The NPR Politics Podcast - As Uvalde Families Demand Answers, DOJ Will Investigate Police Response

Episode Date: May 31, 2022

And President Biden and first lady Jill Biden visited with victims and their families in Texas on Sunday. The White House is considering more executive actions on guns, though substantial reform would require congressional action — something that remains very unlikely despite ongoing negotiations.This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, congressional reporter Claudia Grisales, and senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro.Support the show and unlock sponsor-free listening with a subscription to The NPR Politics Podcast Plus. Learn more at plus.npr.org/politics Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Brian on the Camino de Santiago. My wife and I are a little over halfway done with a 500-mile walk through northern Spain. This podcast was recorded at 12.22 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday, the 31st of May. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but we'll be a few miles closer to Santiago de Compostela. Wow, that's a lot of walking. Happy hiking. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Claudia Grisales. I cover Congress. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. Over the weekend, President Biden and First Lady Jill Biden went to Uvalde, Texas to pay their respect to the victims of the attack. They were there on Sunday.

They visited a makeshift memorial. They met for hours and hours with family members. Claudia, you cover Congress, but right now you are in Uvalde doing reporting there for us for NPR. Tell us about some of the folks that you met there in the community. Right, yes. It's been heartbreaking hearing these stories here. I arrived Sunday just after the president had been in town and you could get a feel from visitors, from residents, what they were going through, the excruciating pain of the last few days and what they are processing right now. And for example, I went to the makeshift memorial at Robb Elementary School where the shooting took place. For days, mourners would line up and hand off flowers and notes and

just other mementos to police and ask them to place these items at this memorial. They could not walk up directly to it until Sunday. And that's when I was talking to people, a lot of visitors from all over the state. I spoke to one couple, Renee and Adela Lopez, who drove five hours out here. They were so struck by what happened and wanted to show their respects. Adela Lopez is actually a high school teacher, and she talked to me a little bit about what she was experiencing.

Students I teach are older, 9 through 12, but they're still children. And this can happen to us. So that's my fear for my next, we're already out for summer, so everyone's fine, but we don't know next year. So this is what is on a lot of people's minds. Are we next? And it was interesting talking to Adela Lopez about this because she said she had the same feeling after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut. She wondered, when will it get to us? When will something like that reach us? And now it's closer, it's here. And she's talked about how much it's made her reflect on

what needs to get done when it comes to guns and restrictions? So we really got to get out there and get our government to give our children a chance and ban semi-automatic weapons. Have you always felt that way? I used to be pro-gun, but just guns, not military-style weapons that you can kill masses of children and people. We don't need that. You can keep your handguns, you can keep your hunting guns, but not them automatic weapons. Yeah, so that was really striking, and it was a reminder of these weapons

and how they've made it into the scenes of these mass shootings. Yeah, I mean, I think the point is that they get off a lot of shots in a short amount of time. And we've seen that here and we've seen it in other places. And it makes it very difficult for, you know, kids, teachers, police even to respond. Domenico, you know, President Biden visited this weekend, It was less than two weeks after he had made another trip to Buffalo, New York, to console families there after a mass shooting killed 10 people. Today, a small group of senators are meeting to talk about some very, I think that their ambitions are fairly limited in terms of the measures that they might be able to pass in the wake of these shootings. Do we know what what they're looking at? Well, what we do know is that Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Senator John Cornyn of Texas are leading this kind of bipartisan group looking at a potential framework for various gun restrictions.

We don't know what they're going to wind up coming up with. I mean, one thing obviously everybody continues to talk about are expanded background checks, closing quote-unquote gun show loopholes, and the ability for people to get weapons from other people and having to have those weapons go through background checks first or people to go through background checks before they can acquire those weapons. And we've heard some talk of red flag laws again. These are the kinds of laws where if somebody sees something, they say something about somebody who they think they have an issue with. They raise a red flag on somebody, whether that's how they've been acting in the community, whatever it may be, that they raise a red flag to

local authorities and, you know, would essentially ban them from getting a weapon. You know, if they're a danger, if they're a danger to themselves or others. Yeah, if that's what, you know, authorities have determined. The details of these things are difficult and not always easily sorted out. And there isn't a huge overwhelming majority because Republicans largely are against expanding any kind of gun restrictions. All right, we are going to take a quick break. And when we get back, more on was news this weekend that after requests coming in from the community in Uvalde, the Justice Department will conduct a review of the police response to the shooting. What we know is that the timeline of what happened, the information that the community was given about what happened and when it happened has shifted dramatically since the initial hours after the attack.

We know that the gunman spent more than an hour inside the school before he was ultimately killed by a tactical unit of Border Patrol agents. And those agents went in despite officers being on the scene for much of the attack. And then the Don McLaughlin, and that's why they're undertaking this to start with. And when you look at the first thing that they note as far as the goal of the review, they say it's to provide an independent account of law enforcement actions and responses that day. And that obviously has been a huge part of the conversation. And that is one thing, that timeline, what their actions were, what the potential lessons are from that are what's, I think, a headline here that a lot of people are going to be looking at. Of course, we're also going to likely find out details of exactly what happened that day to the victims.

And I think that another big piece of this that potentially could get talked about is bigger cultural issues about Uvalde, the relationship between police and this largely Latino community, as well as the accessibility of guns. Claudia, this is obviously a big storyline. What is it like for the community? How important is getting some sort of independent answer to what happened and when? How important is that to the healing process? I think it's very crucial. There is a sense here that they have moved from that initial shock, perhaps in some cases, that sadness to anger and confusion over the decisions that were made that day and how many lives it cost. And it's a very

precarious moment here in this community. They're starting the visitations for these children, for the two teachers who were killed, and the funerals are this week. And it's just going to continue for many days for the victims. So it is a brutal moment here. And people want answers. Yeah. And this timeline question, the delay in officers going in, even if the gunman had stopped shooting, by not going in, there's a question of whether some of these children could have been saved with the medical attention. And this is a question that also happened after the Pulse nightclub shooting. This is a question that has happened before after these mass shootings, where there's a delay in medical aid actually getting into the victims.

And Tam, in terms of the president, he's looking at some potential actions here himself. He may be able to do something on his own as well, correct? Yeah, that's right. The president has been a little reticent to move to executive action right away. His administration has done numerous executive actions related to gun violence over the course of the administration, things like cracking down on so-called ghost guns, pushing towards safe storage of weapons, trying to prevent veteran suicides by gun. They've done a lot on gun violence, community violence intervention, other things like that. They've done a lot of executive actions. The president has said he doesn't have much else left to do when it comes to executive action and that Congress really needs to act. You know, whether Congress is going to be able to successfully act is a very open question.

And some gun safety advocates say President Biden has done a great job. There's nothing else he can do. Others are quite adamant that there's a lot more that the president could do. They want him to create an office of gun violence prevention so that there are people whose full-time job is to focus on this. Right now, it's housed in the Domestic Policy Council, and the people who are working on gun violence prevention are working on a lot of other things, too. And there are some specific potential executive actions, actually a pretty long list of them, that gun safety advocates say that the president could take now that could the bully pulpit. And that means he can command media attention, he can reframe a narrative, he can continue to talk about and focus on any issue that he wants. And if he wants, he could focus on this issue every single day. Now, he could yell into the void, and it still might not move enough Republicans in the Senate. But in the states, we're also seeing people go in different directions. States like New York, New Jersey, and California controlled by Democrats

moving to raise age limits, for example, on who can buy a gun and put out more restrictions. States like Texas, not so much because they're controlled by Republicans. And the president can at least try to encourage and argue for this issue. And that's about all a president really can do short of the other executive actions you talked about. Yeah. And I will just note that in Florida, also a very Republican state by any measure, they enacted some of those gun safety reforms that that are being talked about after the parkland shooting like red flag laws and age limit changes yeah well claudia thank you for being there for being our eyes for being witnesses this community struggles through this time i'm tamra ke, I cover the White House. I'm Claudia Grisales, I cover Congress.

And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.