Young survivor recounts Texas shooting

WASHINGTON－An 11-year-old girl who survived the mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, recounted to the US Congress in a video testimony on Wednesday how she covered herself with the blood of a dead classmate to avoid being shot.

Miah Cerrillo, a fourth-grader at Robb Elementary School, told lawmakers in a prerecorded video that she watched a teacher get shot in the head before looking for a place to hide. "I thought he would come back so I covered myself with blood," Miah told a House of Representatives panel. "I put it all over me and I just stayed quiet." She called 911 using the deceased teacher's phone and pleaded for help.

Nineteen children and two teachers died when an 18-year-old gunman opened fire with an AR-15 style rifle inside Robb Elementary School on May 24.

It was the second day lawmakers heard wrenching testimony on the nation's gun violence. On Tuesday, a Senate panel heard from the son of an 86-year-old woman killed when a gunman opened fire in a racist attack on black shoppers in Buffalo, New York, on May 14. Ten people died.

In the video on Wednesday, Miah's father, Miguel Cerrillo, asked his daughter if she feels safe at school anymore. She shook her head no.

"Why?" he asked. "I don't want it to happen again," she responded.

This came as the United States House of Representatives on Wednesday passed a gun package that is unlikely to be approved by the evenly divided Senate.

The package, dubbed the Protecting Our Kids Act, was passed in a 223-204 vote, largely along party lines.

The legislation would, among other things, raise the minimum age for buying a semi-automatic weapon from 18 to 21 years old and ban bump stocks for civilians.

Legislation talks

Senators from both sides of the aisle have engaged in gun legislation talks for a consensus on narrower gun legislation.

The House bill also includes incentives designed to increase the use of safe gun storage devices and the creation of penalties for violating safe storage requirements, providing for a fine and imprisonment of up to five years if a gun is not properly stored and subsequently used by a minor to injure or kill themselves or another individual.

It also builds on the Joe Biden administration's executive action banning fast-action "bump stock "devices and "ghost guns" that are assembled without serial numbers.

The House was expected to approve a bill on Thursday that would allow families, police and others to ask federal courts to order the removal of firearms from people who are believed to be at extreme risk of harming themselves or others.

According to data compiled by the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that tracks gun violence incidents across the country, the United States is on pace to match or surpass its worst year on record for the number of mass shootings.

There have been at least 246 mass shootings through June 5 this year. That's the same number the country saw through June 5 in 2021－the worst year on record since the Gun Violence Archive began tracking mass shootings in 2014.There were a total of 692 mass shootings in 2021.

"That 246 number also means there have been more mass shootings than days so far in 2022－a trend that's recurred each year since 2020－underscoring the growing prevalence of gun violence in American life," said CNN on Tuesday in its report of the data.

Recent events in the United States, such as the spike in gun violence across the country, and the stark partisan divide in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, are putting public health on a collision course with politics, said an article published on the STAT website on Tuesday.

Agencies - Xinhua