Joe Biden is to meet families of victims of the Uvalde massacre this weekend.
The President’s trip was announced after it emerged that Robb Elementary School did not have an armed guard at the time of the shooting.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said he will travel there with First Lady Jill ‘to grieve with the community that lost 21 lives in the horrific elementary school shooting.’
She added: ‘While he’s there, he will meet with community leaders, religious leaders and the families of the victims.’
The Bidens ‘believe it’s important to show their support for the community during this devastating time and to be there with families of the victims’, Jean-Pierre said.
Their planned visit was announced shortly after Texas law enforcement revealed that the lack of an armed guard at the elementary school allowed the gunman to easily get into a school building where he fatally shot 21 people.
Public safety director Victor Escalon said: ‘He walked in unobstructed initially. He was not confronted by anybody. Four minutes later, law enforcement are coming in to solve this problem.’
Escalon added that the first cops who responded to the massacre on Tuesday retreated when the gunman shot at them and waited an hour for a SWAT team to arrive.
Texas state police on Thursday launched a re-examination of the law enforcement response to the mass shooting. Authorities on Wednesday acknowledged that the gunman, Salvador Ramos, 18, was not confronted by officers as he entered the campus and went on a rampage before being shot dead.
Asked to comment on the police investigation, Jean-Pierre said that the president respects the work of law enforcement agencies and ‘we won’t prejudge the results’.
The president on Wednesday had said he and the first lady would be traveling to Texas ‘in the coming days’ to ‘meet with the families, let them know we have a sense of their pain, and hopefully bring some, a little comfort to the community’.
‘As a nation I think we all must be there for them,’ he said. ‘And we must ask, when it god’s name will we do what’s needed to be done.’
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