PHILADELPHIA, May 24, 2022 – Senator Street released the following statement on today’s mass shooting that killed 19 students and two teachers in Ulvade, Texas.
“As a person who comes from a community routinely touched by gun violence and as someone who has recently lost family to a mass shooting, I unfortunately understand the grief that so many families in Ulvade, Texas now face.
Today’s school shooting ended the lives of nineteen students, children, before they ever lived. Two teachers were killed and many more injured. A nation that elevates the right to unfettered access to firearms above all, even the right to live free from violence, cannot be civilized. There is no place in America where communities are immune to gun violence, not in grocery stores, places of worship nor schools. This was an avoidable tragedy and a profound failure of leadership.
Prayers, speeches, and condolences will continue to ring hollow, until government takes the necessary steps to meet their most basic responsibility, protecting the communities we serve. These cycles of gun violence are levels of trauma that no generation of Americans have known. Tomorrow I’ll join the Philadelphia Black Clergy in our state’s capital to call for all resources, dollars and common sense, needed to end gun violence in our communities.”