Largest Shooting in Texas Leaves 26 Dead

November 8th marks the day of one of the largest mass shootings in U.S. history and the largest mass shooting in Texas history. Twenty-six people, ranging from five to seventy-seven years old, were killed whilst attending morning mass. The shooting occurred inside a small church in Sutherland Springs, Texas on a Sunday morning.

Two of the deadliest mass shootings in American history have taken place in the span of just over a month.

“If we look at say the top seven in terms of how deadly they’ve been, five of the seven deadliest have been in the last ten years,” Grant Duwe, a criminologist and author of Mass Murder in the United States: A History, said.

Devin Patrick Kelley, a military veteran, was convicted of beating his wife and stepson in 2012. This alone should have restricted Kelley from purchasing the guns he used in the church shooting. Kelley was discharged from the military in 2014, but the Air Force failed to enter this into the national database that prevents people with convictions from buying guns.

Gun control advocates say the background check system remains an effective tool, blocking nearly 1.4 million gun sales since 1998.

“It’s not that the system is weak. The system has a lot of records in in it. The problem is, we can’t afford to have a single record missing,” William Rosen of Everytown for Gun Safety, which advocates stricter gun control, said.

The small church remained closed on Sunday morning, so parishioners and hundreds of guests gathered under a white tent. In the evening, the church reopened. It was converted into a memorial. The walls had all been painted with white paint, and the pews were gone. White chairs stood where the victims were said to have been praying  at the time of the shooting. Red roses with ribbons were propped up on the chairs, where the names of the victims were displayed in gold.