Texas school shooting live: Trump praises NRA as he denounces 'savage and barbaric' attack

Keep an eye on our website and app for the latest from Texas in the aftermath of the school shooting.

US correspondent Greg Milam speaks with parents of Robb Elementary students, following an admission by one of Texas's most senior police officers that the "wrong decision" was made in not confronting the gunman earlier.

While statistics show most of America's "active shooter" incidents are over within minutes, it took police in Texas up to an hour to storm the classroom where gunman Salvador Ramos was murdering 19 children and two teachers.

A Dallas-based first response expert tells Sky News that law enforcement "took too long" to shoot 18-year-old Ramos.

Mr Trump has called for the elimination of gun-free school zones during his speech at the NRA convention.

The former president said every school should have a single point of entry, strong fencing and metal detectors, and a police official or armed guard at all times.

"This is not a matter of money. This is a matter of will," he said.

"If the United States has $40bn to send to Ukraine, we can do this."

He said that gun-free school zones leave victims with no way to defend themselves if they are attacked by someone with a gun.

"As the age-old saying goes, the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun," he added.

"The existence of evil is one of the very best reasons to arm law-abiding citizens."

You can hear an excerpt from Donald Trump's speech to the NRA conference here.

He calls for people to "find common ground" and criticises "cynical politicians" and those who "use the suffering of others to advance their own extreme political agenda".

Mark Stone, US correspondent in Houston, Texas

For the gun lobby members arriving at their national convention, there is nothing odd or awkward about the timing of this event because there is, they believe, no correlation between mass shootings and guns.

"Guns don't pick themselves up and kill people. It's people that do that," one woman told me.

"He managed to buy a gun," I said to another visitor, referring to the Uvalde school gunman.

"That's right, legally," he said.

"... and walk into a school and kill 19 kids," I said.

"The school was negligent. They shouldn’t have had the doors open. He walked in an open door…" the man replied.

"Should gun laws be tightened?" I asked another National Rifle Association (NRA) member.

"No. What they need to do is enforce the ones they have. They are not doing their job. They are letting those people slip through the cracks. That’s the issue," he said.

Inside the George R. Brown Convention Centre, thousands of NRA delegates gathered for the keynote speech of their chief executive Wayne Lapierre.

He addressed the Uvalde school shooting up-front but rejected any attempts to restrict gun ownership.

"We the NRA will never stop fighting for the innocent and the law abiding to defend themselves against the evil criminal element that plagues our society because we know there can be no freedom, no security, no safety without the right of the law abiding to bear arms for self-defence.

"Taking away their right to self defence is not the answer. But there are certain common sense things that we can and we must do…” Mr Lapierre said.

"We need to protect our schools because our children deserve at least and in fact more protection than our banks stadiums and government buildings."

He quoted former President Ronald Reagan, saying: "We must reject the idea that every time a law is broken society is guilty, rather than the lawbreaker."

The guest of honour was former President Donald Trump.

Mr Trump wouldn't have seen the anti-gun protests outside. The crowds were big, noisy and passionate.

Among them, 17-year-old student, Leah Samuels, who told me she is scared in her classroom every day.

"Every single person in that building right there is complicit," she told me, pointing at the convention centre.

"If you are not actively doing something to help the problem, you are part of the problem. Honestly, I am absolutely disgusted, I am a student - that could so easily have been me. It's horrifying," she said.

Among the crowd, there was a sense that, despite no change after so many mass shootings, this time things could be different. But more than that; they say the change could begin in Texas.

The central cry was that the Republican politicians, who are in the pockets of the gun lobby groups, must be voted out of office.

The star guest was the Democratic candidate for Texas governor, one-time presidential hopeful, Beto O’Rourke.

"We are committed to it, and we are going to act. We are going to break through right now. Everyone here is committed to it," he told me.

But against all this optimism, there is a blunt reality.

America is such a deeply divided society right now; more entrenched than it has been for decades. If nothing changed when the country was less divided, how is it really possible now?

Mr Trump says the children and their teachers were "stolen by a malice that no words can describe".

He says the killer "is pure evil, pure hatred... he will be eternally damned to burn in the fires of hell."

"Together we grieve side by side as one great American family. Now is the time to find common ground."

He criticised "a now familiar parade of cynical politicians seeking to exploit the tears of sobbing families to increase their own power and take away our constitutional rights" and the "grotesque effort by some in our society to use the suffering of others to advance their own extreme political agenda".

He also criticised what he described as "their rush to shift blame away from the villains who commit acts of mass violence" and "to place that blame onto the shoulders of millions of peaceful law-abiding citizens who belong to organisations such as our wonderful NRA".

He adds: "When Joe Biden blamed the gun lobby, he was talking about Americans like you."

"This rhetoric is highly divisive and dangerous and, most importantly, it's wrong and has no place in our politics."

Former US president Donald Trump is speaking to the NRA conference and describes the shooting in Texas as a "savage and barbaric atrocity that shocks the conscience of every single American."

He then asks the crowd to be silent as he reads the names of "those beautiful people" - the children and teachers murdered.

Each name is read out with a bell chiming afterwards.

"I was misled," says Greg Abbott, in response to a question from the media about being told the wrong thing by police - although the question could not be heard. 

"I am livid about what happened. I was on this very stage two days ago and I was telling the public information that had been told to me in a room just a few yards behind what we are looking at now."

He says the information he was given "turned out in part to be inaccurate" and says it is "inexcusable" that the families may have suffered because of this. 

"Our hearts are broken here, and nobody ever wants to go through this. I never thought as a mayor I would have to go through this," says the Mayor of Uvalde, Don McLaughlin.

He says Uvalde is a "strong community" and will "come back stronger". 

"We are a family, and like a family we are going to get through this together," says District Attorney Christina Mitchell Busbee.

The state has set up a "one stop shop" Family Assistance Centre for all victims - which means anyone associated with Robb Elementary School.