Unconscionable tragedy struck the once-quiet community of Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday morning. Situated eighty miles west of San Antonio and just over fifty miles from the U.S.-Mexico border, Uvalde was a place hardly known to anyone outside the tiny Texas vicinity before yesterday.
However, in the span of a few minutes, the name has become synonymous with so many other fateful towns like Columbine and Sandy Hook. As of this writing, nineteen children and one teacher have died from gunshot wounds, more still in critical condition.
The barbarity of this shooting is unquestionable. What is noteworthy is how Salvador Ramos, the eighteen-year-old named the lone gunman, has immediately been portrayed as an impoverished, bullied outcast, often ridiculed with homosexual slurs for wearing eyeliner and cheap clothing. He had just turned eighteen a few days before the shooting, purchasing two semi-automatic rifles used in the horrific attack.
The immediate call for insane gun control measures by Democrats, politicizing the senseless massacre of children within moments of shots being fired, is perhaps the only more disgusting aspect of establishing a narrative of the shooting.
The distinction between the Buffalo shooting and the Uvalde shooting, perhaps only separated by the fact that massacring children registers as an evil beyond words, is despicably made in the coverage. Whereas the Buffalo shooter was white and his motivations could be attached to an entire structural racism and white supremacy system, the Uvalde shooter was Hispanic, enabling the media to instead push gun reform and focus on the individual’s troubled mental state.
The U.K.’s Daily Mail reported extensively on this background narrative. Its opening headline even read: “Texas school shooter Salvador Ramos was bullied at school because of the clothes he wore and because his family was poor, former classmate says.”
Contrast that burden on guilt to their headline from the recent Buffalo shooting: “Buffalo white supremacist, 18, threatened a school graduation shooting last year and was given psychiatric treatment – but still legally bought three guns: Classmates reveal he acted strangely, wore hazmat suit to school for a week and scared them with ‘Hitler-esque’ political views.”
In the former, Ramos is immediately the victim of his assault. In the latter, Peyton Gendron (also eighteen) was a white supremacist with Hitler-esque political views. They might as well have called him Ultra-MAGA.
The Daily Mail continues:
“Warped mass murderer Salvador Ramos was a failing high school loner with an ‘aggressive streak’ who was bullied for being poor and mocked for wearing eyeliner.
That is how former classmates and colleagues have described the ‘evil’ killer, 18, who slaughtered at least 19 innocent children in the second deadliest school shooting in American history in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday, before being shot dead in a shootout with a border patrol officer.
Described by one pupil as an ’emo,’ his lisp also made him a target, according to the Washington Post, with classmates claiming he endured gay slurs. Another said he was mocked for his clothing.”
In addition to the struggles at school and interpersonal connections, the Daily Mail also notes that his relationships at home were no better.
“His neighbor Ruben Flores, 41, said he had a ‘pretty rough life’ with his mother and that he had tried to be a father figure to the teen.
He claimed to the Post that police had previously visited his maternal home on Hood Street and that the troubled youth argued often with his mother before moving to his grandmother’s house across town a few months ago.”
