According to reports, Uvalde, TX gunman Salvador Ramos shared his plans via Facebook Messenger minutes before carrying out the deadly attack.
Roughly a half-hour before the shooting, Ramos allegedly wrote “I’m going to shoot my grandmother,” followed by a message confirming he carried out the harrowing deed. Minutes before going to the elementary school, Ramos allegedly wrote “I’m going to shoot an elementary school.”
Facebook policy communications director Andy Stone explained that the messages were not public but “private one-to-one text messages that were discovered after the terrible tragedy occurred.”
While many are calling for gun control and are dismissing discussions of mental health as a band-aid to the problem, Texas Governor Greg Abbott still pushed the mental health line during a presser on Wednesday.
“Before coming out here, we had a long discussion with law enforcement at all levels … and I asked the sheriff and others an open-ended question and got the same answer from the sheriff as well as from the mayor of Uvalde,” Abbott said during a Wednesday press conference. “The question was, what is the problem here? And they were straightforward and emphatic. They said … ‘we have a problem with mental health illness in this community.’ And then they elaborated on the magnitude of the mental health challenges that they are facing in the community and the need for more mental health support in this region.”
