The tragedy of last week’s deadly shooting at a Texas elementary school has grabbed most of the nation in past days. On May 24, an 18-year-old shooter opened fire at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde County, Texas, killing 19 young students and two instructors. The heinous act is part of a disturbing pattern south of the border, in which school shootings have become all too prevalent. According to National Public Radio, the event on May 24 was the 27th school shooting in the United States. It was also the second-deadliest school shooting in US history, after only the December 2012 tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. While mass shootings happen throughout the world, the United States seems to be the only country where they happen so frequently.

Similar questions arise concerning President Joe Biden as he states, “Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we keep letting this happen? Where in God’s name is our backbone?” President Biden’s agonized questions came hours after a shooting at a Texas elementary school on Tuesday. The deaths of 19 students and two instructors in a fourth-grade curriculum at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, happened just ten days after a man motivated by bigotry killed down ten black people at a Buffalo grocery. The same unsettling questions were raised following Columbine, Blacksburg, Sandy Hook, Roseburg, and Charleston. As long as Congress fails to implement vital gun safety reform, they will be challenged.

Xavier Lopez, 10, who merely made the honor roll; Uziyah Garcia, 8, commemorated by his granddad as the “sweetest little boy that I’ve ever known”; Eva Mireles, a 17-year elementary school educator whose daughter not long ago graduated from college; and Irma Garcia, an educator, and mom of four confirmed to have tried to protect her students from the gunman, were among those killed in the deadliest attack at an American school in nearly ten years.

According to a Post database, the shooting was one of at least 24 instances of gun violence on K-12 campuses this year, with at least 28 people murdered. A day after, an FBI analysis showed a dramatic spike in active-shooter assaults worldwide last year. For the first time in 2020, weapons surpassed automobile accidents as the most significant cause of mortality for American children and adolescents. Despite this, Congress does almost nothing. Two measures to extend and tighten background checks — changes with widespread public support — cleared the House in March 2021 but have stalled in the Senate, which would need 10 Republican votes to overcome a blockade. Since the massacre of 20 children and six employees at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in December 2012, the matter has not been actively explored.

Democrats, according to Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), are willing to negotiate with Republicans in the hopes of reaching an agreement on gun control measures. One can only expect that the catastrophe in Uvalde has provoked some Republican consciousness. Background checks should be strengthened as a top priority. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has introduced legislation that’d increase the legal age to acquire firearms and greater ammo magazines from 18 to 21 years old.

Due to a significant clause in federal gun regulations that required someone to be 21 to acquire a pistol but not a rifle, the Texas gunman, such as the alleged shooter in Buffalo and many others superintended for countless slaughters, was a teenager who was supposed to buy military-style weaponry. Following the Parkland school massacre in 2018, Florida’s Republican-controlled legislature enacted, and then-Gov. Rick Scott (R) endorsed the bill raising the minimum age to purchase guns to 21 years old. Mr. Scott, now in charge of the Senate’s Republican leadership, should undoubtedly support a measure he previously championed. The new legislation will not stop all gun massacres, but it will contain some. That’s a good place to start.

People in Uvalde, Texas, wait for news following the horrific shooting at Robb Elementary School.