Roland Gutierrez, the Texas state senator who represents the city of Uvalde, has said that while there were clearly major failures in the law enforcement response to this week’s school shooting, the blame for what happened is shared far more widely.
Mr Gutierrez, a Democrat, was speaking to Dana Bash, host of CNN’s “State of the Union”, on Sunday.
“I had a long talk with Colonel McCraw yesterday,” said the senator, referring to the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety. “He’s devastated… he’s acknowledged that there were errors here. What I’ve suggested is that it’s not fair to put it on the local ISD cop.
At the end of the day, everybody failed here. We failed these children. We even failed them in the Texas legislature.”
The initial confusion over the police response to the shooting has given way to anger in recent days, as information continues to emerge showing that police were received multiple 911 calls from children and teachers while the massacre was underway and yet still did not enter the school building for a full 50 minutes.
Early police statements about the chain of events during the shooting proved to be false and contradictory, deepening the sense of outrage at the failure to stop Salvador Ramos as he murdered 19 children and two adults.
Mr Gutierrez has given multiple interviews since the shooting. He also spoke this morning to NBC’s “Meet the Press”, where host Chuck Todd asked him if somebody needed to be held accountable for the law enforcement response during the shooting.
“I don’t know that there should be criminal negligence or anything like that, or criminal accountability,” replied the state senator. “But we have to make sure that this never happens again, because you and I both know there’s probably going to be one of these instances happening again, in this state, in others. We have to learn from this, for sure. We have to make some changes.”
Mr Gutierrez also emphasised that episodes like this week’s massacre are definitely attributable to “a gun problem”, pointing out that even taking into account compounding issues like poor mental health services, “at the end of the day, if we don’t have accessibility to militarised weapons, this doesn’t happen. Just like it doesn’t happen in the rest of the world.”
