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(UVALDE, Texas) — Nearly six months after a gunman armed with an AR-15 killed 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, the community remains divided on the topic of gun control.

Many of Uvalde’s families have grown up hunting, so guns have been built into the county’s culture and economic lifeblood for generations.

But the May 24 school shooting has left some longtime residents and gun owners rethinking their views. Jesse Rizo, a Uvalde rancher who lost his 9-year-old niece Jackie Cazares in the shooting, told ABC News that the shooting showed residents that they need to take a head-on approach to address the problem.

“It’s something that was dormant. It’s something that nobody wanted to touch. But now it’s inevitable,” he told ABC News.

Some residents, however, contend the shooting may prompt gun control actions that they say go too far.

“I really, I really don’t feel like banning any gun is going to solve any problem,” Jason Molitor, who owns Ox Ranch, an exotic-game hunting property outside of Uvalde, told ABC News.

Uvalde:365 is a continuing ABC News series reported from Uvalde and focused on the Texas community and how it forges on in the shadow of tragedy.

Rizo and other gun control advocates contend that the solutions they’re pushing for won’t be a burden for those businesses and will save lives.

Rizo, who has been vocal in town meetings and rallies over the past six months, said that the difference in opinions on gun control is part of the pain that the Uvalde community is facing since the massacre.

“I don’t know one person here who didn’t grow up without a weapon at a young age. All of us. All my friends,” he said.

Molitor said he held his first firearm when he was 5 and shot his first deer three years later. The rancher said he uses his AR-15s to hunt hogs, contending that the assault rifle is the best way to shoot the passel.

“We consider the pigs as an invasive species, a nuisance, and they multiply,” he said. “You want the larger capacity magazines so we can try to get more of them.”

Molitor, who noted that one of his ranch employees lost his son in the Robb Elementary shooting, said he supported some gun control policies such as raising the age to purchase a firearm and more background checks, but he opposed proposals to ban assault rifles.

He said such a move could affect his business and other hunting ranches in the area, which he estimated drives $10 million to $12 million into the Uvalde economy.

“We’d like to see something done to stop [mass shootings] from happening, but as far as starting to take guns and guns rights away from people? That’s just a slippery slope that I think really concerns a lot of gun owners,” Molitor said.

Gun control activists and some of the families impacted by the shooting have called for policies such as banning assault rifles like the one used in the shooting, increasing the legal age for purchasing a firearm and stricter background checks.

Rizo said arguments about taking a person’s gun away are scare tactics spread by the opponents of control policies.

He added that the shooting and the death of his niece made him and his family see the issue in a different spectrum, and he urged other residents to hear the families out.

“The main focus should be on the children and on the teachers that lost their lives that day. If you can keep that as your compass and as your guiding light, then that’s what’s important,” Rizo said.

Rizo acknowledged that it will take a lot of time and a lot of work before residents can find that common ground on gun control, but he said, “with patience, people begin to understand each other.”

In the meantime, Rizo said he is considering donating his hunting ranch and turning it into a memorial for the Robb Elementary victims.

“I want to give the community,” he said. “I want to give them hope and inspiration.”

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(NEW YORK) — The Powerball jackpot reached an estimated $1.6 billion on Friday, making it the largest jackpot ever, lottery officials said.

The record-setting jackpot has ballooned after 39 consecutive drawings yielded no grand prize winner, lottery officials said.

The next drawing is Saturday night, marking the 40th Powerball drawing since the jackpot was last won in Pennsylvania on Aug. 3. The cash value of Saturday’s jackpot is $782.4 million, according to the latest figures.

If a player’s ticket matches all six numbers drawn on Saturday night, it will be the largest jackpot won in U.S. lottery history — surpassing the previous world-record-setting $1.586 billion Powerball jackpot in 2016.

If no one wins Saturday’s jackpot, it will tie the game record for the number of drawings in a row without a grand prize winner, Powerball said.

Although there was no jackpot winner in the last drawing on Wednesday night, more than 7.2 million tickets won cash prizes totaling $74.9 million. The overall odds of winning a prize are 1 in 24.9, according to Powerball.

The jackpot grows based on game sales and interest. But the odds of winning the big prize stays the same — 1 in 292.2 million, Powerball said.

Jackpot winners can either take the money as an immediate cash lump sum or in 30 annual payments over 29 years. Both advertised prize options do not include federal and jurisdictional taxes, Powerball said.

Tickets cost $2 and are sold in 45 U.S. states as well as Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. More than half of all proceeds remain in the jurisdiction where the ticket was purchased, according to Powerball.

Powerball drawings are broadcast live every Monday, Wednesday and Saturday at 10:59 p.m. ET from the Florida Lottery draw studio in Tallahassee. The drawings are also livestreamed online at Powerball.com.

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(NEW YORK) — Minnesota elections officials are working to coordinate law enforcement responsibilities on Election Day after the husband of a GOP nominee for the state’s top election post was heard on a leaked recording calling for off-duty law enforcement officers to police poll workers at election sites — in apparent violation of state regulations.

In an audio recording of a Tea Party Patriots meeting in Champlin, Minnesota, last month, Marty Probst, the husband of Minnesota GOP Secretary of State candidate Kim Crockett, is heard urging conservative supporters to send sheriffs and deputies to form an Election Day “SWAT team.”

“If you got friends or family or whatever in sheriff deputies or sheriffs, we need them on Election Day,” Probst said. “That’s part of the SWAT team to get out when certain places don’t follow the rules that they are supposed to.”

The comments represent a growing trend across the country, in which some supporters of former President Donald Trump, driven by misinformation surrounding the results of the 2020 election, are recruiting off-duty law enforcement and ex-military personnel to serve as poll watchers.

“They won’t be able to steal this election the same way they stole 2020!” tweeted Joseph Flynn, president of The America Project, one of the organizations leading the effort to recruit first responders for that purpose.

The Minnesota meeting included several high-profile attendees from the Minnesota Republican Party and the Republican National Committee. Following Probst’s remarks, RNC Minnesota Election Integrity Director Lukas Severson said, “He brought up a great point there — we are still looking for folks who would like to join us in our War Room to answer calls from the hotline.”

Cassondra Knudson, the spokesperson for incumbent Secretary of State Steve Simon, told ABC News that Minnesota law does not allow law enforcement to be situated in a polling place for any purpose other than responding to a call for assistance.

“We’re working in coordination with the [Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension] to ensure law enforcement know their role on Election Day,” Knudson said. “Minnesota has guidelines for who can be in be in polling places and how they can behave. This would not allow for law enforcement to be situated in a polling place for any purpose other than responding to a call for assistance.”

“Recruiting people based on lies is problematic,” Sean Morales-Doyle, acting director of voting rights at the nonprofit, nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice, told ABC News last month. “Skepticism is one thing, but coming to that job believing that the election was stolen and on the lookout for nonexistent conspiracies and fraud is problematic.”

In addition, said Morales-Doyle, “There’s a history of problems with intimidation by poll watchers in this country — specifically a history of efforts to use off-duty law enforcement and poll watchers to accomplish racially discriminatory intimidation, so it gives me concern when you see that kind of recruitment.”

The recording of the Tea Party Patriots meeting was obtained and published by the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. Other high-profile attendees included Minnesota GOP Deputy Chair Donna Bergstrom and Minnesota RNC Committeewoman Barb Sutter.

Neither Probst nor representatives for Crockett’s campaign responded to ABC News’ requests for comment.

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(NEW YORK) — Billy McFarland, the convicted founder behind 2017’s Fyre Festival, which rocked social media, is apologizing for his role in controversial music festival.

“I need to apologize. And that is the first and the last thing that needs to be done,” McFarland said. “I let people down. I let down employees. I let down their families. I let down investors. So I need to apologize. I’m wrong and it’s bad.”

McFarland pleaded guilty to two counts of wire fraud in federal court in 2018, and admitted to using fake documents to attract investors, who put more than $26 million into his company, Fyre Media, the host of the Fyre Festival.

He has since served almost four years of a six year sentence, including two stints in solitary confinement, but is now out of prison on supervised release. He recently told ABC News’ Good Morning America that he’s had time to reflect on his wrongdoings while in prison.

“I was wrong. I messed up. And I was so driven by this desperate desire to prove people right … I think I was just so insecure that I thought the only way to prove myself to them was to succeed,” he said. “That led me down just this terrible path of bad decisions.”

“I started lying to get the money and I would literally wake up every day to a document that we called, ‘Urgent Payment Sheet.’ And it had an amount of money that I had to acquire before the bank closed that day to stop the company from going underwater,” he continued. “So I was literally day-by-day doing whatever it took. And looking back, it was so incredibly stupid.”

In 2017, word spread of a music festival that promised “an immersive” experience on a small island in the Bahamas. The event was touted by top models and social media influencers and nearly 5,000 hopeful attendees bought in.

Tickets ranged from $500 to $12,000 and customers were led to expect extravagant accommodations and celebrity chef-cooked meals. Instead, the first guests to arrive to the scheduled two week experience received boxes with plain cheese sandwiches and lodging in the form of Federal Emergency Management Agency and U.N. disaster tents.

As chaos quickly ensued on the island and the event’s failure went viral on social media, Fyre Festival co-founders McFarland and rapper Ja Rule were forced to cancel the event.

Ja Rule later apologized in a note on Twitter, writing, “I’m heartbroken at this moment. My partners and I wanted this to be an amazing event. It was NOT A SCAM … I truly apologize as this is NOT MY FAULT… but I’m taking responsibility. I’m deeply sorry to everyone who was inconvenienced by this.”

Ja Rule has never been charged in connection with the festival and he was later dismissed as a defendant in a civil lawsuit filed by attendees.

“I think the hardest thing for me is the trust that I violated and whether it was friends, investors, or employees, people gave up a lot to try to make this happen,” McFarland told GMA. “How do I call them now and look them in the eye when I let them down?”

McFarland has roughly $26 million in restitution to pay investors, vendors and concert-goers. His earnings will be garnished until it’s all been paid back.

Moving forward, McFarland is trying something new, launching a venture called “PYRT.” He said he knows he’ll need time to “slowly” win back trust, but said he’s changed and plans to keep evolving.

“I went way too fast before. So I need to do everything now in a manageable way that I can actually make work,” he said, adding, “I hope I continue to change for the next 40 years. So I’m certainly not done changing yet.”

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