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On May 24, nineteen young children and two adults died in a shooting at a school in south Texas. That incident begin at 11:32 local time on Tuesday, according to Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Chief of Police Pete Arredondo.

The shooter was 18 years old. He used an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle and high-capacity magazines. It is known that the name of the shooter was Salvador Ramos. A Uvalde school district police officer, who worked at the school, saw Ramos emerge from the vehicle carrying a rifle and wearing body armor. The officers attempted to stop Ramos but they were unable to do so and called for backup. The Associated Press news agency reports that a US Border Patrol official who was nearby when the shooting began rushed into the school and shot and killed the gunman, who was behind a barricade. Two border agents were reportedly shot in an exchange with the gunman. One agent was shot in the head, but fortunately, they have managed to avoid the death.

Texans have been able to carry a handgun in public without a license or training since Sept. 1, 2021. More than 1.6 million gun owners were licensed in Texas. Each year the state would reject a few thousand applicants, mostly because of criminal history. You must be 18 to buy a handgun or a long gun, but there is no minimum age to possess firearms under Texas law, according to the Giffords Law Center. Parents and legal guardians are allowed to give written permission for one to be sold or given to a minor as a gift.

“The idea that gun laws won’t have an impact in reducing mass shootings and school shooting violence is a myth,” said Louis Klarevas, a research professor at Teachers College at Columbia University who studies gun violence. Simply requiring guns to be stored safely, for example, or outlawing high-capacity magazines wouldn’t eliminate mass shootings, he said, but “the idea is to reduce the gun violence.”. Laws won’t stop bad guys from getting guns, they say, so the best solutions are increasing mental health resources in a state notoriously lacking access to such initiatives, fortifying schools, and of course, more good guys with guns.