Texas schools are sending out DNA kits, stark reminders of Uvalde shooting

This could go terribly wrong.



Texas schools are encouraging parents to store their children’s DNA and fingerprint records in case they need to provide them to law enforcement if kids go missing.

For many, the rollout — less than six months after a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers in Uvalde, Tex. — brought to mind a grisly problem: school shootings.

As one middle school teacher in San Antonio said: The word missing “means a lot of different things.”

After the shooting at Robb Elementary School in May, families of children who were unaccounted for lined up to provide DNA samples to help identify bodies torn apart by bullets. The Uvalde gunman, an 18-year-old, legally purchased two semiautomatic rifles and almost 400 rounds of ammunition to carry out the worst school attack in state history.

The free test kits — which are optional — were not explicitly linked to school shootings under a 2021 law establishing a “child identification