Chinese social media users react to the Texas school shooting: 'Is this the price of America's freedom?'

• The Robb Elementary School shooting in Texas was a trending topic on China's Twitter-like Weibo.
• The Weibo hashtag "21 dead in Texas elementary school shooting" got more than 140 million views.

"Is this the price of America's freedom?"

That's what one user wrote on China's Twitter-like platform Weibo, in response to Tuesday's Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas. The shooting was a trending topic on the Chinese social platform Wednesday morning, with the Weibo hashtag "21 dead in Texas elementary school shooting" receiving more than 140 million views.

Among the thousands of comments on the platform related to the shooting, many had to do with the seemingly heavy cost of freedom and democracy in the US.

"Having the freedom to carry guns and killing elementary school students — if this is what it means to have democratic freedom, I don't want it," one person wrote.

"They had freedom. But they also lost their lives," another wrote.

Other users called for gun control in the country. "How many more deaths do American need before they ban guns? Those poor children, this is too cruel," one Weibo user said.

China has some of the world's "strictest gun control laws," per CNN, allowing only a few groups of people to own guns, including law enforcement and government-approved sport shooters.

Gun crime is so rare in the country that when news broke that a man had shot dead a lawyer in Wuhan city last year, Chinese social media users thought they were reading about an American shooting, the outlet said.

The Robb Elementary School shooting is the deadliest elementary school mass shooting in the US since the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, which left 27 people dead in Newtown, Connecticut. Each of the 20 child victims was aged 6 and 7.