After the Parkland, Florida shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018, there were changes made. Fifty new state gun laws went on the books, including in 14 states with Republican governors. They included bans on bump stocks that make guns fire faster and tools for authorities to disarm violent people.
--:-- Jennifer Masia: But nationally, progress has been slow. Many Republicans prefer to turn the focus away from laws restricting guns. Yesterday on Newsmax, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said we should arm adults who work in schools.
--:-- Jennifer Masia: Having potentially teachers and other administrators who have gone through training and who are armed because first responders typically can't get there in time to prevent a shooting. It's just not possible unless you have a police officer on every campus, which for a lot of these schools is almost impossible.
--:-- Shamita Basu: On Friday, the NRA is scheduled to hold a leadership forum in Houston. President Trump, Senator Ted Cruz, and Governor Abbott are still listed as speakers as of this morning.
--:-- Jennifer Masia: The NRA is not what it was 10 years ago when Sandy Hook happened. It's going through legal trouble and leadership questions. Still, I say, don't underestimate the influence of its philosophy. NRA-ism survives, even if the NRA is weak.
--:-- Jennifer Masia: Whether the NRA has an outsized voice in our culture still or not, the NRA's message has become part of American society, for better or worse.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Next, congressional Democrats are trying to push forward on a vote for stronger background checks for gun buyers. All signs point to there being significant Republican opposition.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It may be true that not a lot has changed over the years, as far as federal law, despite polls showing public support for certain gun control measures like background checks. But it's not correct to say nothing has happened.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Year after year, more mass shootings happen. Families of victims have turned into full-time advocates. And politicians have voted and gone on record as being in favor of or against restrictions on guns.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now we have another shooting, another set of funerals. And again, our elected officials will have to put into writing whether they think something should change or not.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's a difficult day in America as we think about why violence happens and what we as a country will do about it. Today also marks two years since George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer.
--:-- Shamita Basu: His killing, which happened in the first few months of the pandemic, sparked national protests. Demonstrators marched against racism and called for big changes to policing.
--:-- Shamita Basu: At the time, Joe Biden was running for president. He told lawmakers to move quickly on overhauling law enforcement.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I call on the Congress to act this month on measures that will be the first step in this direction starting with real police reform. He spoke about a bill to outlaw chokeholds. He called for more accountability and oversight.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But two years later, The Washington Post reports on how Biden's rhetoric has changed.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Here's the president this month at a memorial for law enforcement officers who were killed in the line of duty. Folks, the answer is not to abandon the streets. It's not to choose between safety and equal justice. And we should agree, it's not to defund the police. It's to fund the police. Fund them with the resources, the training. They need to protect our communities and themselves and restore trust among the police and the people.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A political analyst tells The Post, Biden is largely limited to symbolic stands on overhauling law enforcement because he doesn't have the votes in Congress for sweeping and lasting reform.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Lawmakers failed to move forward on a package of changes called the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So instead, Biden is leaning on his executive powers. Today, he's expected to sign an executive order that will severely limit chokeholds, limit the use of no-knock warrants, create a database tracking officers fired for misconduct, require body cameras, and restrict transfers of military hardware to local police.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But the executive order only covers federal law enforcement. Local law enforcement doesn't have to follow it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A lot of police reform activists worry that the momentum that was built up two years ago now seems to be lost.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Two Washington Post reporters wrote a book to capture the rise of that momentum and what happened in George Floyd's life before the world learned his name. Robert Samuels and Talou Olorunipa were on NPR's Fresh Air.
--:-- Talou Olorunipa: Floyd's family is frustrated with the lack of progress. This has become just another political fight in which there's a stalemate and nothing gets done. And that's something that the family has been pretty upset about and pretty understandably distraught over, that even though it seemed like there was this momentum and that something would happen to honor Floyd's legacy and to make sure that this kind of thing did not happen again, all of that seemed to have evaporated very quickly.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find more coverage of the Texas shooting, of George Floyd, and other stories, including yesterday's key primary results. All of that is in the Apple News app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We'll talk with you again tomorrow.
