Stop Gun Violence

An 18-year-old gunman opened fire Tuesday at a Texas elementary school, killing at least 19 children as he went from classroom to classroom, officials said, in the latest gruesome moment for a country scarred by a string of massacres. The attacker was killed by law enforcement.

The death toll also included two adults, authorities said. Gov. Greg Abbott said one of the two was a teacher.

The assault at Robb Elementary School in the heavily Latino town of Uvalde was the deadliest shooting at a U.S. grade school since a gunman killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, almost a decade ago.

“My heart is broken today,” said Hal Harrell, the school district superintendent, announcing that all school activities were canceled until further notice. “We’re a small community, and we’re going to need your prayers to get through this.”

The attack also came just 10 days after a deadly, racist rampage at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket that added to a yearslong series of mass killings at churches, schools and stores. And the prospects for any reform of the nation’s gun regulations seemed as dim as in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook deaths.

Former CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin wrote a powerful essay about last week's massacre at a Texas elementary school and the media's handling of mass shootings. Baldwin, who departed the network in 2021 after 13 years, said she's processing the tragedy in Uvalde with "a feeling of deep cynicism" for the first time. Why? Because she understands the way cable news outlets operate.

"I brought together survivors of Parkland with survivors of Columbine, to reflect on two school shootings that occurred two decades apart. I looked these survivors in the eye and believed, along with them, that change was going to come," she penned for The Atlantic. "Now I know how unsure that change is. That's partly because of political inaction; Washington hasn't changed gun laws much. But it's also because of media coverage."

Baldwin covered the 2018 Parkland shooting where 17 people were murdered at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. The journalist was getting ready to speak to a teacher there on the ground when a producer "interrupted our broadcast from Florida and spoke into my earpiece."

"News was breaking about President Donald Trump and the FBI. My producer assured me that we'd return to coverage in Parkland, but that right then — I'll never forget it — 'we have to break away to go live to Washington,'" Baldwin recalled. The teacher was standing nearby waiting for the five-minute live interview. "I used the pause in coverage to tell her what was happening and told her that we'd get to her, that her story mattered. But I already knew then that they weren't coming back to us."

Baldwin, who covered mass shootings since 2006, was ordered back to New York. The media's coverage about Parkland quickly lessened four years ago and she predicts a similar outcome now.