Death toll in Texas shooting rises to seven as O'Rourke condemns inaction
- 2020 contender on US gun violence: ‘This is fucked up’
- 17-month-old child shot in the face among more than 20 injured
As the death toll in a mass shooting in Texas on Saturday rose to seven, Beto O’Rourke, the Democratic presidential candidate, used an appearance on live television to denounce America’s epidemic of gun violence as “fucked up”.
The former congressman from El Paso told CNN’s State of the Union the polite rhetoric deployed by most politicians, of “thoughts and prayers”, was no longer adequate.
He was speaking hours after a chaotic shooting spree in Odessa and Midland left seven people including the gunman dead and a 17-month-old child shot in the face among more than 20 wounded. An Odessa police spokesman said at least one person remained in a “life-threatening” condition.
Soon after 3pm on Saturday a man was stopped by Texas state troopers for failing to signal a turn. The man opened fire then fled, hijacking a mail truck and embarking on a rampage in which he shot people at random.
On Saturday officials said the 17-month-old boy was airlifted to Lubbock. A medical update on Sunday suggested the boy was in “satisfactory condition”.
It was the second mass shooting in Texas in a month. O’Rourke, who has been at the forefront of calls for tougher gun laws since 22 people were killed at a Walmart in his home town on 3 August, recited the stark statistics.
On average, he said, the US was suffering 300 mass shootings a year. In a New York Times survey, 51 people were recorded to have died in such events in August alone.
“So yes, this is fucked up,” he said. “If we are not able to call it out we will continue to have this kind of bloodshed.”
In Texas, no fewer than eight new laws came into effect on Sunday, dramatically loosening already lax controls. The legislation will allow Texans to carry guns into churches, synagogues and other places of worship, permit more guns to be deployed in schools and remove restrictions on licensed gun owners.
O’Rourke is calling for universal background checks on all gun sales, a ban on the sale of AR-15-style semi-automatic rifles and a mandatory buy-back of those weapons.
In the aftermath of the Odessa shooting, confusion reigned. Police said two suspects were on the loose and the location of the shooting was wrongly announced. The suspect, described as a white male in his 30s, was chased and shot dead in a parking lot outside a cinema between Odessa and Midland, more than 10 miles from where he was pulled over. A police update was expected later on Sunday.
The shooting began when state troopers pulled over a gold car on Interstate 20 for failing to signal a left turn, said a Texas Department of Public Safety spokeswoman. The driver “pointed a rifle toward the rear window of his car and fired several shots”, striking one of two troopers inside a patrol car. The gunman fled and two other officers were shot.
Witnesses described gunfire near shopping plazas and busy intersections. One woman, Shauna Saxton, said she was driving with her husband and grandson in Odessa and had paused at a stoplight when they heard loud pops.
“I looked over my shoulder to the left and the gold car pulled up and the man was there and he had a very large gun and it was pointing at me,” she told TV station KOSA.
“I started honking my horn. I started swerving and we got a little ahead of him and then for whatever reason the cars in front of me kind of parted,” she said, sobbing.
On CBS’s Face the Nation, O’Rourke made reference to a video, apparently of the shooting in progress, which spread on social media on Saturday.
“I also just watched a video on Twitter of a family that is pinned to the ground, the children are crying,” he said. “They’re all Mexican American in a part of our country where Mexican Americans were targeted and hunted for their very ethnicity.”
The suspect in the El Paso shooting has been linked to a “manifesto” posted online which detailed far-right positions.
“People are living with fear,” O’Rourke said, “feel like they have targets on their backs right now. Kids afraid to go to school tomorrow morning. This is not right. Unacceptable.
“And I won’t accept it.”
Donald Trump tweeted from Marine One on his return from Camp David on Sunday that the Texas shooting was a “very tough and sad situation!”
Back in Washington, he repeated to reporters a line that has been heavily criticised by experts on gun violence: that mass shootings are caused almost exclusively by the mental illness of the shooter and not by the proliferation of guns.
He said: “I will say that for the most part, sadly, if you look at the last four or five, going back even five or six or seven years – for the most part, as strong as you make your background checks, they would not have stopped any of it. So it’s a big problem. It’s a mental problem. It’s a big problem.”
Trump said a “package” of measures was being prepared to put before Congress though he gave no details. His deflection from any discussion of gun control is in tune with his behavior over recent weeks.
Days after El Paso, the president said he was eager to implement “very meaningful background checks” for which there was “tremendous support”. He later backed off.
From Poland the vice-president, Mike Pence, said Trump and his administration “remain absolutely determined” to “address and confront this scourge of mass atrocities in our country”.
In Odessa, Dustin Fawcett told reporters he was sitting in his truck at a Starbucks when he heard at least six gunshots less than 50 yards behind him. He spotted a white sedan with a shattered passenger window.
“Oh man,” he thought. “This is a shooting.”
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