--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Thursday, May 26th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today. This morning, we're looking at gun violence in America, the impact and the work to prevent it. There are new questions this morning about the law enforcement response to the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. People who went to the scene after hearing about the gunman reportedly saw police officers standing outside and urged them to go into the school to help. Many are asking why the shooting wasn't stopped sooner.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Today, we want to focus on the families who are trying to figure out how to do this, how to grieve, how to keep living after 19 elementary school children and two teachers were killed.
--:-- Angel Garza: One little girl was just covered in blood, head to toe. Like, I thought she was injured. I asked her what was wrong. And she said she's OK. She was hysterical, saying that they shot her best friend, that they killed her best friend and she's not breathing. And she was trying to call the cops. And I asked the little girl the name, and she told me, and she said Amory. Amory Jo Garza, my 10-year-old daughter.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's how he learned that she was one of the victims. He and his family, including his younger son, are now just trying to make sense of it all.
--:-- Angel Garua: She was so sweet, Mr. Cooper. She was the sweetest little girl who did nothing wrong. And she listened to her mom and dad. She always brushed her teeth. She was creative. She made things for us. She never got in trouble in school. I just want to know what she did to be a victim.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This is a question that so many parents have had as more and more families deal with the consequences of gun violence. The Washington Post spoke with parents of kids killed in previous shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida. These parents said whenever they hear the news of yet another school shooting, they experience a range of emotions. Numbness, nausea, pain in their chest, emptiness.
--:-- Nicole Hockley: These shootings don't just hit close to home. They are home.
--:-- Sandy Phillips: They want to die right now. They don't want to take another breath. And when we go in and we actually meet with these people, we let them know that we felt the same way. I tell them that if I had a gun in the house, I probably would not be here today.
--:-- Shamita Basu: For so many of these parents, the murder of their children has come to define the rest of their lives. They've become full-time advocates for gun reform. When a school shooting like the one in Texas happens, they jump into gear immediately to provide support for the parents who are about to join their club of anguish.
--:-- Fred Gutenberg: I'm trying hard not to curse, Nicole. But I'm shaking. But I like to tell them all to go F off. Because what they did, what they do, the way they politicized guns and violence led us to this day.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Gutenberg went on to give the mourning parents in Uvalde some advice. It took me a good solid 24 hours before my world stopped spinning to the point where I really kind of grasped what was happening. I am simply going to say this to the families there. You're going to go through pain. It's not right, and it shouldn't be. But I am here for you, and others will be here for you. You will be okay. You will find a path forward.
--:-- Shamita Basu: As Washington debates how to prevent mass shootings, the Senate is deciding whether to confirm Stephen Dettelbach, President Biden's nominee to run the ATF, that's the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.
--:-- Kevin Johnson: Violent crime is increasing. Firearms violence and mass shootings are increasing. Hate crimes and religious violence are increasing, as is violent extremism.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The confirmation hearing on Wednesday pretty much exposed the raw political divide that has existed in the country for some time, but animated, obviously, by the recent mass shootings.
--:-- Kevin Johnson: That raw political divide that I mentioned is exactly what upended Biden's first nominee for this role, David Chipman. He was a 25-year veteran of the ATF. After he retired, he worked with gun control groups. He supported banning assault-style weapons and expanding background checks. That cost him the support of Republicans and some centrist Democrats.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Biden ultimately withdrew his nomination. Dettelbach has the endorsement of eight former ATF leaders. He also had the support from the advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety. The NRA opposes him, calling him a dedicated gun controller.
--:-- Kevin Johnson: In his hearing, Dettelbach said he would steer clear of politics and stick to law enforcement. But as we just mentioned, politics has prevented the ATF from having a Senate-confirmed leader for seven years. The votes just haven't been there. All of that means acting directors have been leading investigations of illegal use of firearms and explosives.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The power that any agency director, especially a Senate-confirmed director, has is the ability to help shape policy. They don't set the policy. The administration essentially sets the policy, but they bring authority to shape the policy. And when you are a temporary or acting director, as has been the case for the agency over the past seven years, that authority is diminished in the eyes of many.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We're experiencing such frequent mass shootings that we don't even have time to process one before another happens. But it's important not to rush past the strong analysis that comes out after a major incident. And this New Yorker piece about the gunman in Buffalo who killed 10 people earlier this month is worth spending some time on.
--:-- Kyle Chayka: I think you can see how these shooters specifically do get radicalized online and they kind of find inspiration or even logistics from different examples on the Internet. So in Peyton Gendron's case, he was super inspired by the mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand. And he copied that shooter's manifesto in some cases and he echoed a lot of the same points.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Chayka looked into what we know about his activity online. Before the shooting, he was writing about plans on the chat platform Discord. Some chat rooms are public, some are private. And in a private Discord, like the one that Gendron kept for himself, he could just kind of post as much as he wanted and talk to himself, essentially. But he was also developing this content in order to eventually show it to people.
--:-- Kyle Chayka: So he unlocked his Discord half an hour before he carried out the attack to a small audience, and then it just leaked everywhere on the internet. Discord says it has protocols in place to uncover violent and hateful content, and it notes that it banned thousands of communities last year that were organizing around hate violence or extremist ideologies.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Still, the Buffalo shooter was able to discuss his plans on Discord in detail. Like other recent mass shooters, the shooter in Buffalo live-streamed his attack. The platform Twitch took down the stream within two minutes and says it's working to prevent rebroadcasting, but the footage has been shared on other online platforms.
--:-- Kyle Chayka: Chayka says the volume of disturbing online content around the Buffalo shooting shows that social media companies have more work to do. There are always going to be bad actors on any social network and you kind of can't control what content is being posted at any time. What you can do is be proactive about monitoring it so you can find where extremist content is being distributed, where it's reaching people and who's creating it, and target those situations.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This week's events made us think about a conversation that we had on our weekend podcast a few months back. It's about the school shooting generation, the first wave of school shooting survivors. They are now adults, and they've grown up watching these events happen over and over again.
--:-- Maren Kogan: The thing I keep coming back to is we just didn't have the language to discuss what had happened. It was so new. It was so unexpected. And it was so sad, but it was also so strange.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Earlier this year, Marin connected with survivors of other early school shootings that took place around the same time period. They're now in their 30s and 40s. And they talked about going through this traumatic experience before almost anyone else in the U.S. without the tools and the resources to cope.
--:-- Maren Kogan: The overall message I got from talking to the other survivors is we need to create a world and a country where this doesn't just keep happening. And I think that once we accept these things as a part of our lives, we begin to not expect any better. And I think that that is a real tragedy.
--:-- Shamita Basu: If you want to hear the full conversation with Maren Kogan, we're resurfacing it this weekend. You can find the episode by searching Apple News in conversation in the Apple News app or in the podcast app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Apple News Today team is not making a show on Friday or on Monday. Our colleagues will be updating Apple News throughout the weekend. There's a special collection of great journalism covering the Texas shootings that's up now. Our show will be back with the news on Tuesday. Thank you.
