Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) is apparently going to skip a planned appearance at the National Rifle Association convention in Houston on Friday after the deadly mass shooting at a South Texas elementary school earlier this week, according to a new report.

Abbott will address attendees in a “prerecorded video,” said spokesman Mark Miner, as reported by the Dallas Morning News.

A late Thursday advisory from Abbott’s office said the governor will return to Uvalde, the town where the shooting took place, and hold a 3:30 p.m. press conference “on state’s ongoing efforts to support the Uvalde community.”

Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat running against Abbott in Texas’s gubernatorial contest in November, interrupted a press conference about the school shooting with Abbott and other officials Wednesday.

Former President Donald Trump is set to deliver a speech at the NRA event Friday, but attendees will be prohibited from carrying their firearms during the address, according to a report.

While the White House slammed the NRA before the pro-gun group’s members meet in Houston days after 19 fourth grade students and two teachers were shot dead Tuesday at Robb Elementary School, singer-songwriter Don McLean is among some performers who have dropped out of appearing at the gun lobby meeting.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said he plans to appear at the event “because what Democrats and the press try to do in the wake of every mass shooting is they try to demonize law-abiding gun owners, try to demonize the NRA.”

Police officers responding to Tuesday’s deadly mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, were stalled as they entered Robb Elementary School due to uncertainty about the gunman’s location, a Texas Department of Public Safety official said.

Lt. Chris Olivarez provided some insight Thursday as outrage and questions mount regarding what took law enforcement so long to stop the gunman, who was in the school for up to an hour and killed 21 people, including 19 children and two teachers, in one classroom. More than a dozen others were injured.

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked if “current best practices” call for officers to disable a shooter as quickly as possible regardless of how many officers are on site.

“Correct,” Olivarez said.

“The active shooter situation — you want to stop the killing. You want to preserve life. But also one thing that, of course, the American people need to understand is that officers are making entry into this building. They do not know where the gunman is,” he added. “They are hearing gunshots, they are receiving gunshots. At that point, if they proceeded any further not knowing where this suspect was at, they could have been shot — they could have been killed. And at that point, that gunman would have the opportunity to kill other people inside that school.”

Three officers initially breached the school through the same door as the shooter, where he said officers were “taking gunfire.” At that point, they called for tactical teams and additional backup “that could arrive to assist not only with the situation but also to assist in evacuating students and teachers,” Olivarez said.

Eventually, backup did arrive. A member of a Border Patrol tactical unit that arrived later on has been credited with killing the shooter, identified by authorities as 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, after breaching the classroom in which he was barricaded. Olivarez said they were assisted by local officers who arrived with ballistic shields and noted that at least one Border Patrol agent received minor injuries in the raid.

A pair of MLB teams are turning to their social media accounts to raise awareness of the effects of gun violence in the wake of the second-deadliest school mass shooting in the country.

The New York Yankees and the Tampa Bay Rays, teams facing off Thursday, posted that they would do this in lieu of game coverage two days after a shooter killed 21 people, including 19 children and two teachers, at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

“We all deserve to be safe — in schools, grocery stores, places of worship, our neighborhoods, houses and America. The most recent mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde have shaken us to the core. The Tampa Bay Rays are mourning these heartbreaking tragedies that took the lives of innocent children and adults,” the Rays said in a statement. “Rather than our usual game coverage on social media tonight, we’ve partnered with Everytown to amplify facts about gun violence in America.”

Additionally, the Rays donated $50,000 to the Everytown on Gun Safety Support Fund, one of the largest gun violence prevention organizations in the country.

The teams’ social media accounts followed suit with tweets about guns.

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The leaders of the nation’s largest teachers unions blasted renewed interest in arming teachers and school staff as a distraction amid the aftermath of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

Training teachers to carry firearms in schools has often been proposed as a deterrent to would-be mass shooters targeting schoolchildren, but the leadership of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers have loudly opposed the idea, saying the solution is “not more” guns.

Read more here.

UVALDE, Texas — Border Patrol agents who responded to the shooting at Robb Elementary School on Tuesday are struggling to cope with the inhumanities they witnessed.

Border Patrol agents are federal law enforcement and typically intercept human and drug smugglers attempting to enter the United States illegally. However, on Tuesday, agents stationed in Uvalde and the surrounding area responded en masse to calls for backup for the school shooting.

“We had some agents who are in kind of bad shape because some of them had to help carry bodies out of the school,” said Jon Anfinsen, a Border Patrol agent who is union president of the National Border Patrol Council’s Del Rio chapter. “There are a lot of agents who saw some pretty terrible things.”

“A gunshot wound to a child is really traumatic — not just to Border Patrol, but any medic who went in,” said a senior federal law enforcement official familiar with the investigation into the attack. “You don’t get over that in a few days. Those are wounds that stick with you.”

In response, Border Patrol has sent in “peer support” agents who are trained to help fellow agents when they are going through a difficult time. Counselors from El Paso and Laredo were also sent in to evaluate and help affected agents.

Anfinsen said the recovery process is complicated because Border Patrol in the region “can’t really even afford” to let agents take time off because the region is buried responding to record-high illegal crossings at the border. He added that there is no protocol within the Border Patrol for recovering from this type of incident.

Anfinsen said at least one agent lost a grandchild in the shooting and that others may have had family members who were affected, adding that several dozen agents across four regional stations live in Uvalde.

The union sent a message to members Wednesday afternoon encouraging them to speak with friends and family, as well as free mental health resources available to them.

Read more here.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Susan Rice is leading the administration’s gun control efforts.

Jean-Pierre said there is “no one better” than Rice to lead the effort in the wake of a mass shooting Tuesday at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. She was responding to a question about whether President Joe Biden intended to tap his vice president as a gun czar, a role Biden held during the Obama administration that some Democratic lawmakers have urged the president to fill again.

“We have a whole-of-government approach … that Ambassador Susan Rice is leading, along with other departments,” Jean-Pierre added.

Rice leads Biden’s Domestic Policy Council and was considered a top vice presidential prospect during the 2020 campaign. A veteran of the Obama administration, she drew controversy after downplaying the possibility of a planned terrorist attack when four Americans were killed in Benghazi, Libya. Rice was ambassador to the United Nations at the time.

The White House refused to call for an investigation into the police response to the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, saying President Joe Biden “has the utmost respect for the men and women of law enforcement.”

Read more about the press briefing on Thursday here.

Georgia’s GOP Senate nominee Herschel Walker fumbled two responses to questions about his stance on gun control this week in the aftermath of a shooting at a Texas elementary school.

The former NFL running back proposed that law enforcement develop “a department that can look at young men that’s looking at women that’s looking at their social media” rather than strip U.S. citizens of constitutional rights, likely referencing the alleged shooter’s social media patterns before opening fire at the school on Tuesday.

“What about doing that, looking into things like that, and we can stop that that way?” Walker asked on Fox News.

The Senate hopeful invoked biblical analogies when discussing the Uvalde mass shooting.

“People see that it’s a person wielding that weapon. You know, Cain killed Abel,” Walker told Fox News host Brian Kilmeade. “And that’s the problem that we have. And I said, what we need to do is look into how we can stop those things.”

“We need to get into what happened to him, why, by putting money in mental health. Have people thought about that?” he continued. “We’ve gotta get back into prayer. People thinking now praying is bad. No, it’s not bad. We need to pray for things like that. We need to continue to go out and fight, continue to take your constitutional rights away, and I think we can’t do that.”

When asked by a CNN reporter on Tuesday whether the shooting should lead to new gun laws, Walker responded, “What I like to do is see it and everything and stuff,” according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Walker, who won the Republican primary for the hotly contested Senate seat earlier this week, suffers from dissociative identity disorder and advocates increased resources dedicated to understanding the shooter’s psyche as opposed to greater restrictions on guns.

Eleven-year-old Miah Cerrillo reportedly snapped into “survivor mode” after watching her classmates and teachers massacred by a crazed gunman in the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting that left 21 victims dead.

The fourth-grader smeared another girl’s blood on her body to convince the gunman that she was dead, according to her aunt.

“My sister-in-law said that she saw her friend full of blood, and she got blood and put it on herself,” said Cerrillo’s aunt, Blanca Rivera, according to a report. “My brother said she had bullet fragments in her back,” she added.

The husband of a teacher who was fatally shot in the Uvalde shooting on Tuesday died of a heart attack, his family announced Thursday.

Joe Garcia had been the high school sweetheart of Irma Garcia, who was one of two teachers killed in the bloody rampage. The Garcias had been married for 24 years and are survived by four children, FOX26Houston reported.

“EXTREMELY heartbreaking and come with deep sorrow to say that my Tia Irma’s husband Joe Garcia has passed away due to grief, I truly am at a loss for words for how we are all feeling, PLEASE PRAY FOR OUR FAMILY, God have mercy on us, this isn’t easy,” John Martinez, Garcia’s nephew, tweeted.

Irma Garcia was shot while trying to defend her fourth grade class from the shooter, who went on to kill 19 students and Irma Garcia’s colleague, Eva Mireles, according to Martinez. An 18-year-old assailant wielded an AR-style semi-automatic rifle during his attack, which also wounded 17.

A woman named Debra Austin, who claims to be a cousin of Irma Garcia, posted an update to a GoFundMe campaign for the Garcia family, claiming Joe Garcia died from “a medical emergency.”

“Please keep our family in your thoughts and prayers. I truly believe Joe died of a broken heart, and losing the love of his life of more than 30 years was too much to bear,” she said.

Meghan Markle made a surprise visit Thursday to Uvalde, Texas, to pay tribute to the victims of a deadly elementary school shooting.

The Duchess of Sussex approached a memorial outside of the courthouse in the southern Texas town and laid a bouquet of white roses in front of a cross dedicated to 8-year-old Uziyah Garcia, the youngest victim in the attack. She was accompanied by a bodyguard, according to the Daily Mail.

The duchess and her husband, Prince Harry, live in Montecito, California, with their two children after the two stepped down as working royals in 2020. It is not clear if Harry accompanied his wife to Uvalde.

(AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

The shooter at a Texas elementary school on Tuesday was not confronted by officers and entered the building through an unlocked door, officials said Thursday.

The revelation corrects initial reports that school officers had attempted to stop the gunman from entering the elementary school before he barricaded himself in a classroom and killed 19 children and two teachers. The shooter walked through the hallways until he eventually reached an open classroom, Texas police told reporters on Thursday.

Click here to read the full report.

While the 18-year-old shooter who killed 21 in an elementary school on Tuesday was fleeing the scene of a crash, there weren’t any law enforcement officers to stop him from going inside the school.

A raging debate about the efficacy of school resource officers or other armed personnel on school campuses was complicated Thursday afternoon when Texas Department of Safety said there wasn’t anyone to halt the shooter.

Jacquelyn Martin/AP

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) said Thursday he wants to have an “informed debate about reforms we can make” to federal gun policy in the wake of a mass shooting at an elementary school in his state.

Senate Democrats are eager to vote on a gun bill in response to the shooting but face steep odds to do so because any effort to pass new restrictions or reforms to existing laws would have to win bipartisan support in the Senate in order to reach the upper chamber’s 60-vote filibuster threshold and go to President Joe Biden’s desk.

“I can’t fathom the pain of seeing an empty bed where your child slept the night before,” he said. “The obvious question is, how do we prevent something like this from happening again?”

Click here to read the full report.

AP

Republican senators have blocked movement on a bill Democrats say would equip law enforcement agencies with more resources to combat domestic terrorism and white supremacy in the military.

The bill failed to secure the 60 votes necessary to open debate, with the final tally coming to 47-47. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer changed his vote to be against the measure so that he could introduce it to the floor again in the future.

The GOP rallied against the measure, which passed the House along party lines last week, out of concern that it would cast too wide a net as to what qualifies as “extremism” and argued that federal agencies already have the authority and resources to combat domestic terrorism.

Click here to read the full report.

Dario Lopez-Mills/AP

Parents who were frustrated with the delayed response of Texas police tried to enter the elementary school where an active shooter was barricading himself inside a classroom, video evidence shows.

A group of adults began yelling at officers just before noon to let them inside if the police refused to enter the school and arrest the suspected shooter, according to a Facebook video recorded by a witness and verified by the Washington Post. Police stood outside the building for at least 40 minutes after the gunman stormed into Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, around 11 a.m. on Tuesday, according to a new report.

“You know that there are kids, right? They’re little kids, they don’t know how to defend themselves,” the man shooting the video tells an officer. “Six-year-old kids in there, they don’t know how to defend themselves against a shooter.”

Click here to read the full report.

Unprompted, the Department of Homeland Security announced law enforcement officials are not planning on making any immigration-related arrests at Robb Elementary School.

The school where an 18-year-old killed 21 people on Tuesday is a “protected area” according to a DHS press release.

“To the fullest extent possible, ICE and CBP will not conduct immigration enforcement activities there so that individuals, regardless of immigration status, can seek assistance, reunify with family and loved ones, and otherwise address the tragedy that occurred.”

Uvalde, a small town just 60 miles away from the southern border, has a large Border Patrol presence, including a station.

A CBP agent was the law enforcement officer who stormed the school with two other police officers and shot and killed the shooter who had barricaded himself inside a classroom.

The NRA Convention lost a musical act but still has some of its biggest headliners appearing on Friday.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) told a local CBS affiliate on Thursday that he has no plans to cancel his appearance at one of the National Rifle Association’s biggest events of the year. The group has been criticized for opting to hold the event in Houston, 4.5 hours away from the site of Tuesday’s brutal school shooting.

“I’m going to be there because what Democrats and the press try to do in the wake of every mass shooting is they try to demonize law-abiding gun owners, try to demonize the NRA,” Cruz said. “I’ll tell you what the NRA does, it stands up for your rights, stands up for my rights, and stands up for the rights of every American.”

Dario Lopez-Mills/AP

UVALDE, Texas — The elite tactical agents in the U.S. Border Patrol credited with taking down the gunman in Tuesday’s mass shooting at Robb Elementary School recognized that they were attempting a “suicide” mission but took action in spite of that, according to a senior Homeland Security official.

Parents on scene outside the school amid the chaos criticized law enforcement outside for taking too long to act, but a senior federal law enforcement official familiar with the investigation into the incident told the Washington Examiner on Thursday that the Border Patrol agents on site that day had been appointed by the local and state law enforcement on site to lead that aspect of the response.

Click here to read the full report.

Graeme Jennings/Graeme Jennings

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Thursday that the Senate will vote on “gun safety legislation” upon its return from its Memorial Day recess regardless of whether bipartisan negotiations “bear any fruit.” Senate Democrats operating on a slim majority would need to win bipartisan support in order to pass any such legislation.

In the wake of the mass shooting at a Texas elementary school that left at least 19 children and two adults dead, Senate Democrats are eager to vote on a gun bill but face steep odds to pass one. Any effort to pass new restrictions or reforms to existing laws would have to win bipartisan support in the Senate to reach the upper chamber’s 60-vote filibuster threshold and reach President Joe Biden’s desk.

“We are under no illusions that this will be easy,” Schumer said in remarks on the Senate floor.

Schumer singled out Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) for reaching out to Republican colleagues to see what types of legislation they would support and said he was willing to give Murphy “a short amount of time to try.”

Click here to read the full report.

William Luther/AP

At least one child who died on Tuesday was shot because she called out for help.

A student who survived Tuesday’s massacre said that he and four others hid themselves from the shooter by taking cover under a table cloth. However, when police arrived, one child’s response to their commands left her dead, according to KENS5.

“When the cops came, the cop said: ‘Yell if you need help!’ And one of the persons in my class said ‘help,'” the child told police. “The guy overheard and he came in and shot her,” the boy said. “The cop barged into that classroom. The guy shot at the cop. And the cops started shooting.”

Police were slow to enter the building, with new evidence suggesting they waited almost an hour before making the decision. It’s unclear when the shooter began killing students.

Besides hiding under the tablecloth, the child said his teachers, Irma Garcia and Eva Mireles tried to help protect his classmates.

“They were nice teachers,” he said. “They went in front of my classmates to help. To save them.”

J. Scott Applewhite

One of Texas’s senators said he was going to talk with a colleague whose state also suffered a mass shooting about red flag laws.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) will reportedly talk with Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) about the provisions that could help keep firearms out of the hands of dangerous individuals.

Red flag laws, in theory, have broad, bipartisan support, but not everyone believes that preventing someone from purchasing — or taking away lawfully owned — firearms before someone has committed a crime is a good or effective idea.

Even if Murphy can persuade Cornyn to further explore the idea of implementing a red flag law in his state, Cornyn’s colleague Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has stated his firm opposition to the idea.

Jae C. Hong/AP

In the wake of the mass shooting at a Texas elementary school that left at least 19 children and two adults dead, voters broadly support certain firearm restrictions, but a majority also supports a proposal to arm teachers, according to a new poll.

A new Politico/Morning Consult poll conducted entirely after the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, found that 88% strongly or somewhat support requiring background checks on all gun sales, while just 8% strongly or somewhat oppose that proposal.

Click here to read the full report.

(AP Photos)

Former President Barack Obama is facing online scrutiny after mentioning George Floyd amid grief concerning the Texas elementary school shooting.

Obama’s tweet that called for the remembrance of Floyd’s death came Wednesday afternoon, one day after a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers in a classroom of an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.

Click here to read the full report.

Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats spent the hours after a mass shooting at a Texas elementary school calling on Congress to revisit gun control solutions that have, for years, failed to attract bipartisan support.

“As a nation, we have to ask: When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?” Biden said during a prime-time address Tuesday evening, responding to the massacre that left 19 children and two teachers dead.

Click here to read the full report.

Dario Lopez-Mills/AP

The mayor of Uvalde had a few choice words for Texas gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke after he interrupted a press conference about the Tuesday school shooting.

Mayor Don McLaughlin initially intervened during the interruption to tell O’Rourke, “You’re a sick son of a b**** that would come to a deal like this to make a political issue.” He later expanded on the remarks to denounce O’Rourke’s attempt to make a political point during the briefing.

Click here to read the full report.

Patrick Pleul/AP

Elon Musk offered his thoughts on regulating the sale of semi-automatic rifles on Thursday, saying he believes at the very least “a special permit” should be required for buyers.

The SpaceX and Tesla CEO gave his opinion on Twitter after being asked for his thoughts on the “AR-15 discussion.” His Thursday tweet comes after telling a news outlet on Wednesday that he supports “tight” background checks on people purchasing firearms following a school shooting at an elementary school in Texas that killed 19 children and two adults.

Click here to read the full report.

UVALDE, TEXAS – The elite Border Patrol tactical agent who took down the Uvalde shooter sustained a wound to the head after being brazed by a bullet.

The Washington Examiner obtained a picture of the wound, showing just how close the agent himself came to death as he risked his life to stop 18-year-old shooter Salvador Ramos. A separate picture obtained by Fox News shows the border agent’s hat with a hole ripped at the top.

Click here to read the full report.

(AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills)

Police stood by for upward of 40 minutes after a gunman stormed into an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday and killed 19 children and two teachers in a classroom, according to a new report.

Investigators are piecing together what happened over the course of the massacre, which ended with a Border Patrol team rushing in and killing the 18-year-old shooter. Witnesses cited by the Associated Press recalled shouting at police to enter the building to save the people inside. One even proposed having bystanders do the job that officers apparently refused to do as they stood outside.

Click here to read the full report.