“If things are not done the way they need to be done, we’re prepared to walk out, we are prepared to keep our children home, and not start school,” said a woman whose granddaughter died in Uvalde, at a school-board meeting.
, was typically devoted to frivolity: field trips to the zoo; wacky-shoe day; classroom parties. But, on May 24th, a few hours after the end-of-the-year awards ceremony, the school year came to an abrupt end when a teen-ager armed with a semi-automatic rifle clambered over a fence and entered the campus, where he killed nineteen students and two teachers and wounded seventeen other people.
Although the shooter was dead, a sense of fear was palpable. At baseball practice, a scrawny kid with a vest and a gun stood sentinel. A week after the shooting, the Uvalde school superintendent, Hal Harrell, told the community that students wouldn’t return to Robb in the fall; he later announced that the school would be demolished and rebuilt. Until then, the students would be shifted to other campuses.
Local officials initially painted the law-enforcement response as heroic and orderly. The mayor’s office prepared a narrative of the day that downplayed the seventy-seven minutes it took for officers to kill the gunman,that “each minute was used to save lives of children and teachers.
In mid-July, victims’ families, along with local and national advocacy groups, co-hosted a protest, which they called the Unheard Voices March and Rally. A half century later, those tensions were still present. A few hours before the Unheard Voices March and Rally, the Torres sisters, a recently established organization called Fierce Madres, and March for Our Lives hosted a sign-making party at the Jardin de los Heroes Park. Stacks of pizza boxes sat on a long table, mostly untouched. Elsa Garcia, a kindergarten teacher, was working on a sign that read “Enough Is Enough.” She scanned the sparse crowd.
Father Eddy, the priest at Sacred Heart, gave a homily opposing the phrase “No justice, no peace,” saying that peace had to come first. Some parishioners clapped; others started attending mass at other dioceses. A petition circulated, asking Oasis Outback, the store where the gunman had purchased his weapons—which is owned by a friend of the mayor’s—to stop selling and facilitating the sale of AR-style weapons and their ammunition.
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