On Tuesday, an 18-year-old gunman from Uvalde, a small town in South Texas, barricaded himself inside the city's Robb Elementary School and murdered 21 people, including nineteen children, in what was the deadliest school shooting since 2012.
Although little is known about precisely what led to this horrific massacre, news reports suggest that the suspected perpetrator, Salvador Ramos, who died on the scene, should have never been able to get his hands on a gun in the first place. Former friends of his told The Washington Post that Ramos had a predilection for egging people's cars, cutting up his own face "for fun," shooting random strangers with his BB gun, and sharing his firearm wishlists over social media. Ramos was also known to get into fistfights throughout middle school and would often lash out at his mother, which, according to neighbors, ended in at least one visit from the police. At one point, Ramos may have even been arrested for threatening to shoot up a school. But in Texas, where the Second Amendment is sacrosanct, none of this prevented the troubled teen from legally buying two military-style semi-automatic assault rifles and 375 rounds of ammunition on his eighteenth birthday, just a week before the shooting.
