Biden Remembers Uvalde Victims One Year After Texas Shooting

As families and loved ones mourn the unimaginable loss of 19 children and two teachers shot dead last year in Uvalde, Texas, President Joe Biden said from a solemn White House memorial that too many schools, too many everyday places have become “killing fields.”

Biden delivered remarks in front of a display with 21 candles, one for each victim, with a white rose and satin ribbons in school colors that displayed each victim's name and age.

All the students killed were between the ages of 9 and 11 years old.

Before the president spoke, he and first lady Jill Biden, who is a teacher, stopped to look at the names of the dead.

“I realize this is a very tough day for all the families,” Biden said quietly. “Remembering is important, but it’s also painful.”

Biden spoke of how he stood in Uvalde a few days later, staring at 21 crosses outside the school with the names of victims. He said they spent hours with the grieving families.

“We know one year later, this is still so raw for you," he said. "You'll miss birthdays and holidays, school plays, soccer games. Just that smile. A year of everyday joy, just gone forever.”

The killings, along with another mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, prompted bipartisan legislation that passed through a divided Congress just a month later. It was the most significant gun safety law in decades.

The law toughened background checks for the youngest gun buyers, and sought to keep firearms from domestic violence offenders and to help states put in place red flag laws that make it easier for authorities to take weapons away from people adjudged to be dangerous.

“Too many schools, too many everyday places have become killing fields in communities across America. And in each place, we hear the same message: Do something. For God’s sake, just do something,” Biden said. “We did something afterwards, but not nearly enough.”

Those laws haven't stopped mass shootings or gun deaths of children. And Uvalde is still managing the fallout from the botched emergency response to the shooting.

It was the worst shooting in a school since 2012, when 20 children between 6 and 7 years old and six adults were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

Yet since that bill signing last summer, the tally of mass shootings in the United States has only grown. Five dead at a nightclub in Colorado. Eleven killed at a dance hall in California. Three 9-year-olds and three adults shot and killed at an elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee. Seven shot dead in rural Oklahoma.

As of May 24, there have been at least 25 mass killing incidents in the U.S. so far in 2023, leaving at least 127 people dead.

Firearms are the No. 1 killer of children in the U.S. and so far this year, 85 children younger than 11 have died by guns and 491 have died between the ages of 12 and 17.

As of 2020, the firearm mortality rate for children under 19 is 5.6 per 100,000. The next comparable is Canada, with .08 per 100,000 deaths.

“It's time to act," Biden said. "It’s time to make our voices heard. Not as Democrats or Republicans. But as friends, as neighbors, as parents — as fellow Americans.”

“I know for a long time it’s been hard to make progress," Biden said. “But there will come a point where our voices are so loud, our determination so clear, that it can no longer be stopped. We will act.”

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