Families of Uvalde, Buffalo victims to testify before Congress next week | National/World

WASHINGTON (AP) — Relatives of victims and survivors of the Buffalo and Uvalde mass shootings will appear before a House committee next week as Congress debates gun control measures.

The panel at Wednesday’s hearing will include the mother of a 20-year-old man shot dead in a racially motivated mass shooting last month at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket, as well as the parents of a 10-year-old girl shot dead at her elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.

The House Oversight Committee’s announcement comes as the committee launched an investigation into five major manufacturers of semi-automatic weapons used in recent shootings.

Senator: Chief Didn’t Have Radio During Uvalde School Shooting

A Texas state senator says the state agency investigating the mass shooting at a Uvalde elementary school has determined that the commander criticized for the slow police response did not have a radio on him during the massacre. Sen. Roland Gutierrez told The Associated Press Friday that a Texas Department of Public Safety official told him that school district police Chief Pete Arredondo did not have a radio during the May 24 attack by a lone gunman at Robb Elementary School that left 19 students and two teachers dead. Arredondo did not respond to AP requests for an interview. The DPS chief criticized Arredondo for acting too slowly. Gutierrez said Thursday that Arredondo was not informed of 911 calls from terrified children inside the school during the shooting.

Company Offers Taser-Armed Drones to End School Shootings

Axon, the Taser developer, said this week that it was working on building drones equipped with stun guns that could fly into schools and “help prevent the next Uvalde, Sandy Hook or Columbine.” But its own group of technology advisers quickly dismissed the idea as a dangerous fantasy.

The publicly traded company, which sells Tasers and body cameras for police, last year pitched the idea for a new police drone product to its Artificial Intelligence Ethics Committee, a group of highly respected experts in technology, policing and privacy.

Some of them expressed reservations. But they didn’t expect Axon to announce Thursday that it plans to send Taser-equipped drones into classrooms.