Biden says Second Amendment ‘not absolute’ as more details of school shooting emerge

The billboards could be seen all over Colorado’s Front Range for months, showing a picture of actor Charlton Heston, then the president of the National Rifle Association, holding an antique rifle, with the words “Join me.” It was an ad for the NRA’s annual meeting, which, in 1999, was scheduled to be held in Denver from April 30 to May 2.

Those billboards were still up in Littleton, a suburb of Denver, after April 20, when two students entered Columbine High School there and shot and killed 12 students and a teacher before taking their own lives.

For five years, Irma Garcia and Eva Mireles were a teaching team at Robb Elementary School. On Tuesday, they died together in their fourth-grade classroom — slain while probably doing their utmost, relatives said, to protect their students from a rampaging gunman.

Garcia, 48, and Mireles, 44, were the only teachers killed in the shooting in Uvalde, Tex., that authorities say also took the lives of at least 19 children.

UVALDE, Tex. — At Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Uvalde on Wednesday evening, a priest read victims’ names as a line of children, each carrying a red rose, walked up to the altar.

The young parishioners — some of them teenagers, many others seemingly the same age as those slain in their elementary school classroom — took their steps one by one on the white linoleum tiles to the light strumming of a guitar.

The youth activist group Students Demand Action has called for students across the country to walk out of their classrooms at noon Eastern time on Thursday to put pressure on lawmakers to respond to Tuesday’s shooting.

“How many more kids have to die in our schools before our lawmakers act,” organizers wrote on the group’s website, which is the student arm of the organization Everytown for Gun Safety. “We deserve to learn and live without fear, but thanks to our weak gun laws and the gun lobby’s relentless ‘guns everywhere’ agenda, nowhere is safe.”

UVALDE, Tex. — The gray Ford pickup truck veered into a ditch with such force that people who live on the block assumed it was an accident and rushed over to help the driver.

Instead, according to witness and police accounts, Salvador Rolando Ramos emerged wearing tactical gear and carrying an AR-15-style rifle he bought this month just after his 18th birthday. Bystanders scattered as Ramos hopped a fence, exchanged gunfire with a school police officer and strode through a back entrance to Robb Elementary. Inside, he embarked on a deadly rampage that brought the national scourge of school shootings to a fourth-grade classroom in this southern Texas town.

Members of the Senate confronted another gut-wrenching mass shooting with a distinct sense of fatalism Wednesday, with most Republicans standing firm in defense of expansive gun rights as Democrats said they were desperate to pursue even meager attempts to prevent another tragedy.

Much of the reaction inside the Capitol to the horror in Uvalde, Tex. — where an 18-year-old gunman killed 19 children and two teachers in an elementary school — followed a familiar script, one that has played out repeatedly since 2012, when the tragedy at Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary School prompted a months-long failed effort to forge bipartisan compromise.

Stephen Garcia said Salvador Rolando Ramos often used the Yubo app, a platform where users can swipe on each other’s profile, Tinder-style, or hang out in live-streaming rooms and virtually ‘meet’ other users by playing games and chatting with them.

Garcia, who considered himself Ramos’s best friend in eighth grade, said Ramos didn’t have it easy in school. “He would get bullied hard, like bullied by a lot of people,” Garcia said. “Over social media, over gaming, over everything.

Faith Mata, 21, was getting dressed and ready for work at her apartment in San Marcos, Tex., where she is a rising senior at Texas State University, when she received a text from a cousin in her hometown of Uvalde. Her cousin works at the Uvalde Police Department. The cousin wanted to know: What school did her sister Tess go to?

“Hurry,” the message read, imploring Faith to respond.