"Yes, I was misled," Abbott said during a press conference on Friday. "I am livid about what happened. When I came out here on this stage and told the public what happened, it was a recitation of what people in that room told me, whether it be law enforcement officials or non law enforcement officials, whatever the case may be, and as everybody has learned, that the information that I was given turned out in part to be inaccurate, and I'm absolutely livid about that."
Abbott said he expects investigators, including the Texas Rangers and the FBI, to clarify every fact of the shooting with absolute certainty.
The governor added that it is inexcusable that the families of the victims may have suffered from the inaccurate information.
"Do we expect laws to come out of this devastating crime? The answer is absolutely, yes," Abbott said on Friday. "And there will be laws in multiple different subject areas."
US media reports broke the story on Thursday that law enforcement officers did not immediately engage the 18-year-old gunman in the Uvalde school shooting, but he was inside the school for an hour prior to an officer killing him.
The Texas top law enforcement agency eventually confirmed that police delayed their response after the gunman barricaded himself inside the school and decided to wait for a tactical response team.
"The decision was made that this was a barricaded subject situation, there was time to retrieve the keys and wait for a tactical team with the equipment to go ahead and breach the door and take on the subject at that point," Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw told reporters.
"There were 19 officers in there, in fact there were plenty of officers to do whatever needed to be done with one exception - the incident commander inside believed he needed more equipment and more officers to do a tactical breach at that point... Where I'm sitting now, of course it was not the right decision. It was the wrong decision, period."
The gunman fired about 100 rounds from his assault rifle inside the school, according to police.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Angeli Rose Gomez, a parent of several students that were inside the elementary school during the shooting, was one of numerous parents who urgently pleaded with police officers to charge into the school after seeing their delayed response to the incident. She was eventually arrested by federal law enforcement officers who claimed she was intervening in an active investigation, the report said.
The Biden administration and congressional lawmakers have renewed discussions about passing additional gun control legislation following the shooting.
So far this year, there have been more than 200 mass shootings in the United States and 27 school shootings.