Texas school shooting response questioned

Texas law enforcement authorities faced angry questions on Thursday over whether they acted fast enough to end the shooting rampage at an elementary school where a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers, as witnesses said parents of students trapped inside pleaded for them to storm the school.

"Go in there! Go in there!" women shouted at officers soon after the attack on Tuesday at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, according to Juan Carranza, who witnessed the mayhem from outside his house, reported USA Today.

The officers didn't immediately enter the building. They should have entered the school sooner, Carranza said. "There were more of them. There was just one of him," he said referring to the 18-year-old gunman Salvador Ramos.

Victor Escalon, a regional director for the Texas Department of Public Safety, provided new details at a news conference in front of the school on Thursday.

Escalon said the gunman had lingered outside the school for 12 minutes, firing shots before walking into the school at 11:40 am and barricading himself in a classroom where he killed the children and teachers.

"He walked in [to the school] unobstructed initially," Escalon said, disputing initial reports that the gunman was confronted by a school district police officer.

Escalon said he couldn't say why no one stopped Ramos from entering the school. Most of the shots Ramos fired came during the first several minutes after he entered the school.

Asked whether the police should have gone into the classroom sooner, Escalon said, "I don't have enough information to answer that question just yet."

Also on Thursday, a bipartisan group of 10 senators restarted gun control talks and narrowed the discussion to a few ideas, such as expanded background checks or laws that keep guns away from people who could do harm.

Tian Dewen, a researcher on international issues of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said that the prospect of greater gun control measures in the US is remote, as it is a Constitutional right for individuals to keep guns.

"The procedure of changing a Constitutional amendment will definitely meet with huge difficulty and may take years or even decades, that is why the gun controls issue has been brought up and then dropped frequently," he said.

Moreover, many politicians in Congress get support from the National Rifle Association, and it is unlikely for them to make changes that will undermine the association's interest.

"The proliferation of guns is like a cancer for the US that no one knows how to cure," he said.

Agencies contributed to this story.