- See you at the show tonight, says a round-bellied man and raises his plastic cup, when we meet in the elevator.

The discussion in Texas revolves mostly around how the American gun legislation should be perceived.

But I'm not there yet.

It is not taken for granted that we have just come to Houston from an Uvalde in unimaginable grief.

Police blunder

It is inconceivable to understand how the toddlers were kept in the two classrooms and cared for one by one.

Someone smeared his body with blood and played dead.

Another girl managed to crawl out of a window.

But most of the fourth-grade classrooms were met by a semi-automatic rifle muzzle and the perpetrator's words: now you are going to die.

You can imagine what happens to a small child's body when the bullets penetrate.

Several were so badly persuaded that DNA tests were required to identify them.

And the stories of how the parents stood out there under the Texas sun and heard the dull bangs without the police intervening.

The perpetrator must have been in the school building for over an hour.

That fear and dread is hard to take in.

The responsibility for the completely misguided rescue effort seems to fall on the local police.

In a situation like this, the police must intervene.

Every minute involves the risk of more human lives being wasted.

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At 11.31 in the morning, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos fires the first shot at Robb Elementary School in the small town of Uvalde in Texas.

This leads to the worst school shooting in the state's history.

Photo: TT / AP

10 years ago Sandy Hook

The years feel lost since that early Christmas lunch was interrupted in Washington when the alarm came from Newton in Connecticut.

All the Scandinavian colleagues packed up, went to the airport and quickly found ourselves in a - in every way - cold society.

Large parts of the small town of Newton were cordoned off.

Then as now, the perpetrator was a young man with an obvious exclusion.

I will never forget the moving memorial service with parents who said goodbye to their young children.

But the 20 school children would not have died unnecessarily.

Among the weeping parents, there was a conviction that the memory of their children would be honored with a changed and safer United States.

Surveys then showed that 9 out of 10 Americans wanted to see stricter gun laws, but 10 years later, the United States has experienced a record number of mass shootings - more than one a day in 2022. It shows figures from the non-profit organization Gun Violence Archive.

The debate reflects the split

The protesters and NRA members here on the streets of Houston are a reflection of Congress.

There are two groups that pull in completely different directions and have some understanding for each other.

The result is an even more fragmented society, with little room for agreement.

Admittedly, there are now cautious talks in the Senate about at least presenting something they can agree on to show voters a little bit of action.

One proposal is a certain tightening of the background checks when buying weapons.

But most of us, who have heard the stories of murdered children again, must first make an effort to understand what made the police wrestle with desperate parents outside Robb Elementary instead of trying to get into the building.

Why a gun-fixed 18-year-old chose to kill the innocent children, we will probably never get a proper answer.

We never really got that after the shots at Sandy Hook Elementary School.