News

Aug 09, 2023

Uvalde Elementary School Shooting: ‘It Was the Wrong Decision,’ Police Say of Delay in Confronting Gunman

Officials described a harrowing series of 911 calls, including some from

Officials described a harrowing series of 911 calls, including some from children inside Robb Elementary in Uvalde. The National Rifle Association's annual convention opened in Houston and former President Donald J. Trump defended gun owners.

Follow today's latest news on the Uvalde, Texas, elementary school shooting.

J. David Goodman, Edgar Sandoval, Karen Zraick and Rick Rojas

UVALDE, Texas — Furtively, speaking in a whisper, a fourth-grade girl dialed the police. Around her, in Room 112 at Robb Elementary School, were the motionless bodies of her classmates and scores of spent bullet casings fired by a gunman who had already been inside the school for half an hour.

She whispered to a 911 operator, just after noon, that she was in the classroom with the gunman. She called back again. And again. "Please send the police now," she begged.

But they were already there, waiting in a school hallway just outside. And they had been there for more than an hour.

The police officers held off as they listened to sporadic gunfire from behind the door, ordered by the commander at the scene not to rush the pair of connected classrooms where the gunman had locked himself inside and begun shooting shortly after 11:30 a.m.

"It was the wrong decision, period," the director of the state police, Steven C. McCraw, said on Friday after reading from the transcripts of children's calls to 911 and from a timeline of the police inaction during nearly 90 minutes of horror at the elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.

After days of shifting explanations and conflicting accounts, the disclosures answered many of the basic questions about how the massacre had taken place. But they raised the even more painful possibility that had the police done more, and faster, not all of those who died — 19 children and two teachers — would have lost their lives.

The frank and sudden revelation by Mr. McCraw that a police commander decided not to go inside the classroom even as the gunman continued shooting brought forth an eruption of shouts and emotional questioning. At times, Mr. McCraw struggled to be heard. At others, he appeared overcome, his voice breaking.

Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, who earlier in the week had said the police "showed amazing courage by running toward gunfire," said on Friday at a news conference in Uvalde that he had been "misled" about the events and the police response, adding that he was "absolutely livid."

Mr. Abbott, who hours earlier abandoned plans to appear at a National Rifle Association convention in Houston, told reporters that state lawmakers would review the tragedy and determine what went wrong. "Do we expect laws to come out of this devastating crime? The answer is yes," he said.

To the children inside Robb Elementary School, Tuesday began as a day of celebrations and special treats — movies in classrooms, photos with family in front of a glittery curtain and award ceremonies for students finishing their year in two days, as relatives proudly gripped their hands as they walked down the hallways.

Gemma Lopez had gym class that morning, and an awards ceremony. She watched "The Jungle Cruise" with her fourth-grade classmates in Room 108. Some of the students finished up work, others played around, "doing whatever we do," as she put it.

Then she heard loud popping in the distance, like firecrackers. She realized something was wrong because she saw police outside the classroom window. And the popping grew louder.

"Everyone was scared and everything, and I told them to be quiet," Gemma, 10, said. One of her classmates thought it might be a prank and laughed. Gemma said she had hushed her. They had done drills for this. She turned out the classroom lights, as she had been taught to do.

"I heard a lot more of the gunshots, and then I was crying a little bit," she said, "and my best friend Sophie was also crying right next to me."

The 18-year-old gunman, who crashed his grandmother's pickup truck at 11:28 a.m. in a ditch by the school, began by firing outside — more than 20 times, first at bystanders and then at classroom windows. A Uvalde school district police officer arrived at the scene but did not see the gunman and drove past him.

Minutes later, the gunman was inside, pulling open a side door that should have been locked but had been propped open by a teacher who had gone outside to retrieve her cellphone.

Jasmine Carrillo, 29, was working in the cafeteria with about 40 second-graders and two teachers when the attack began. The lights dimmed — part of a schoolwide lockdown that had gone into effect.

Once he entered the fourth-grade building, Ms. Carrillo said, the shooter banged and kicked on the door of her 10-year-old son Mario's classroom, demanding to be let in. But he could not open the locked door.

Instead, he moved to others.

In the connected classrooms, Room 111 and Room 112, a pair of teachers, Eva Mireles and Irma Garcia, had also been showing a movie, "Lilo & Stitch," as the students finished up their lessons. One of the teachers moved to close the door and seal the classroom from the hallway. But the gunman was already there.

Miah Cerrillo, 11, watched as her teacher backed into the classroom, and the gunman followed. He shot one teacher first, and then the other. She said he shot many students in her classroom, and then went to the adjoining one and opened fire, said her grandfather, Jose Veloz, 71, relaying the girl's account.

Then he began shooting wildly.

The terrifying echo of at least 100 gunshots rattled through the school as children in the classrooms and both of the teachers there were shot and fell to the ground. It was 11:33 a.m.

Not all of the children inside were killed in that horrifying moment. Several survived and huddled in fear next to their limp friends. One of the children fell on Miah's chest as she lay on the ground, her grandfather said. Terrified he would return to her classroom, Miah said, she took the blood of a classmate who fell dead and rubbed it all over herself. Then she played dead herself.

Two minutes after the gunman first entered the pair of classrooms, several police officers from the Uvalde Police Department rushed into the school. A pair of officers approached the locked door to the classrooms as gunfire could be heard inside. The two were struck — graze wounds, as their injuries would later be described — as bullets pierced the door and hit them in the hallway.

Minutes passed. Miah heard the gunman go into the room next door and put on "really sad music," as she described it to her family.

Inside the room, the gunman fired 16 more shots. More officers arrived outside. By noon, there were 19 officers from different agencies in the hallways, and many more outside the school.

By 12:10 p.m., one of the students phoning 911 reported that eight or nine students were still alive, Mr. McCraw said.

Parents gathered near the grounds and around Uvalde, a close-knit community of 15,000 west of San Antonio, searching desperately for any word of their children inside, increasingly distraught at the silence of texts sent and not replied to.

"I prayed with four ladies that everything would be all right," said Lupe Leija, 50, whose 8-year-old son, Samuel, was inside. In the midst of the pandemonium, his wife, Claudia, sent their child's teacher a text: "Kids OK?"

In less than a minute, she got the response that she wanted: "Yes, we are."

Other parents were increasingly angry, urging the officers who appeared to be milling about to end the shooting that they could plainly see and hear was still going on.

But the commander at the scene, Chief Pete Arredondo of the Uvalde school district police department, determined that the nature of the situation did not call for officers to rush in, as active shooter trainings have prescribed for decades, since the massacre at Columbine High School in 1999.

Mr. McCraw said the commander had determined that the gunman was no longer an active shooter, but a barricaded suspect — "that we had time, there was no kids at risk," he said. The commander ordered up shields and other specialized tactical gear to enter the room.

Through the long, excruciating minutes, they waited for it.

"They were there without proper equipment," said Javier Cazares, who arrived in anguish at the elementary school, panicked for his daughter, Jackie Cazares, who was trapped inside. He watched as the shields were brought in slowly and not at the same time. "One guy came in with one and minutes later, another one came in," he said.

Chief Arredondo did not respond to requests for comment on Friday.

By 12:15 p.m., specialized officers from the Border Patrol arrived at the school after driving about 40 minutes from where they had been stationed near the border with Mexico.

The federal agents arrived to a scene of chaos — people pulling children out of windows while the local police, carrying only handguns and a few rifles, were trying to secure a perimeter. The specially trained agents did not understand why they were left to wait, a law enforcement official said.

At 12:19 p.m., another girl called from Room 111, but quickly hung up when another student told her to. Two minutes later, there was another call, and three shots could be heard.

More time passed. Another call came to 911 from one of the two girls at 12:47 p.m. By then, the children had been trapped with the gunman for over an hour.

The girl in Room 112 implored: "Please send the police now," according to the transcript read by Mr. McCraw.

A few minutes later, at around 12:50 p.m., the specially trained officers from the Border Patrol opened the locked door with keys from a school janitor and burst into the room, firing 27 times inside the classroom, and killing the gunman.

Another eight spent cartridges were found in the hallway, fired by law enforcement. During the course of the massacre, the gunman fired 142 times, Mr. McCraw said, using an AR-15-style rifle, one of two he had purchased several days earlier with a debit card, just after his 18th birthday.

Jackie, who always wanted to be the center of attention, the "little diva" to her family, died in the shooting, alongside her classmate and cousin, Annabelle Rodriguez, a quiet, honor-roll student.

Miah, the 11-year-old whose classmate died beside her, survived, as did both of the children who had quietly called 911.

But Miah's family has been unable to hug her because of the bullet fragments embedded in her back and in the back of her head, said an aunt, Kimberly Veloz. She still needs to see a specialist in San Antonio to remove them, but she does not want to leave the house, she said.

"She still thinks he's going to come and get her," Ms. Veloz said. "We told her that he's dead. But she does not understand."

Mario, the 10-year-old whose mother was working in the cafeteria, has refused to eat since Tuesday and is unable to sleep at night.

The academic year in Uvalde is over now, but Mario's mother, Ms. Carrillo, said her son, afraid of another attack, does not want to go back to school.

She has had to be honest with him, that the friends he made at Robb Elementary, his friend Jose Flores, the schoolmates he expected to see again in the fall, were all gone.

"They are with God now," she told him.

Frances Robles, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and Serge F. Kovaleski contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy Kirsten Noyes and Jack Begg contributed research.

Jack Healy and Natalie Kitroeff

UVALDE, Texas — Living in a rural Texas town renowned for white-tailed deer hunting, where rifles are a regular prize at school raffles, Desirae Garza never thought much about gun laws. That changed after her 10-year-old niece, Amerie Jo, was fatally shot inside Robb Elementary School.

"You can't purchase a beer, and yet you can buy an AR-15," Ms. Garza said of the 18-year-old gunman who the authorities say legally bought two semiautomatic rifles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition days before killing 19 children and two teachers. "It's too easy."

But inside another Uvalde home, Amerie Jo's father, Alfred Garza III, had a sharply different view. In the wake of his daughter's killing, he said he was considering buying a holster to strap on the handgun he now leaves in his home or truck.

"Carrying it on my person is not a bad idea after all this," he said.

An anguished soul-searching over Texas’ gun culture and permissive gun laws is unfolding across the latest community to be shattered by a shooter's rampage.

Uvalde, a largely Mexican American city of 15,200 near the U.S. southern border, is a far different place from Parkland, Fla., or Newtown, Conn., which became centers of grass-roots gun control activism in the aftermath of the school shootings there.

Gun ownership is threaded into life here in a county that has elected conservative Democrats and twice supported former President Donald J. Trump. Several relatives of victims count themselves among Texas’ more than one million gun owners. Some grew up hunting and shooting. Others say they own multiple guns for protection.

In Uvalde, the debate has unfolded not through protests and marches, as it did after Parkland, but in quieter discussions inside people's living rooms and at vigils, in some cases exposing rifts within grieving families. The grandfather of one boy killed on Tuesday said he always keeps a gun under the seat of his truck to protect his family; the boy's grandmother now wants to limit gun access.

Gov. Greg Abbott, who signed a law last year making Texas a "Second Amendment sanctuary" from federal gun laws, and other Republicans have dismissed calls for tightening access to guns in the wake of the Uvalde shooting. They have instead called for improving school security and mental health counseling.

But public opinion surveys and interviews with victims’ families and Uvalde residents suggest that many Texans are more open to gun control measures than their Republican leaders, and would support expanding background checks and raising the age requirement to buy assault-style rifles to 21 from 18.

Trey Laborde, a local rancher, brought his gun to a fund-raiser for relatives of victims of the shooting, where he was helping to smoke meat. Mr. Laborde said he despises President Biden, thinks the 2020 election was stolen and recoils at calls to take away people's guns. He believes "all these teachers should be armed."

But he also wants more limits on gun access.

"I don't think that anybody should be able to buy a gun unless they’re 25," Mr. Laborde said. He was recently given an assault rifle as a gift by his father-in-law but said, "I don't think they should be sold," he said, adding: "Nobody hunts with those types of rifles."

Public support for some gun control measures has held steady throughout recent years of opinion polls, as Texas was rocked by deadly mass shootings at a Walmart in El Paso and in the streets of Odessa.

In a February poll by the University of Texas/Texas Politics Project, 43 percent of Texans said they supported stricter gun laws while just 16 percent wanted looser rules. In earlier polls, majorities supported universal background checks and were against allowing gun owners to carry handguns in public without a license or training; 71 percent of Texans supported background checks on all gun purchases, according to a poll from the University of Texas/Texas Politics Project in 2021.

Three hundred miles away from Uvalde, raw divisions over gun rights in Texas were on vivid display on Friday as hundreds of gun control supporters protested outside an annual National Rifle Association convention in Houston. Inside, Mr. Trump and others blamed "evil" and an array of social ills for the attacks, but not easy access to guns.

Mr. Abbott withdrew from speaking in person at the convention and instead traveled to Uvalde amid mounting anger over revelations that the police response was delayed in confronting and killing the gunman.

The Roman Catholic archbishop of San Antonio, whose territory includes Uvalde, said the N.R.A. should have canceled its meeting in Houston. "The country is in mourning, but they are not," Gustavo García-Siller, the archbishop, said in an interview, calling the embrace of guns "a culture of death in our midst."

Vincent Salazar, 66, whose granddaughter Layla was killed in the Uvalde attack, said he had kept guns in his house for 30 years for protection. But as he grieved the girl who won three blue ribbons at Robb Elementary's Field Day, he said he wanted lawmakers to at least raise the age for selling long guns like the black AR-15-style rifle used in his granddaughter's killing.

"This freedom to carry, what did it do?" Mr. Salazar asked. "It killed."

Several parents and relatives of Uvalde's victims said they wanted politicians in Texas to follow the lead of six states that have raised the age for buying semiautomatic rifles to 21 from 18. But gun rights supporters are challenging those laws in court, and recently won a legal victory after an appeals court struck down California's ban on selling semiautomatic guns to young adults.

Javier Cazares, whose daughter Jacklyn was killed inside Robb Elementary, carries a gun and fully supports the Second Amendment, having learned how to fire semiautomatic rifles at 18 when he enlisted in the U.S. Army. But he said the killing of Jacklyn and so many of her fourth-grade friends should force politicians into tightening gun measures.

"There should be a lot stricter laws," he said. "To buy a weapon at 18 — it's kind of ridiculous."

Even as many in Uvalde have said they want to focus their attention on the victims, the conversation about guns has been reverberating through town. Kendall White, who guides groups on hunting trips, helped cook at the barbecue fund-raiser for relatives of victims of the attack on Friday.

Mr. White said he would never give up the right to "legally go out and harvest an animal and bring it home to my kids." He crowed over the fact that his daughter shot her first white-tailed deer at the age of 3.

"She was sitting on my lap," he said.

Mr. White believes people are the problem — not guns. "Guns don't kill nobody, period," he said. "You’ve got to have somebody pull the trigger."

But the recent mass shootings have weighed on Mr. White, who is 45, and this one, in his hometown, left him gutted.

He says he wants some things to change.

"He should never have been able to get that gun," Mr. White said, referring to the gunman. "We should raise the age limit. We should do stronger background checks." There is room, he said, "for some compromises" on gun laws.

Ricardo García was working a shift as a groundskeeper at Uvalde Memorial Hospital on Tuesday when the first students from Robb Elementary were hustled inside the emergency room, followed by a group of parents. As the hours wore on, he said, the hospital began informing families that their children had died.

Mothers screamed the word "no" over and over. Fathers banged on the walls of the hospital.

Mr. García said he has never owned a gun and now believes the only way to solve gun violence in America is to ban them for everyone other than law enforcement.

"They’ve got to stop selling the guns," he said. "The governor's got to do something about it."

One child, who came in with blood on his shirt, told his parents that he was right next to the gunman as he was shooting, and now the boy couldn't hear out of one ear.

"He had an AR-15 man, inside a classroom," Mr. García said. "It's going to make a lot of noise for those kids."

The grief swirling through the little green house where Eliahana Torres once cared for her goldfish and practiced her softball swing into the night was still raw as relatives gathered to grapple with her killing.

An uncle, Leo Flores, said that someday, some other gunman would attack another school. He said the best hope for preventing more bloodshed was to arm and prepare teachers — a view shared by many conservative politicians and residents across Texas.

But inside the house, Eliahana's grandfather, Victor M. Cabrales, said the seeming inevitability of another mass shooting was a clarion call for stronger gun restrictions.

"It's because we don't do nothing," he said. "We need a change. A real change. Not just words."

Rick Rojas and Josh Peck contributed reporting.

Scott Miller

Gabe Kapler observed his own moment of silence sometime before the San Francisco Giants team he manages opened its Memorial Day Weekend series in Cincinnati on Friday night. His moment came not before a national anthem nor while standing at attention at the edge of a dugout.

Instead, it occurred at a keyboard as he quietly filtered his own grief and outrage into a fiery blog post under the headline, "Home of the Brave?"

He then tweeted the post, describing it with one sentence: "We’re not the land of the free nor the home of the brave right now."

"When I was the same age as the children in Uvalde, my father taught me to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance when I believed my country was representing its people well or to protest and stay seated when it wasn't. I don't believe it is representing us well," Kapler wrote, adding: "Every time I place my hand over my heart and remove my hat, I’m participating in a self-congratulatory glorification of the ONLY country where these mass shootings take place."

"I don't plan on coming out for the anthem going forward until I feel better about the direction of our country" – Gabe Kapler pic.twitter.com/J1MdlVL3XI

Consequently, as Kapler would later tell reporters in Cincinnati, he no longer intends to be on the field for pregame national anthems "until I feel better about the direction of our country." Kapler said he didn't necessarily expect his protest to "move the needle," but that he felt strongly enough to take this step.

After Friday's game was delayed just over two hours because of inclement weather, only seven Giants were on the field — two coaches, four players and an athletic trainer — when the anthem was played. The Giants eventually lost, 5-1.

In his blog post, Kapler said he regretted standing on the field for the national anthem and observing a moment of silence before a game in San Francisco against the Mets this week just hours after a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Texas. Kapler said that he was "having a hard time articulating my thoughts the day of the shooting" and that "sometimes, for me, it takes a couple of days to put things together."

In that way, he is not unlike another Bay Area sports figure who wrestled with the most meaningful way to protest. Quarterback Colin Kaepernick, formerly of the San Francisco 49ers, also struggled. He began by sitting during the national anthem to protest racial inequality and police brutality, and after consulting with Nate Boyer, a retired Army Green Beret and former N.F.L. player, he started kneeling instead.

For Kaepernick, that protest proved to have lasting consequences. Despite having previously led his team to a Super Bowl appearance, he was not signed after opting out of his contract following the 2016 season. He has only been given the chance to work out for teams a few times since. In 2019, he and his former teammate Eric Reid settled a lawsuit against the N.F.L. in which they had accused the league's teams of colluding against them.

"My brain said drop to a knee; my body didn't listen," Kapler wrote of his swirl of emotions before this week's Mets-Giants game. "I wanted to walk back inside; instead I froze. I felt like a coward. I didn't want to call attention to myself. I didn't want to take away from the victims or their families. There was a baseball game, a rock band, the lights, the pageantry. I knew that thousands of people were using this game to escape the horrors of the world for just a little bit. I knew that thousands more wouldn't understand the gesture and would take it as an offense to the military, to veterans, to themselves."

Kapler's action continues a steady stream of protests from the sports world this week. Coach Steve Kerr of the Golden State Warriors forcefully spoke out in favor of gun control ahead of his team's Western Conference finals game on Tuesday. On Thursday, both the Yankees and the Tampa Bay Rays used their Twitter and Instagram feeds to post facts about gun violence rather than posting anything about the game between the rival teams.

"We elect our politicians to represent our interests," Kapler wrote. "Immediately following this shooting, we were told we needed locked doors and armed teachers. We were given thoughts and prayers. We were told it could have been worse, and we just need love.

"But we weren't given bravery, and we aren't free," he wrote. "The police on the scene put a mother in handcuffs as she begged them to go in and save her children. They blocked parents trying to organize to charge in to stop the shooter, including a father who learned his daughter was murdered while he argued with the cops. We aren't free when politicians decide that the lobbyist and gun industries are more important than our children's freedom to go to school without needing bulletproof backpacks and active shooter drills."

Christina Morales

When Maranda Gail Mathis, 11, started school she was a shy and quiet girl, said her mother, Deanna Gornto, confirming that her daughter died in the Uvalde school shooting. But as the year went on, she opened up, made friends and even her teachers, Irma Garcia and Eva Mireles, said she became more talkative. Maranda was a creative girl who loved music, mermaids and unicorns –– mythical creatures instilled in her by her mother and aunts. She and her younger brother were always together and loved to play Roblox on her tablet. Maranda loved the outdoors. She enjoyed running during school field days, swimming in the river and showing rocks she found to her mother. "The one thing I know is she loved her whole family," Ms. Gornto said. "She loved all of us."

Edgar Sandoval

UVALDE, Texas — It was two days before the end of the school year. Miah Cerillo, a fourth grader at Robb Elementary School, and her classmates were giddy with anticipation to the summer break. The children were watching the Disney movie "Lilo and Stitch" when she had to do the unimaginable to survive the mass shooting at the school in Ulvade, Texas, according to an account shared by relatives.

The gunman barged through a side door of a classroom divided in two and pointed a gun at a teacher and told her "good night." She then tried to shut the door, and he shot her point blank, said Miah's grandfather, Jose Veloz, 71.

The gunman then began shooting indiscriminately and wounded children fell to the ground. A boy fell on Miah's chest, Mr. Veloz said. "When he fell on her chest, she took blood from that child and smeared it all over her face to play dead," he said in Spanish. "She was brave and smart to think of that in that moment."

She then recalled the shooter going to a room next door and playing "really sad music," said her grandmother, Dominga Veloz, 71. She laid still for an hour, what she said felt like five hours, relatives said, until finally a border patrol agent barged through the door and shot the gunman. "He saved her life. If he had not gone in, I don't want to think about it."

The family have not been able to hug her because she has fragments of bullets embedded in her back, relatives said.

"She doesn't want to leave the house," said an aunt, Kimberly Veloz. "She still thinks he's going to come and get her. We told her that he's dead. But she does not understand."

Alexandra Petri

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine gave a virtual address to Stanford University students on Friday, and offered his condolences for the shooting in Uvalde. "It is impossible to understand at all. This is a tragedy," Mr. Zelensky said, noting that the attack in Uvalde occurred exactly three months after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. "And we live in a terrible time when Americans express condolences to Ukrainians over the deaths in war. And Ukrainians express condolences to Americans over the deaths in peace."

Michael C. Bender

Donald J. Trump delivered a fiery, hourlong speech to the National Rifle Association on Friday in Houston that could have been pulled right out of the group's political playbook — or worked just as well at one of his political rallies.

"Existence of evil in our world is not a reason to disarm law-abiding citizens," Mr. Trump said, but "one of the very best reasons to arm law-abiding citizens."

His speech reflected none of the equivocations over gun policy Mr. Trump struggled with at times as president. After the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Fla., he called for raising the minimum age for buying guns to 21 from 18, only to back down after meeting with the N.R.A. He privately said he wanted to ban semiautomatic assault rifles, but top White House aides and administration officials convinced him otherwise.

Speaking just days after the mass shooting at an Uvalde, Texas, elementary school, Mr. Trump made clear on Friday that he didn't view guns as the problem. Instead, he blamed a troubled American culture in which mental health was declining, school discipline was lacking and the traditional nuclear family was receding.

"No law can cure the effects of a broken home," he said.

He resurrected some past policy proposals, like arming teachers in schools, and teased another presidential campaign. And he suggested that, if he were to become president again, he would "no longer feel obligated" to avoid deploying federal troops into cities to deter crime.

"I would crack down on violent crime like never before, which is the way I would have liked to have done it the first time," Mr. Trump said to applause, before adding, opaquely, "but in a certain way, I’m glad I didn't."

Eileen Sullivan

WASHINGTON — In the sprawling distances of South Texas, sheriff's deputies, local and county police officers, Texas Rangers and Highway Patrol troopers, U.S. Border Patrol agents, immigration officers and other members of law enforcement work together on a daily basis.

Along the more than 1,200 miles of border between Mexico and Texas, federal, state and local law enforcement agencies respond to one another's calls for backup and regularly conduct joint operations.

So it was not unusual that agents with Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement responded to the desperate request for backup from the Uvalde Police Department on Tuesday. It was highly unusual, however, for ICE officers to be pulling children out of school windows, and for Border Patrol agents to play such a central role in response to a school shooter, firing the bullets that killed him.

The Uvalde police asked for tactical equipment when they called for backup, and members of the Border Patrol Tactical Unit, the agency's version of a SWAT team, dropped what they were doing and went to the school, about a 40-minute drive from where they had been working on the southwest border.

(Even though the Border Patrol's mission is to secure the nation's international boundaries, it is allowed to operate up to 100 miles from a land or coastal border.)

Ultimately — about 35 minutes after the unit members arrived at the school, Steven C. McCraw, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said at a news conference on Friday — it was a sharpshooter from the Border Patrol Tactical Unit, or BORTAC, who killed the gunman around 12:50 p.m.

At the news conference, Mr. McCraw said the local police had been in charge of the response and that not sending law enforcement officers into the classroom where the gunman was for more than an hour had been "the wrong decision."

Border Patrol created the BORTAC unit in 1984, in response to rioting at immigration detention facilities. Since then, agents in the unit have at times found themselves in high-profile situations. In April 2000, it was a gun-wielding BORTAC agent who seized Elián González, the Cuban boy who was at the center of an international custody battle. The agent grabbed the boy from his great-uncle's arms after agents had forced their way into the house in Miami where Elián had been staying.

The little-known unit, headquartered in El Paso, has about 250 agents. Its members most often operate along the country's borders, conducting operations like breaking into stash houses where smugglers hide drugs and weapons. Most of the people the unit targets are violent, with lengthy criminal records. Its agents have enhanced, Special Forces-type training; they typically carry stun grenades and hold sniper certifications. They arrived at Robb Elementary School on Tuesday with three ballistic shields, which are designed to stop or deflect bullets and other projectiles.

Becoming a member of the unit involves a three-week selection process that includes constant physical and mental stress and food and sleep deprivation.

"We are looking for an overall combination of toughness, heart, intelligence and integrity," Mike Marino, a supervisory agent with BORTAC, said earlier this year. "The goal is to assess in someone what is normally immeasurable. You have to get a sense of person's true being."

Members of the unit also operate around the world and have provided training and supported military action in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The unit has been criticized for some of its actions, including its involvement in former President Donald J. Trump's efforts to quash protests against police violence in Portland, Ore. in 2020, after George Floyd's murder. That June, Mr. Trump sent 66 agents from the specialized unit, along with other federal law enforcement officers, to Pearland, Texas, for the burial service of Mr. Floyd, a Black man killed by a white Minneapolis police officer.

Mr. Trump also sent members of the unit to so-called sanctuary cities — where local police are instructed not to assist federal immigration enforcement agents. They were sent to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers with arrests of undocumented immigrants. Many saw the operation as a scare tactic, part of the Trump administration's efforts to crack down on illegal immigration.

While it is rare for the BORTAC team to play such a central role in the response to a local crime, it has happened before.

In 2015, members of the team assisted with the manhunt of the escaped convicted killers Richard Matt and David Sweat in upstate New York. A member of the team shot and killed Mr. Matt, after the team found him hiding in the woods.

Many Border Patrol agents and officers with Customs and Border Protection, its parent agency, live in the Uvalde area, which is part of the 245-mile-long Del Rio Border Patrol sector. About 160 agents and officers work out of the Uvalde station, which is about an hour from the U.S. border with Mexico and has a traffic checkpoint. Parts of the Texas border are popular crossing points for undocumented migrants, and Border Patrol agents, in their green uniforms — about 9,200 of them in the state — are everywhere.

Raul Ortiz, the Border Patrol chief, said that when his agents got the call about the Uvalde shooting around 11:30 a.m. on Tuesday, between 80 and 100 of them — both on and off duty — headed to the school.

"Right away, we decided that we needed to engage," Mr. Ortiz said Wednesday on CNN.

"The people that work in law enforcement, particularly in South Texas, have such a strong kind of common bond, almost familial,"said Charley Wilkison, the executive director of the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas, a professional association. "Sometimes in South Texas, law enforcement is just seen as one thing."

Chief Victor Rodriguez of the police department in McAllen, Texas, said Border Patrol works so closely with local law enforcement that it is considered another law enforcement asset in the community.

Most often, he said, incidents that Border Patrol responds to along with local officers are related to immigration.

In a situation like the school shooting in Uvalde, Mr. Rodriguez said, "all local law enforcement agencies react and respond to see if they can help."

Edgar Sandoval contributed reporting from Uvalde, Texas.

Rick Rojas

The Roman Catholic archbishop of San Antonio, whose territory includes Uvalde, lamented on Friday that the National Rifle Association went ahead with its annual meeting in Houston so soon after the massacre at Robb Elementary School. "The country is in mourning, but they are not," Archbishop Gustavo García-Siller said in an interview with The New York Times on Friday. "Is that sad?" he said, adding that it would have been more appropriate to "cancel that kind of gathering." After the shooting, Archbishop García-Siller described it as another outburst of violence that underscored an urgent need for tighter restrictions on access to guns, as well as for the nation to confront what he saw as a troubling cultural embrace of these weapons. "You cannot reconcile guns with life," he said in the interview. "It's a culture of death in our midst." He added: "We are not grieving with the people. We don't walk with the people. We don't see them. We don't listen to them. We don't touch their wounds."

Michael Bender

Mr. Trump remains unimpressed by the overwhelming bipartisan support to spend $40 billion on an emergency military and humanitarian aid package for Ukraine. That money, he just told the N.R.A., should have been devoted to "building safe schools for our own children in our own nation."

Michael Bender

Mr. Trump is making clear that he doesn't view guns as the problem when it comes to mass shootings. Instead, he's blaming a troubled American culture in which mental health is declining, school discipline is lacking and the traditional nuclear family is receding.

Michael Bender

Mr. Trump just read out the names of the victims of the Uvalde school shooting during his N.R.A. speech. The sound of a bell rang out in the room after each one.

Michael Bender

Donald J. Trump opened his speech to the N.R.A. a few minutes ago by praising himself for — showing up. Some speakers did cancel after the school shooting this week. But Mr. Trump also has a pet peeve about canceling on people. "Unlike some, I didn't disappoint you by not showing up," he said. "Gotta show up."

Glenn Thrush

HOUSTON — Senator Ted Cruz offered an unapologetic defense of gun rights on Friday in the wake of the massacre in Uvalde as he warned members of the National Rifle Association that the liberal "elites" would try to capitalize on the tragedy to destroy the Second Amendment.

"Now is not the time to yield to panic," Mr. Cruz said.

Mr. Cruz, the junior senator from Texas and a onetime Republican presidential hopeful, categorically rejected compromise on gun control reforms, after opening his speech by lamenting the string of mass shootings that have occurred in Texas during his time in office.

Mr. Cruz was the most prominent Texan to appear at the N.R.A.'s leadership forum. Gov. Greg Abbott appeared in a pretaped video, after initially committing to attend in person. He remained in Uvalde on Friday.

The state's senior senator, John Cornyn, quietly pulled out of the convention because he had to stay in Washington for personal reasons, a spokesman said; in contrast to Mr. Cruz, Mr. Cornyn, another fervent supporter of gun rights, has been working with Democrats to draft some bipartisan response, possibly a limited expansion of background checks on gun purchasers.

Mr. Cruz has countered calls for new gun controls by promoting a talking point that has been gaining traction among gun rights groups, including many of the 55,000 people attending the convention this weekend — that the failures of school security and local law enforcement, not the proliferation of semiautomatic weapons, were a root cause of school shootings.

Glenn Thrush

What President Donald J. Trump says Friday before the National Rifle Association convention could be less important than his decision to speak here at all — after several Republicans scrapped their appearances out of respect for the victims in Uvalde.

In the wake of previous killings, Mr. Trump has been more willing to embrace gun reforms, albeit modest ones such as expanded background checks, than many of the 55,000 N.R.A. members expected to attend a three-day celebration of gun rights.

But it is his boisterous, visceral and, above all, consistent support of their cause that mattered most to the hundreds of N.R.A. members, most of them white and middle-aged, who stood in line waiting to hear him speak.

"He's always with us, always supporting us, when a lot of people are running in the other direction," said Bob Legge, 52, a construction manager from Houston. "I think him coming here, at this time, is huge."

Most of the people who waited to see the former president were devoted followers, some wearing their oversize N.R.A. credentials over fading Trump-Pence T-Shirts. Most, too, were disgusted and shaken by the murder of 19 children and two adults in Uvalde, although they did not view the attack as a justification for any of the measures Democrats have proposed to address the problem — expansion of background checks, new restrictions on semiautomatic guns or hiking the national age threshold to purchase such weapons from 18 to 21.

Instead, the cavernous George R. Brown Convention Center echoed with conversations about the missteps of law enforcement officials in Uvalde, and the apparent absence of an armed guard at the door of the school to stop the shooter.

Ellen Pentland, an N.R.A. member from Houston, said she was "extremely sad" for the families of the victims and called for programs to improve school safety, moderate extreme social media content and address "the awful mental health issues out there."

The Uvalde gunman had no record of mental health problems, officials say.

N.R.A. planners had originally anticipated the former president would take the stage at precisely 3:39 p.m. CST; But the decision by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to skip the event in lieu of a video message, threw off the schedule — and N.R.A. officials were not quite sure when Mr. Trump would come on, how long he would speak or what he would say.

But many of Mr. Trump's admirers in the N.R.A. expected him to express his sympathy for the victims of the latest massacre, then reiterate his support for the gun-rights movement.

"He knows it's not the N.R.A.'s fault," said Nyla Cheely, 64, who traveled from Palm Springs, California — and spent the last several days fretting that Mr. Trump might cancel.

"But he didn't cancel," she added, "He's here to support us. I’m really glad."

Campbell Robertson

"Do we expect laws to come out of this devastating crime?" said Gov. Greg Abbott asked at a news conference. "The answer is absolutely yes." But he pushed back on the notion that gun control measures like background checks would help prevent mass shootings, instead saying lawmakers would look into "whether it be the healthcare issues or laws that address the challenges that are now surfacing that this killer had in his life that lead to someone doing what he did."

Campbell Robertson

Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said he was initially "misled" about the sequence of events in the Texas school shooting and that he was "livid about what happened." He said his comments earlier in the week were based on wrong information that he was told, and said he expected law enforcement to "thoroughly exhaustively" investigate what happened.

Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs

UVALDE, Texas — Three days before an 18-year-old massacred children and teachers in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, a student at the high school he had attended was alarmed to see that he had posted a picture of two long, black rifles on an Instagram story.

"Who let him?" the freshman student said in a message to his older cousin, who had graduated from the school several years earlier.

"He finna shoot something up," the older cousin replied.

The freshman noted that the week ahead was the last of the school year and said, in words that would become chillingly prescient: "I’m scared now to go to school." He added a skull emoji.

The newly disclosed exchange, obtained by The New York Times, adds to the wealth of evidence that the 18-year-old had begun to tease his plans online — sometimes in oblique and sometimes in more explicit ways — in the days and weeks before he fatally shot 19 children and two teachers in a classroom.

A 15-year-old girl in Germany had video chatted with the future gunman as he visited a gun store, unpacked a box of ammunition that he ordered online and showed off a black duffel bag holding magazines and a rifle. One of his co-workers at the Wendy's in Uvalde said other employees called him names including "school shooter" because of his emo look — long hair and black clothes — and short temper. A California woman he had met online said she had been afraid when he tagged her in a picture of his guns out of the blue, telling him "it's just scary."

The exchanges may raise questions about whether teenagers in the youth's realm had or should have reported the concerns to their parents or the authorities, and they may provide warning signs for the millions of parents and students now asking how the next mass shooting can be stopped.

Experts in mass shootings call disclosures like the one from the Uvalde gunman "leakage," and say that they are much more common among young gunmen.

"You see significantly more leakage among adolescents who carry out attacks than you do adults," said J. Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist in San Diego. He said as many as 90 percent of young attackers may tell someone in advance about their intent to harm.

Jazmine Ulloa and Shaila Dewan contributed reporting.

Campbell Robertson

In a news conference in Uvalde on Friday, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said that an anonymous donor provided $175,000 "to ensure that every cost of every family concerning anything about the funeral services is going to be taken care of."

Mike Baker

Two months ago, the Uvalde school district hosted an active-shooter training for officers, using instructional materials that say the priority for responding officers is to stop the killing by confronting the attacker.

The instructional guidelines were based on those produced by the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, according to images and documents reviewed by The New York Times. Those materials tell officers that they will usually need to place themselves in harm's way and "display uncommon acts of courage to save the innocent."

"As first responders we must recognize that innocent life must be defended," the commission's training materials say. "A first responder unwilling to place the lives of the innocent above their own safety should consider another career field."

The district's police chief was the commander on Tuesday's mass shooting, in which officers took more than an hour to confront the gunman in the classroom. Steven C. McCraw, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, on Friday called the delay the "wrong decision."

Uvalde's school officers, along with other nearby agencies, had also participated in training in 2020 that included role-playing an active shooting in a school's hallways.

Doug Conn, the police chief at Angelina College whose materials were used in the most recent Uvalde training, said in an interview that active shooter training in recent years has focused on urgency.

"The officer has to be ready at any given moment to go to the threat, eliminate the threat," said Mr. Conn, who did not lead the Uvalde training and had not been aware that his materials were used there. "Your own personal safety is not a question."

Mr. Conn said that in a situation where there is a barricaded gunman with victims, responding officers are trained to go in, no matter the cost, to eliminate the threat and save lives. But, he said, shooting scenes are fluid, changing by the second, and can abruptly turn into a hostage-type situation in which negotiation is needed.

He declined to comment on the Uvalde case, saying it remains unclear how things unfolded on the scene.

Mike Baker

Pete Arredondo, the school district police chief who led the troubled initial response to the Uvalde mass shooting, graduated from the city's high school and was recently elected to the Uvalde City Council.

Mr. Arredondo has served as the chief of the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District's police force, which is separate from the city police, for the past two years. Steven C. McCraw, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said on Friday that Mr. Arredondo was in command of the scene during the shooting and had made the "wrong decision" to hold officers back from trying to breach the classroom.

Mr. Arredondo leads a department that includes five other officers. He had touted efforts to prepare for mass shootings, including in-person training exercises in which officers roamed hallways to role-play how an event might unfold.

"It was very successful," Mr. Arredondo wrote in a summary for district officials after the training exercises.

Mr. Arredondo began his police career working for the Uvalde Police Department in 1993, and then moved to jobs at other law enforcement agencies in the region before returning to Uvalde, according to The Uvalde Leader-News. He has degrees from Southwest Texas Junior College and Texas A&M Commerce.

In the City Council election earlier this month, Mr. Arredondo won a seat after walking the streets and trying to knock on every door in his district.

"My pledge is to be available to the public to represent your interests," Mr. Arredondo said on Facebook earlier this year as he asked for support for his candidacy. "Uvalde is our home!"

Glenn Thrush

Wayne LaPierre, the head of the N.R.A., opened the convention by calling out "the evil" of the attack in Uvalde. Then he quickly pivoted to saying the federal government could not "legislate against evil," and said President Biden's gun control proposals would restrict "the fundamental human right of law-abiding Americans to defend themselves."

Mike Baker

Just two months ago, the Uvalde school district police department hosted an active-shooter training for officers, utilizing a version of the state's instructional guidelines, which say that the top priority for responding officers is to stop the killing by confronting the attacker. "A first responder unwilling to place the lives of the innocent above their own safety should consider another career field," the instructional guidelines say.

The New York Times

Edgar Sandoval

Joaquin Castro, a congressman who represents the San Antonio region, said that F.B.I. officials had told him that there was no indication that the gunman was motivated by any kind of ideology and that he was not aided by any co-conspirators.

Larry Buchanan, Keith Collins, Lazaro Gamio, Taylor Johnston, Eleanor Lutz and Albert Sun

In a news conference Friday, Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, offered a more detailed timeline of events during the shooting Tuesday at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde that left 19 students and two teachers dead.

In the updated sequence of events, the police sought to explain an hour-long gap during which law enforcement officials entered the school, but did not engage the shooter. Mr. McCraw also revised facts about the timeline previously stated by other officials. What follows is the timeline he laid out, including his account of several 911 calls that were made.

Christina Morales

Maite Yuleana Rodriguez, 10, was the only girl in her family, happy all her life, and very loving with her four siblings, her mother, Ana Rodriguez, said. Her 15-year-old brother would become "embarrassed and shy" when she hugged him and called him "my gordo." She was focused, ambitious and determined, working to get her grades back up after they slipped during the pandemic and winning an academic award on the morning of the Uvalde school shooting. Maite taught herself to sew using YouTube videos, and made pillows as gifts for her mother, stepfather and younger brother. "I want the world to know she was my absolute best friend," Ms. Rodriguez said. "She was my sweet girl."

Jesus Jiménez, Shaila Dewan and Mike Baker

Responding to a call of a mass shooting, police officers in the United States are trained, above all else, to stop the gunman. Act with urgency. Defend innocent lives.

As new questions emerged on Friday about the police response to the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, experts described those principles as the central tenets for handling such circumstances — a set of protocols that have evolved significantly over the last two decades but are widely accepted by law enforcement agencies in the United States.

Officers are taught to enter quickly in small formations — or even enter with only one or two officers — to disable any gunman. Texas protocols, included in materials that Uvalde officers were trained on as recently as two months ago, advise that an "officer's first priority is to move in and confront the attacker. This may include bypassing the injured and not responding to cries for help from children."

An entirely different approach may be called for if the gunfire ends, experts say. Then police are trained to use slower tactics appropriate for a barricaded gunman or hostage situation.

The guidelines sound straightforward, but the scenarios often are not. The protocols have been examined time and again over the last two decades amid devastating massacres in cities around the country. Officers must make moment-by-moment judgment calls based on often incomplete information in shifting, highly volatile situations where every second is essential. And none of it, experts acknowledge, can serve as an antidote to the underlying problem of gunmen intent on causing violence inside grocery stores, churches and schools.

"It's very incident-specific," said Ashley Heiberger, a retired police captain from Pennsylvania who trains police officers. "There's not usually a perfect answer, because there are disadvantages to the best plan."

Still, in a school shooting, law enforcement should err on the side of neutralizing the threat, said Ronald Tunkel, a retired agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms who has analyzed school shootings. "If you know children are being murdered, why do you wait?" he said. "Get in there."

In Uvalde, where 19 children and two teachers were killed on Tuesday, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, Steven C. McCraw, said on Friday that the commander overseeing the police had made the wrong choice when he treated the evolving situation as a "barricaded subject" rather than an active shooting. As police officers gathered in the school halls, children made multiple 911 calls from inside the classrooms over a period of more than an hour, reporting dead and wounded classmates. Inside the school, while an initial burst of at least 100 shots ended quickly, sporadic gunfire continued.

"Of course it was not the right decision," Mr. McCraw said. "It was a wrong decision, period. There's no excuse for that."

He continued, "When there's an active shooter, the rules change."

The best practices for such shootings have evolved considerably since 1999, when 12 students and one teacher were killed at Columbine High School in Colorado, and officers were trained to maintain a perimeter and wait for a tactical team.

"Columbine changed everything because they realized that although it was not a bad plan to wait, people will get killed while you’re waiting," said Robert J. Louden, a professor emeritus of criminal justice and homeland security at Georgian Court University in New Jersey.

Since then, the police have increasingly emphasized speed. In an Elkhart, Ind., supermarket in 2014, officials said that a gunman who had shot two people was aiming his weapon at a third when officers fatally shot the gunman within a minute of arriving.

Other shooting massacres, too, have revealed how quickly lives can be lost. At Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in 2012, 26 people were killed, including 20 children, in six minutes before the police arrived. In Las Vegas in 2017, 59 people died at an outdoor concert festival over 12 minutes before the police closed in on the gunman's hotel room.

In some cases, experts said, mass shooting events can transition between active situations and barricaded or hostage situations. In the latter, the priority becomes making contact with the aggressor and starting negotiations to persuade a gunman to surrender or just gain valuable time while a tactical team is assembled.

But even hostage situations can require complex judgment calls about when to use force — particularly if trapped victims are wounded and need treatment. "An immediate and overwhelming tactical assault may be the safest and most effective response," a Justice Department review of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Fla., said.

That shooting in 2016, in which 49 people were killed, revealed how fluid such situations can be; the crisis transitioned to a hostage situation when the gunman stopped firing and barricaded himself in the bathroom with multiple victims. Ultimately, with wounded people calling 911 from inside the bathroom and the gunman telling negotiators that he was armed with explosives, the police decided to breach a bathroom wall. They later faced questions about whether they had waited too long.

Over time, attackers have learned that the police will enter immediately and have responded by using barricades as a matter of course, law enforcement experts said. Before shooting six people at a church in Southern California this month, a gunman chained the doors closed and glued the locks.

A study of active shootings between 2000 and 2010 by Peter Blair of Texas State University found that half of them ended before the police arrived, most commonly because of suicide, but some when the gunman was subdued by people on the scene or simply left. When the police ended the incident, it was most often by killing or subduing the gunman.

Mr. Heiberger said that despite what officers are taught about how to respond, departments vary on whether they are required to put themselves directly in harm's way. Some expect officers to head toward gunfire, while others give more discretion. "Most agency policy likely does not require you to go on a suicide mission," he said. "But I would think that most officers would feel a moral obligation — protecting lives is your highest duty."

In Uvalde, two officers suffered graze wounds before retreating after an initial confrontation with the gunman, as the commander at the scene called for more officers and more equipment.

Two months ago, the Uvalde school district hosted a training for officers dealing with active shooting situations. The instructional guidelines used in the training were based on those produced by the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, according to images and documents reviewed by The New York Times. Those materials tell officers that they will usually need to place themselves in harm's way and "display uncommon acts of courage to save the innocent."

"As first responders we must recognize that innocent life must be defended," the materials say. "A first responder unwilling to place the lives of the innocent above their own safety should consider another career field."

Doug Conn, the police chief at Angelina College whose materials were used in that Uvalde training, said urgency has become the focus of such trainings in recent years.

"The officer has to be ready at any given moment to go to the threat, eliminate the threat," said Mr. Conn, who did not lead the Uvalde training and had not been aware that his materials were used there. "Your own personal safety is not a question."

Adam Goldman contributed reporting.

Katie Benner

WASHINGTON — A top Democratic lawmaker has asked the nation's largest gunmakers to disclose how much money they make from selling weapons used in some of the nation's deadliest mass shootings like the massacre in Uvalde, Texas, this week.

In letters sent to the companies on Thursday, Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York and the chairwoman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, pressed for information about the manufacture, marketing and sales of firearms, including semiautomatic assault rifles.

"I am deeply concerned that gun manufacturers continue to profit from the sale of weapons of war," Ms. Maloney wrote. "Despite decades of rising gun deaths and mass murders using assault weapons, your company has continued to market assault weapons to civilians, reaping a profit from the deaths."

The letters were addressed to Bushmaster Firearms, Sig Sauer, Smith & Wesson, Sturm, Ruger & Company and Daniel Defense, which made the rifle used in the shooting in Texas this week.

Ms. Maloney's request comes a week after she announced a hearing to "examine the gun violence crisis in the United States" after two mass shootings earlier this month: an attack on a church in Laguna Woods, Calif., in a predominantly Asian community and a shooting in a Buffalo supermarket carried out by a white supremacist who murdered 10 people in a predominantly Black neighborhood.

Assault rifles were used in the shootings in California, New York and Texas.

In the letters, Ms. Maloney asked that the gunmakers provide the information before the hearing, which is scheduled for June 8.

Michael C. Bender

One of the most extraordinary moments of Donald J. Trump's presidency was an hourlong meeting with U.S. senators in the aftermath of the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., in which he forcefully argued for a litany of gun safety measures that the National Rifle Association had long opposed.

Mr. Trump's support for gun control measures — which he unrolled on live television from the White House on Feb. 28, 2018 — astonished lawmakers from both parties. But the next day, N.R.A. officials met with Mr. Trump without any cameras or reporters in the room, and he immediately backed down.

That apparent surrender to N.R.A. pressure came to sum up Mr. Trump's record on gun control in the eyes of his critics.

Unbeknownst to the public, however, Mr. Trump again pushed inside the White House for significant new gun-control measures more than a year later, after a pair of gruesome shooting sprees that unfolded over 13 hours. Those discussions have not previously been reported.

On Aug. 3, 2019, a far-right gunman killed 23 people at a Walmart store in El Paso. Early the next morning, a man shot and killed nine people outside a bar in Dayton, Ohio. Both assailants used semiautomatic rifles.

At the White House the next day, Mr. Trump was so shaken by the weekend's violence that he questioned aides about a specific potential solution and made clear he wanted to take action, according to three people present during the conversation.

"What are we going to do about assault rifles?" Mr. Trump asked.

"Not a damn thing," Mick Mulvaney, his acting chief of staff, replied.

"Why?" Trump demanded.

"Because," Mr. Mulvaney told him, "you would lose."

Mr. Trump never pursued an assault weapons ban, though he had called for one in his 2000 book, "The America We Deserve" — in which he also criticized Republicans for opposing even limited gun restrictions.

Mr. Trump was scheduled to face the N.R.A. again on Friday in Houston, where he’ll address the gun group's annual conference. The event is taking place days after a gunman killed 19 children and two adults at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.

"America needs real solutions and real leadership in this moment, not politicians and partisanship," Mr. Trump said in a social media post this week after the school massacre, explaining his decision to speak at the event.

Other scheduled speakers, including Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, have opted to skip the meeting.

Mr. Trump's repeated interest in pushing for gun control as president flew in the face of his public image as an absolutist on Second Amendment issues who fiercely guarded his standing with the N.R.A.

On the campaign trail in 2016, he promised to abolish gun-free schools on his first day in office and claimed that he sometimes carried a concealed weapon. "I feel much better being armed," he said on CBS's "Face the Nation" during the Republican primary.

Seeking re-election in 2020, Mr. Trump told voters that he had "saved the Second Amendment."

But the reality was more complicated.

After both the Florida school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018 and again in the summer of 2019, Mr. Trump publicly pushed for more background checks before gun purchases and talked about raising the age requirement to buy guns to 21 from 18.

The gunman who carried out the Uvalde massacre was 18, as was the man accused of killing 10 Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo on May 14.

"We have tremendous support for really common-sense, sensible, important background checks," Mr. Trump told reporters in August 2019.

Mr. Trump entered office in 2017 largely unencumbered by his party's orthodoxy, or by any particular political ideology, relying mostly on his own instincts. He carried no scars from the battlefield of intellectual conservatism, where debates over the merit of supply-side tax cuts, health-care policy and gun rights had shaped a generation of Republicans.

He’d been a registered Democrat and a Republican and donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to candidates in both parties. For issues beyond trade and immigration, Mr. Trump's initial reaction was often to side with public opinion polls and support ideas that no other recent Republican president would have considered.

That often occurred on gun issues. And it often fell to Mr. Trump's aides in the administration, including Vice President Mike Pence, to pull him back into positions where Republicans were most comfortable.

According to people familiar with the conversations, Mr. Pence was particularly influential in speaking with Mr. Trump after the shootings in 2018 and 2019.

"He has those Democrat talking points in his head," one White House policy adviser said of Mr. Trump, "because he lived in New York forever."

On Second Amendment issues, Mr. Trump's team often wore him down by burying him in the technical details of gun policy.

Indeed, in the August 2019 conversation, when Mr. Trump suggested he wanted to find a way to ban assault weapons, Mr. Mulvaney asked how he defined them, according to the people in the room. Commonly, the term refers to a class of weapons including the AR-15 semiautomatic rifles regularly used in mass shootings.

"Well, it's the military weapons," Mr. Trump responded.

Legally, AR-15s are civilian versions of a military weapon that has been heavily regulated since the 1930s.

"Mr. President," Mr. Mulvaney shot back, "military assault weapons are already against the law."

The president abandoned the idea.