WASHINGTON, May 26 (Reuters) – U.S. Senate Republicans on Thursday blocked debate on a bill that represented the first effort by Congress to address mass shootings since a white supremacist’s killing of 10 Black people in New York and a gunman’s massacre of 19 pupils and two teachers in Texas.
The 47-47 vote along strict party lines fell short of the 60 yes votes required to launch debate in the 100-member Senate on a bill titled the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act.
The vote effectively blocked the bill which would have authorized federal agencies to monitor and report jointly on domestic terrorism within the United States, including incidents related to white supremacy.
Republicans said the legislation was unnecessary as Democratic President Joe Biden already had the authority to organize his administration’s response to violent extremism.
Democrats said the bill was needed to bolster the federal government’s response to rising incidents of violent extremism. They said amendments to any such bill could address potential restrictions on guns.
Mass shootings in recent years have provoked discussion in Congress on what to do about gun violence but little action as the two parties are deeply divided on gun restrictions.
Americans have little confidence in Congress’ ability to solve the problem, with a Reuters/Ipsos poll on Tuesday showing that just 35% believe lawmakers will act. read more
The House of Representatives passed the domestic terrorism bill along party lines last week, after an avowed white supremacist killed the 10 Black people in a livestreamed shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, on May 14.
On Tuesday, a gunman stormed a school in Uvalde, Texas, and killed the 9- and 10-year-old children and two teachers.
Senate Democrats and some Republicans have discussed the possibility of bipartisan legislation to address mass shootings, including proposals to expand background checks for gun purchasers and to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill.
Some 79% of Americans – including 78% of Republicans – are more likely to vote for a candidate in November’s congressional election who supports passing red flag laws of that kind, the Reuters/Ipsos poll found.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said that at least five Democratic lawmakers including Senator Chris Murphy have reached out to Republicans about possible measures related to gun and school safety.
Murphy, a leading advocate for gun restrictions, told a news conference that talks with Republicans were expected on Thursday and would continue through next week. But the odds are slim at best that the Senate will enact any bill to restrict guns.
“None of us are under any illusions that this will be easy,” Schumer said on the Senate floor, accusing Republicans of being in the “vice grip” of the U.S. gun lobby. But he added: “We need to give it a short amount of time to try.”
Schumer’s Republican counterpart, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, told reporters that any proposal capable of passing the Senate would need to be limited to address “the facts” of the Texas massacre. He did not elaborate but Republicans broadly oppose new gun restrictions that would infringe on the rights of law-abiding gun owners.
Other Republicans expressed potential interest in red-flag legislation that would encourage states to deny firearms to anyone found mentally unstable or dangerous, possibly using unspent COVID-19 funding to pay for the initiative.
With the 100-seat Senate split 50-50, gun legislation would need 10 Republican votes to meet the chamber’s 60-vote threshold for passing most bills.
In ways big and small — in schools, in homes, in every facet of life — the United States fails to protect and support its children.
School shootings, like the massacre in Uvalde, Texas, that has left 19 students and at least two adults dead this week, are one of the most visceral examples of that failure. A second generation is now growing up in a world where school shootings are part of life. Columbine didn’t lead to meaningful policy change; neither did Sandy Hook; neither did Parkland; and the terrible truth is that Uvalde may not either.
The number of children killed by guns every day in the United States, in incidents that never make national news, is much higher than the death toll of victims in school shootings. The firearm homicide rate for US children ages 0-14 is astronomical compared to other wealthy nations, according to data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, with hundreds of budding American lives lost every year. Suicides by gun and accidental firearm deaths among kids are also far higher in the United States than its economic peers. Guns now kill more kids than car accidents, in part because, through design changes and new regulations, cars have gotten safer while guns have only become more accessible and lethal.
Dylan Scott/Vox
But this country’s inability to support and protect its own kids extends far beyond gun deaths, which can also be seen as part of a broader failure to prioritize the well-being of children and families.
“From the very beginning of life, we expect families to take care of their own children,” Jessica Calarco, a sociologist at Indiana University who studies child and family policy, said. “The government is essentially telling families: You’re on your own. We don’t care.”
Natalia Restrepo, right, speaks to a mother about baby formula, at a food pantry run by La Colaborativa in Chelsea, Massachusetts, on May 20.Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images
The consequences of the collective policy shortcomings are everywhere. One is the terrible annual toll of US children and young adults killed by guns: 10,186 in 2020. Another is that one in five children in the US live in poverty, comparable to Chile and Romania, and double (or more) the rate of child poverty of Sweden, the Netherlands, and Germany. Infant mortality is higher than in the rest of the wealthy world.
The OECD published an analysis in November 2017, evaluating how the US compared to other rich countries on various metrics of child well-being. America ranked in the top third for just three of the 20 categories they covered. It was in the bottom third for 10 of them.
Academics have an ironic term for this phenomenon: “American exceptionalism.”
“We stand alone and we have for decades in terms of our disinvestment in children,” Jennifer Glass, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin, told me. “You muck it up for the first 20 years of that kid’s life, you can’t come back and remedy it.”
The reasons for this uniquely American failure are multifold. The solutions will not be easily attained. But until we resolve to fix it, our future will be that much dimmer.
American public policy doesn’t value children
Rhetoric is cheap. If you want to know where a society’s priorities truly lie, look at how it spends its money.
About 9 percent of the federal budget is being spent on children, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. The elderly, on the other hand, are afforded more than one-third of federal spending.
“It’s very little,” Isabel Sawhill, an economist at the Brookings Institution who focuses on child and family programs, said of federal spending on children. “We haven’t been doing enough for our kids.”
Spending for elderly programs like Medicare and Social Security is automatic; Congress never has to pass a new bill to make sure those benefits reach Americans over 65. But most of the spending for children is discretionary; Congress must vote to appropriate those dollars every year and, if there is a lapse in funding, there will be a corresponding lapse in benefits.
Taken together, the federal welfare programs for children and families — everything from food stamps to cash assistance to health coverage — are a pittance compared to what our economic peers spend. Australia spends about 2.1 percent of its GDP on public policies and programs that support families. Norway spends 3.2 percent, as does the United Kingdom. The US spends 0.6 percent, less than Costa Rica and Mexico.
Deborah Jendrasko gives out free lunches to students at Deering High School in Portland, Maine, in July 2021. The meals were available to students in summer programs as well as any children from the community.Brianna Soukup/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images
Child welfare programs are also means-tested, accessible only for those who complete a burdensome application process, which creates a uniquely American stigma around government assistance, as Jack Meserve wrote in an essay for Democracy last year. Calarco said she has interviewed families who declined to apply for free or reduced-price school lunches because they didn’t want their children looked down on. (High-poverty schools can offer free lunch to all students without needing to prove eligibility, but that doesn’t help all poor kids and families.)
Schools — even schools whose names don’t become cultural bywords for the mass death of children — are another forum for America’s failures.
In the aggregate, the US spends a comparative amount of money on children’s education to other wealthy nations — but that money is not spent equitably. School funding is a patchwork of federal, state, and local dollars; much of the local money is dependent on local property values (read: taxes). And school funding differs dramatically from state to state and district to district; some school districts spend as little as $6,000 every year for each student and some spend close to $30,000; in some states, low-income districts get less money than high-income ones. The actual education outcomes that American students attain for that spending are middling.
The way our public policies affect parents also affects their children. The United States is also the only wealthy nation without guaranteed paid family leave or paid sick leave, both of which limit a parent’s ability to bond with and take care of their child.
Two other American crises, the opioid crisis and mass incarceration, provide another example: A recent study from researchers at the University of Maryland and UCLA found that higher local rates of opioid overdose deaths corresponded to a lower rate of children living with two married parents, a family structure associated with better life outcomes. Another paper from sociologists at Washington University in St. Louis and Duke University found that families with a family member imprisoned were worse off, even accounting for preexisting disadvantages: they are more likely to face financial hardship, and their children are more likely to have mental health and behavioral problems and to do worse in school than their peers.
America is capable, in a moment of crisis, of providing better support for children and families. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Congress temporarily approved an expanded child tax credit that functioned as a monthly stipend for many families and funded universal school lunches. Emergency Medicaid provisions also ensured health coverage for millions of children and their family members.
Melissa Roberts fixes dinner for her children at their home in Marks, Mississippi, in January. Roberts lost her job at an insurance company at the start of the pandemic. She had relied on the federal child tax credit to help provide for her children.Andrea Morales/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Child poverty and hunger fell, even amid the most catastrophic public health emergency of our lives. It was a wildly successful policy experiment. And yet soon, those programs will be allowed to lapse.
“It’s telling that that’s what we got rid of,” Calarco said. “We got rid of the programs we made universal during the pandemic.”
Why the US is so negligent in its treatment of its own kids
America’s policy negligence toward its children is, in some ways, a symptom of its general conservative attitude about government assistance. We have a stingy safety net for the childless poor too.
“To my mind, the lack of US social policy pertaining to the safety and well-being of families and children boils down to our distrust of government and our belief that family life is a private and personal matter,” said Daniel Carlson, a sociologist at the University of Utah. “We see children not as the public good that they are but as an individual choice, and thus a personal responsibility.”
That ideology places an enormous burden on parents — and mothers in particular — to carry the weight of raising their children. In the US, about 70 percent of mothers are the primary support for their children in their first year, Glass said. That dependence lasts for five years on average, about a third of their childhood.
“What we’ve seen over time: more and more and more of this burden falling onto mothers,” Glass said. “We expect that mothers will do all of this labor of creating and reproducing the next generation for free because they always have.”
But Australia is also a country with an individualistic spirit and a self-mythology about pioneers conquering the frontier, and that country still spends four times as much money on public programs for children and families, as a share of its GDP, as America does. Germany used to be much more conservative in its public support for families, Carlson said, until its declining birth rate in the 1990s and early 2000s led the country to start remaking its social safety net for children.
Some experts see more nefarious forces at work. For one, a smaller safety net benefits the rich and corporations, who would be called upon to pay higher taxes if the US decided that it would provide more financial support for children and families.
Christina Darling prepares a snack with her sons at home in Nashua, New Hampshire, in July 2021. Darling and her family qualified for the expanded child tax credit. “Every step closer we get to a livable wage is beneficial,” Darling told the AP.Elise Amendola/AP
Then there is old-fashioned American racism, which almost every expert I spoke cited as an influence. There is a perception, even among white working-class families who also rely on government benefits, that these social programs primarily benefit Black and brown families. Sawhill said she had participated in focus groups in which that sentiment became apparent.
Though they might not articulate it in exactly this way, she said, she got the impression that many white people, even poorer ones, thought that “we wouldn’t have so much poverty and inequality if we weren’t such a heterogenous country.”
There is something self-destructive about America’s negligence of its own children. Supporting children — feeding them, educating them, protecting them from violence — is self-evidently good. But it is also necessary to securing a next generation of American adults, who will perpetuate our economy, our culture, our society.
And yet, the United States seems to be self-sabotaging through its failure to do so. The children who grow up hungry and in poverty, whose schools fail to fully educate them, will on average live shorter lives with dimmer economic prospects.
“Generation after generation, you start to see the United States slipping,” Glass said. “These are the kinds of things that over time are going to hurt a nation.”
One explanation won’t suffice. But what is clear is that the structural forces that stand in the way of so many policy reforms have also made America a worse place for our children.
That fact is unavoidable at times like this, when the US’s failure to meaningfully constrain gun ownership and the number of guns in circulation has contributed to the deaths of 19 innocent children in Uvalde, Texas. But it was true on Monday, the day before the shooting, and it will continue to be true until the nation’s leaders decide to change it.
Washington — The Senate on Thursday failed to advance a bill to bolster federal efforts to combat domestic terrorism, a setback in Democratic efforts to take action in the wake of deadly mass shootings at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, and an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
The vote to begin debate on the bill, known as the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2022, failed by a margin of 47 to 47, falling far short of the 60-vote threshold needed to overcome Republican opposition in the 50-50 Senate. Similar legislation passed the House in 2020 only to stall in the Senate.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York switched his vote to “no” in a procedural maneuver that allows him to bring the bill up again in the future. He first scheduled the vote earlier this week to respond to the Buffalo shooting, and on Thursday urged Republican members to advance the bill to kickstart a debate on domestic terrorism and strengthening gun laws to prevent future mass shootings.
“Today is the day we can begin to debate on how to make these shootings less likely. And there’s an additional benefit to moving forward today — it’s a chance to have a larger debate to consider amendments on gun safety legislation in general, not just for those motivated by racism, as vital as it is to do that,” the Democratic leader said on the Senate floor before the vote.
“I know that many members on the other side hold views that are different than the views on this side of the aisle, so, let us move on this bill. Let us proceed. And then, they can bring them to the floor,” he added.
The bill passed the Democratic-led House days after the Buffalo shooting, when a self-described white supremacist targeted a grocery store in a largely Black neighborhood and killed 10 people. One House Republican, Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, voted with Democrats to approve the bill.
The legislation would require the FBI, Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security to open offices dedicated to combating domestic terrorism and create a task force to address white supremacy in the U.S. military. The three agencies would be tasked with crafting a report every six months examining “the domestic terrorism threat posed by White supremacists and neo-Nazis, including White supremacist and neo-Nazi infiltration of Federal, State, and local law enforcement agencies and the uniformed service.”
Republican lawmakers argued the legislation would not have prevented the attack in Buffalo, and unfairly maligned police officers and members of the military.
“Today we will have a bill before us ostensibly titled and ostensibly about the subject of domestic terrorism. But this bill would more accurately be called, the Democrat plan to brand and insult our police and soldiers as white supremacists and neo-Nazis. How insulting,” GOP Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky said on the floor.
Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the majority whip, stressed that the bill would not establish new crimes under federal law or grant new authority to federal law enforcement agencies.
“What we’re doing is asking the federal agencies who have the responsibility of national security to give us timely reports on the incidents of domestic terrorism,” Durbin said. “It’s not an imagined crime. We see the reality of it way too often. We just saw it two weeks ago in Buffalo, New York.”
The shooting in Texas, in which 19 students and two teachers were shot and killed by a gunman wielding an AR-15 rifle, sparked renewed efforts by Democrats to enact further restrictions on guns, a goal that has proved elusive for nearly a decade since the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
Ahead of the vote, Schumer said Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, a staunch gun control advocate whose district included Sandy Hook when he served in the House, has opened talks with Republican senators to see if the two sides can find common ground on gun legislation. But Schumer said the talks are “not an invitation to negotiate indefinitely.”
“If these negotiations do not bear any fruit, the Senate will vote on gun legislation” when it returns from its Memorial Day recess in June, Schumer added.
Murphy told reporters at the Capitol that the upcoming recess could help spur negotiations with GOP lawmakers, saying it’s “easier to work those issues outside of Washington rather than when we’re here.”
“We need at least a week to work through these tough issues,” he said, adding that lawmakers planned to hold a series of meetings on Thursday and next week to try to produce a bipartisan proposal.
“Right now we’re just trying to find what the potential common ground is amongst Republicans. So, that certainly could be in the background check space. It could be in the red flag space,” Murphy said, referring to laws adopted by some states in recent years that allow courts to order the confiscation of firearms from those deemed to be a risk to themselves or others.
Armed school police officers. Lockdown drills. High-tech apps for monitoring bullying and students’ social media posts.
Like many school systems across the country, the school district in Uvalde, Texas, put in place a plethora of recommended safety practices meant, in part, to deter school shootings. But they were of little use on Tuesday, when a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School.
The district’s detailed safety plan illustrates that despite the widespread “hardening” of schools over the past two decades, mass shootings continue on with sickening frequency.
“These security measures are not effective,” said Jagdish Khubchandani, a professor of public health at New Mexico State University who has studied school violence. “And they are not catching up to the ease of access with which people are acquiring guns in the pandemic. All records are being broken in gun sales.”
In Uvalde, a district of 4,000 students, the school district police department included six officers, one of whom was involved in the police response. But there are questions about how the city and school police officers had handled the gunman.
Texas districts like Uvalde have invested heavily in school policing and other security measures in recent years. Texas responded to the 2018 mass shooting at Santa Fe High School with $100 million in school safety funding. In Uvalde, before the shooting, the city’s S.W.A.T. team visited all district schools in “full tactical uniforms,” according to the police department’s Facebook page.
But there is little evidence nationally that the dollars poured into these kinds of prevention measures have decreased gun violence in schools, according to a 2019 study by Professor Khubchandani.
Instead, he wrote, they may be proffering “a false sense of security.”
Social-emotional strategies, including anti-bullying initiatives, also do not appear to forestall senseless tragedy. Uvalde had counselors and social workers available. Threat-assessment teams at each of the district’s schools were on the lookout for warning signs of suicide, according to the district’s safety plan.
Combating bullying was a special focus. The district website displayed the winners of a recent bilingual bullying-prevention poster contest. “Kindness takes courage!” one child wrote.
The district used software called Social Sentinel, which monitors students’ social media posts for threats, and an app called STOPit, which allows anonymous reports of bullying.
These, too, are common practices.
Ron Avi Astor, an expert on school violence at the University of California, Los Angeles, argued that while social-emotional supports have improved school climate broadly, those strategies — as well as the presence of campus police — have been insufficient in preventing suicidal, often ideological young men from accessing guns and carrying out attacks intended to draw fame.
The focus should be on referring high-risk individuals to mental health treatment while preventing them from buying or owning guns, he said.
“We have to start talking about shooters and shootings differently,” he added.
In the hours and days after the tragedy in Uvalde, many policymakers leaned on a familiar response, adding more policing. Officials in Georgia and Virginia deployed additional officers to schools as a precaution. And Senator Ted Cruz of Texas suggested putting more armed police in schools.
At Uvalde, the actions of local law enforcement are under scrutiny. An onlooker told The Times that officers remained outside the building for some time while the gunman was inside, and that parents urged police to storm the school sooner. The gunman gained access to a classroom and reportedly barricaded there for up to an hour. That classroom is where all the fatalities occurred, according to officials.
In an interview, Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, said his organization had trained several Uvalde school officers over the course of four years and that they were typically based at secondary schools, not elementary schools. He warned against jumping to conclusions about officers’ actions.
Storming a building too quickly could allow an active shooter to escape, he said. And while capturing or killing an active shooter is “Plan A,” he said, containing them to a particular space can be an effective “Plan B” to lessen the carnage.
School policing exploded in popularity after the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., when Congress began providing federal dollars for campus officers. Nationally, 19 percent of elementary school students, 45 percent of middle schoolers and 67 percent of high school students attend a school with a campus police officer, according to a 2018 report from the Urban Institute.
But when the Congressional Research Service looked at the effectiveness of school policing in the wake of the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., it concluded there was little evidence showing that the presence of officers affected crime rates.
Armed school officers have been present at some of the most infamous school massacres and were not able to stop those events. The officer on duty at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., in 2018 has been accused of hiding during the shooting that killed 17 people.
During the Columbine shooting, a school resource officer shot at the gunman but missed.
School policing is also divisive, in part because students of color are disproportionately referred to law enforcement, even for routine misbehavior.
But Mr. Canady said that school officers had prevented many instances of violence that do not gain broad attention. He pointed to a National Policing Institute database that showed 120 cases of averted school violence between 2018 and 2020.
Almost every school in the United States holds lockdown drills, and that was true in Uvalde. While some survivors of last year’s shooting at Oxford High School in Michigan credited the trainings with helping them quickly escape the building, there is little evidence that the drills prevent violence — and lots of concern from parents, educators and mental health experts that they cause fear and anxiety for children.
There are some simple, inexpensive measures that are protective, according to those who have studied school shootings. One of them is keeping classroom doors locked, which was a district requirement in Uvalde.
But it was not clear whether that practice was followed at Robb Elementary on the day of the shooting, when individuals were reportedly streaming in and out of the building for an awards ceremony.
The school had “perimeter fencing” designed to restrict access to the campus, according to the district. The safety plan also described the use of the Raptor Visitor Management System, which scans visitor IDs and checks them against sex offender registries and lists of noncustodial parents.
At a news conference in Uvalde on Wednesday, the lieutenant governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, praised the district’s security measures but suggested an area of improvement could be limiting schools to only a single entrance. And in the wake of the shooting, New York City, the nation’s largest school district, said it would consider locking school doors after students arrive for the day. Los Angeles said it would reduce points of entry into schools.
But Professor Khubchandani questioned whether any of these measures would stop a committed killer with access to weapons.
“It’s like medication for heart attacks while continuing to eat bad instead of eating healthy,” he said. “You prevent this from happening or you don’t.”
“I cannot, in good conscience, perform at the NRA convention in Houston this weekend,” Gatlin, 74, said in a statement. “While I agree with most of the positions held by the NRA, I have come to believe that, while background checks would not stop every madman with a gun, it is at the very least a step in the right direction toward trying to prevent the kind of tragedy we saw this week in Uvalde — in my beloved, weeping TEXAS.”
“Please, please, please, damn it, put yourselves in the shoes of these parents for once,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, pleaded with his Republican colleagues, as he made the case for at least expanding background checks on gun purchasers.
Polls show that the proposal has support from as many as 90 percent of Americans, including many G.O.P. voters, but Republicans have effectively blocked action on it for the better part of a decade. Their stance reflects the potency of the issue of gun rights for the Republican base voters, whose zeal for the 2nd Amendment means that any G.O.P. lawmaker who embraces even the most modest form of gun control runs the risk of a primary challenge that could cost him his job.
Still, after Mr. Schumer initially cleared the way for a quick vote to put Republicans on the spot on background checks, he pulled back on Wednesday and said there was no point in doing so, given that their opposition was already “crystal clear.” Instead, he said he would try to find a consensus proposal that could draw in enough Republicans to break the inevitable filibuster.
“The plan is to work hard at a compromise for the next 10 days,” Senator Christopher S. Murphy of Connecticut, who has led the Democratic charge for gun safety legislation since Sandy Hook, said on Twitter on Tuesday. “Hopefully we succeed and the Senate can vote on a bipartisan bill that saves lives. But if we can’t find common ground, then we are going to take a vote on gun violence. The Senate will not ignore this crisis.”
On Thursday, the Senate will face the first test, moving to take up legislation approved by the House last week after the racist mass shooting in Buffalo, to bolster federal resources to prevent domestic terrorism. Mr. Schumer said if Republicans do not filibuster the procedural motion just to take up the measure, he will open the bill up to amendments from both parties to address gun violence.
There was little sign that a consensus was in the offing.
Republicans proposed the now-familiar litany of alternative responses — tighter “red flag” laws to make it easier for law enforcement to confiscate weapons from the mentally ill, more aggressive mental health interventions, and more armed guards at schools — many of which Democrats regard as woefully inadequate.
And Democrats questioned whether they could find any common ground with Republicans on more substantial gun violence measures, after previous proposals ultimately went nowhere.
“We’ve been burned so many times before” when it came to negotiating a bipartisan compromise, Mr. Schumer said.
The echoes between the Newtown, Conn., mass shooting at Sandy Hook in December 2012, which left 20 children and six adults dead, and the Uvalde, Texas, violence, which killed at least 19 children and two teachers, are painful. In both cases, a loner from the community attacked an elementary school, overpowering children and adults with an arsenal.
After Newtown, then-Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was charged with persuading a bipartisan coalition of at least 60 senators to act, and break a threatened filibuster by Republicans. On Tuesday night, a seemingly anguished President Biden made the case for “common sense gun laws,” including an assault weapons ban, and declared, “It’s time to turn this pain into action.”
But in remarks on Wednesday, Mr. Biden, too, appeared to hang back rather than call for specific action by Congress, referring vaguely to the need to show “backbone” and challenge the powerful gun lobby.
Then, as now, bipartisan legislation existed, written by Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, and Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, to impose universal criminal background checks for gun purchasers at gun shows and in internet sales. Then, as now, the barrier was the Senate’s requirement of 60 votes necessary to overcome a filibuster.
Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia indicated that he was not dropping his opposition to changing Senate filibuster rules, which would allow Democrats to push through gun control legislation.Credit…Tom Brenner for The New York Times
But in the intervening years, the partisan lines between Republican and Democrat have only hardened, not only on gun rights but on the much broader question of how to balance individual liberty against collective responsibility. On gun control, climate change, taxation and pandemic safety mandates, Republicans have seemingly decided individual rights trump a collective, societal response, regardless of the cost.
“Maybe it’s a personal responsibility not to shoot people with guns,” said Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, “and maybe people who don’t live up to that responsibility ought to be in prison for a very, very long time — like forever.”
Beyond elective office, some Republicans seemed to have had enough. Bill Frist, a former Tennessee senator who served as majority leader from 2003 to 2007, wrote on Twitter: “I can’t imagine this is what the Founding Fathers hoped for or intended. We can find ways to preserve the intent of the Second Amendment while also safeguarding the lives of our children.”
Such sentiments were hard to find among elected Republicans.
Mr. Schumer framed his call for negotiations as strategic. A quick vote on House-passed legislation to strengthen background checks would all but certainly be filibustered. Republicans would complain about wasting time with political show votes. Democrats would castigate Republicans for their opposition. Nothing would be accomplished, and the Senate would move on.
Negotiations, at least, could keep gun safety a live issue for a while.
“When things like this happen, I think it awakens sensibilities to the bigger picture — I will not say greater good, but the greater collective response,” Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia, said of the Uvalde bloodshed. “I think that’s what we’re all probably grappling with right now.”
But it was not clear that much had changed. Mr. Manchin indicated that he was not dropping his opposition to changing the Senate filibuster rules, which would allow Democrats to push through gun control legislation over unified Republican opposition. He insisted that, with good will, a broad compromise could be reached and such a move would be unnecessary.
“If we can’t get 70 or 75 senators that won’t vote to have a common sense protection of your children and grandchildren, what in the world are we here for?” Mr. Manchin demanded. “What’s your purpose for being in the United States Senate? If it’s not at least to protect the children?”
The initial start to talks has begun. Mr. Murphy reached out to Mr. Toomey and Senator Susan Collins of Maine, two of the four Republicans who voted for the bipartisan background check bill co-sponsored by Mr. Manchin in 2013.
“My interest in doing something to improve and expand our background check system remains,” Mr. Toomey told reporters.
The April 2013 vote for universal background checks garnered 54 votes. But eight of the “yes” votes for the bill have been replaced over the past decade by the potential votes of conservative Republicans.
On the other hand, five of the 2013 “no” votes have been replaced by Democrats — two in Georgia, one in New Hampshire, one in Arizona and one in Nevada.
But with a 60-vote threshold to clear in the Senate, the odds were still long. There was little indication that the murdered children of Uvalde, Texas, would shake the near-unanimous opposition to any measure limiting access to guns.
Asked what he would tell the parents of the slain children, Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama, told reporters, “I’m willing to say that I’m very sorry it happened. But guns are not the problem, OK? People are the problem. That’s where it starts, and we’ve had guns forever. And we’re going to continue to have guns.”
The two Democratic opponents to changing the filibuster rule, Mr. Manchin and Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, appeared similarly unmoved on that position.
Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama, defended guns and blamed people for mass shootings.Credit…Tom Brenner for The New York Times
“Despite the fact that there is always heated rhetoric here in D.C., I do think there is an opportunity for us to actually have real conversations and try and do something,” without ditching the filibuster, Ms. Sinema said, speaking to reporters on Capitol Hill.
The heated language extended far beyond Washington.
On Wednesday, Beto O’Rourke, the former Democratic representative now challenging Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, confronted the governor and other state officials who oppose gun control measures during their visit to Uvalde, interrupting their news conference to castigate them for “doing nothing” to address gun violence.
At the Capitol, some Republicans rushed to propose solutions that would sidestep the issue of guns altogether. Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, went to the Senate floor to request agreement to take up his bill to establish a federal clearinghouse on school safety best practices. Democrats refused.
As lawmakers talked past each other, it was not clear that anything under discussion would address the recent mass shootings. Republicans have long favored more armed guards, arguing that the only way to stop a bad person with a gun is to ensure more good people have guns. But in Buffalo and Uvalde, the gunmen were confronted by armed guards, who were unable to prevent the slaughter. For all the talk of red flag laws, the killer in Texas did not appear to have any known mental health issues.
Likewise, the most recent mass shootings were apparently perpetrated with guns lawfully purchased, which would not have been subject to additional scrutiny under Democratic background check bills.
Legislation that would have directly impacted the possibility of carnage — bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines — are no longer a main feature in Democrats’ gun safety agenda, although Mr. Biden has mentioned them repeatedly in recent days.
Driving the news: After Beto O’Rourke confronted Abbott during a press conference on Wednesday over his support of gun rights, Schumer said the governor “asked people to put their agendas aside and think about someone other than themselves. My God, how dare he? What an absolute fraud the governor of Texas is.”
“And this is the same Gov. Abbott who tomorrow … will go speak at the [National Rifle Association] convention in Houston. Gov. Abbott, will you ask your MAGA buddies and NRA pals to put aside their agendas and think of someone other than themselves like you asked the families to do? … Of course not,” Schumer added.
“Gov. Abbott is more likely to outline some new plan to further loosen gun restrictions. No amount of bloodshed seems to be enough for MAGA Republicans.”
The big picture: Schumer delivered remarks ahead of a Senate vote on a piece of legislation, the Domestic Terrorism Protection Act, aimed at combating violent extremism by white supremacists.
He had scheduled the Senate vote before the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, took place. The bill is instead a response to the mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, that killed 10 people, which the FBI is investigating as a hate crime.
The bill, which already passed the House, needs 60 votes in the Senate to be sent to President Biden.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott says the gunman responsible for the Uvalde shooting Tuesday used an AR-15-style assault rifle. Here, three variations of the AR-15 are displayed at the California Department of Justice in Sacramento, Calif., in 2012.
Rich Pedroncelli/AP
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Rich Pedroncelli/AP
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott says the gunman responsible for the Uvalde shooting Tuesday used an AR-15-style assault rifle. Here, three variations of the AR-15 are displayed at the California Department of Justice in Sacramento, Calif., in 2012.
Rich Pedroncelli/AP
The weapon used to carry out the mass shooting in Uvalde on Tuesday is one all too familiar to Americans and lawmakers who have witnessed mass shootings occur over the past decade.
The Uvalde gunman used an AR-15-style rifle, a popular range of semiautomatic weapons that was purchased from a sporting goods store, to carry out the attack, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and law enforcement officials said Wednesday.
This weapon is an AR-15 type called a DDM4 Rifle, which is manufactured by Daniel Defense, The Associated Press reported. The weapon reportedly retails from between $400 to $2,000, the AP added.
While officials said the shooter, Salvador Ramos, purchased the gun, ammunition, and another weapon legally, the AR-15 and other guns like it have lingered on the minds of lawmakers for some time in terms of their legality.
In 1994, President Bill Clinton signed an assault-weapons ban, which banned the AR-15 and other similar semiautomatic rifles.
After its ban, mass shootings were down in the decade that followed, in comparison to the decade before (1984-94) and the one after (2004-14), NPR reported in 2018.
Once the assault-weapons ban expired 10 years later in 2004, gun manufacturers quickly began production and sales rose.
AR-15-style semiautomatic weapons are civilian versions of military weapons that gun control advocates say aren’t very different.
The AR-15, like its military version, is designed to kill people quickly and in large numbers, hence the term assault-style rifle, gun control advocates told NPR in 2018. They say it has no valid recreational use, and civilians should not be allowed to own them.
The gun industry, gun owners and their supporters on the other hand, say AR-15s are used for hunting, target practice and shooting competitions and should remain legal, NPR reported in 2018.
Such AR-15-style weapons are semiautomatic, meaning a shooter must pull the trigger to fire each shot from a magazine that typically carries 30 rounds.
A shooter with a fully automatic assault rifle can pull and hold the trigger and the weapon will fire until the ammunition supply is spent.
Fully automatic weapons have been heavily restricted in the U.S. since the 1934 National Firearms Act, which was directed against machine guns at the time, NPR reported.
The shooting in Uvalde has resurfaced calls for stricter gun laws.
Among those making these demands was former congressman Beto O’Rourke who interrupted Gov. Greg Abbott’s news conference in Uvalde on Wednesday, KUT reported.
O’Rourke was escorted outside, where he spoke with reporters.
“He’s refused to expand Medicaid, which would bring $10 billion a year, including mental health care access for people who need it,” O’Rourke said of Abbott, according to ABC. “He’s refused to champion red flag laws. … He’s refused to support safe-storage laws so young people cannot get their hands on their parents’ weapons.”
The following is a partial list of when an AR-15-style weapon was used in a mass shooting:
Feb. 14, 2018: Shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Florida leaves 17 people dead.
Oct. 1, 2017: The Las Vegas slaughter of 58 people.
Nov. 5, 2017: The Sutherland Springs, Texas, church shooting that claimed 26 lives.
June 12, 2016: The Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Fla., that left 49 dead.
Dec. 2, 2015: The San Bernardino, Calif., shooting that killed 14 people.
Dec. 14, 2012: The shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut that took 27 lives.
“I don’t believe Ted Cruz doesn’t care about children. I don’t. I refuse to believe he is unaffected by this. He’s a father. I bet he went to bed sick to his stomach last night. It’s easy to call someone a monster. But he’s not a monster — he is a human being. And some people might not like hearing me say that, but it’s true,” Kimmel said. “So here’s the thing I would like to say to Ted Cruz, the human being, and Governor Abbott, and everyone: It’s okay to admit you made a mistake. In fact, it’s not just okay, it’s necessary to admit you made a mistake when your mistake is killing the children in your state.”
WOODSTOCK, Ga. (AP) — Donald Trump opened May by lifting a trailing Senate candidate in Ohio to the Republican nomination, seemingly cementing the former president’s kingmaker status before another possible White House run. He’s ending the month, however, stinging from a string of defeats that suggest a diminishing stature.
Trump faced a series of setbacks in Tuesday’s primary elections as voters rejected his efforts to unseat two top targets for retribution: Georgia’s Republican governor and secretary of state, both of whom rebuffed Trump’s extraordinary pressure to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. But the magnitude of defeat in the governor’s race — more than 50 percentage points — was especially stunning and raised questions about whether Republican voters are beginning to move on from Trump.
Nearly seven years after the onetime reality television star launched what seemed to be an improbable campaign for the White House, the “Make America Great Again” movement Trump helmed isn’t going anywhere. But voters are increasingly vocal in saying that the party’s future is about more than Trump.
“I like Trump a lot, but Trump is in the past,” said David Butler of Woodstock, Georgia, who voted for Gov. Brian Kemp on Tuesday and said Trump’s endorsements had “no” impact “whatsoever” on his thinking.
It was the same for Will Parbhoo, a 22-year-old dental assistant who also voted for Kemp.
“I’m not really a Trumper,” he said after voting. “I didn’t like him to begin with. With all the election stuff, I was like ‘Dude, move on.’”
One thing Parbhoo liked about the current governor? “Kemp is focused on Georgia,” he said.
Trump sought to play down the losses by his favored candidates, saying on his social media platform Wednesday that he had a “very big and successful evening of political Endorsements” and insisting some races “were not possible to win.”
Still, the pattern of high-profile defeats is hard to ignore.
After JD Vance vaulted from third to first place following Trump’s late-stage endorsement in the Ohio Senate primary, the dynamics took a turn. Trump’s pick in Nebraska’s primary for governor, Charles Herbster, lost his race after allegations surfaced that he had groped women.
But his biggest upset was in Georgia, a crucial swing state, where former Sen. David Perdue, whom Trump had lobbied to run and helped clear the field for, lost to Kemp. The governor was among Trump’s top targets after he refused to overturn the results of the 2020 White House election in his state.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who defied Trump’s call to “find” the votes to change the outcome two years ago — a call that is now under investigation — also won his party’s nomination. Attorney General Chris Carr and Insurance Commissioner John King — both opposed by Trump — were also successful in their primaries.
Trump has endorsed in nearly 200 races, from governor to county commissioner, often inserting himself into contests that aren’t particularly competitive and helping bolster his compilation of wins. Some of his work, even in races with multiple candidates, has paid off.
His early support helped football great Herschel Walker and Rep. Ted Budd sail to their respective Senate primary nominations in Georgia and North Carolina. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s former press secretary, easily won the GOP nomination for governor in Arkansas. And even in Georgia, all of the candidates Trump endorsed in open races won or will head to runoffs.
Some allies say Trump’s endorsement tally is a poor measure of his influence, even if Trump constantly promotes that record.
They argue that voters may support the former president and be eager for him to run again, but may not be persuaded by his selections, especially in races with governors such as Kemp who have long histories with voters. And even without Trump on the ballot, the party has been transformed in Trump’s image, with candidates adopting his “America First” platform, mimicking his tactics and parroting his lies about a stolen election.
But with Trump out of office and relegated to posting on his own social media platform, other voices are beginning to fill the void. Fox News host Tucker Carlson, the most watched personality on cable television, has becoming a driving ideological force in the party. Republicans such as the conspiracy-embracing Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who won her party’s nomination for reelection Tuesday, have taken up his mantle in Washington.
Meanwhile, potential presidential rivals to Trump are waiting in the wings for 2024.
Former Vice President Mike Pence, who has been distancing himself from Trump, rallied with Kemp in suburban Atlanta on Monday evening and told the crowd that “elections are about the future” — an implicit knock on his former boss.
Trump has also spawned a new generation of candidates who have channeled his “MAGA” brand, but who have done so independent of his support and see themselves as its next iteration.
“MAGA doesn’t belong to him,” Kathy Barnette, the Pennsylvania Senate candidate whose late-stage surge stunned party insiders, said in an interview. “Trump coined the word. He does not own it.”
While the left, she said, may see the “MAGA movement” as a “cult of Trump voters,” she said it goes far beyond one man. She argued that Trump had succeeded in 2016 because he aligned himself with voters’ concerns and said out loud what people were already thinking, particularly on immigration. She said she tried in her race to do the same.
“I do believe Trump has an important voice still,” she added, but “he needs to get better advisers, and in addition to that, he needs to do better himself in remembering why we aligned with him. And it wasn’t because we were aligning with his values. It was because he was aligning with our values. And I think he needs to remember that so that his voice can remain relevant.”
Other Republicans grouse that precious time and money have been wasted on an ego-driven Trump vengeance campaign, forcing incumbents to defend themselves in primaries rather than focus on general elections. They worry Trump has elevated some candidates who may prove unelectable in the November general election and has exacerbated divisions.
“There’s no question unnecessary fights with kind of the extremes of the party, of Trump’s grievance party, have made it more difficult for us to win in November,” said Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a potential 2024 GOP presidential candidate who has been working to protect incumbent governors.
Hogan, a Trump critic, said that, so far, the races have “been a bit of a mixed bag,”
“We’re in the middle of a battle for the soul of the Republican Party and quite frankly the battle’s not over yet,” he said. “I don’t think we can say exactly what the outcome is yet. And I think we still have many more primaries to go.”
Others are more confident in saying Trump’s power has diminished over time.
“The Trump endorsement is helpful but it is not something that by itself can put anyone over the top. And that means it’s less powerful than it was when he was president and it seemed like a fait accompli when he endorsed,” said Mike DuHaime, a longtime GOP strategist.
Still, he acknowledged that Trump is “still the most influential person in the party,” even if that influence has waned.
Texas elementary school shooting: Live from Uvalde, Texas
Onlookers have said they urged police to move into the primary school as officers stood by while a gunman was carrying out his rampage, which killed 19 students and two teachers.
The father of 10-year-old victim Jacklyn Cazares said he even suggested to go in himself with other bystanders as he was frustrated police were not doing it themselves.
Details are starting to emerge of the attack and the 18-year-old shooter behind it.
The teenage gunman, identified as Salvador Ramos, barricaded himself inside a classroom before killing the fourth-grade students at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde on Tuesday.
The suspect, with no known criminal history or history of mental illness, was shot dead by an officer on the scene after around 60 minutes.
Facebook has confirmed that he sent a direct message online around 10 minutes before the attack warning that he was going to shoot up an elementary school.
Ex-head of Columbine High School says network of education leaders ‘ready to help’
A network of educational leaders who have experienced gun violence is ready to help those affected by the Texas shooting, the former principal of Columbine High School has said.
Frank DeAngelis was head of Columbine, Colorado in 1992 when two gunmen killed 13 people on campus.
“There are about 29 of us that have actually been involved in shootings within our community,” he said.
“So, we reach out and we have guides just to help them wherever we can. And it’s not a one-time phone call,” DeAngelis said of the group, the Principal Recovery Network.
“I will be there every step of the way to help them just as people helped me in our community.”
False claims about shooter’s identity distracts from ‘real issue’, disinformation expert says
False claims about identity of the teenager who killed 21 people at a school in Texas distract from the real issue of gun control, a disinformation expert has said.
Jaime Longoria, director of research at the Disinfo Defense League, was responding to unfounded claims that the killer was an immigrant living in the US illegally, or transgender.
The claims reflect broader problems with racism and intolerance toward transgender people, and are an effort to blame the shooting on minority groups who already endure higher rates of online harassment and hate crimes, Longoria said.
“It’s a tactic that serves two purposes: It avoids real conversations about the issue (of gun violence), and it gives people who don’t want to face reality a patsy, it gives them someone to blame,” Longoria added.
Facebook rejects Abbott’s claim that shooter posted publicly before massacre
Facebook has rejected a claim by Greg Abbott that the Texas school shooter posted publicly on the platform before he opened fire on a classroom, killing 21 people.
At a press conference on Wednesday the Texas governor said the gunman posted on Facebook approximately 30 minutes before reaching the school.”
Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone said shortly after those comments that the messages described by the governor were “private one-to-one text messages that were discovered after the terrible tragedy occurred.”
“We are closely cooperating with law enforcement in their ongoing investigation,” he added.
Washington governor Jay Inslee was quick to react to this week’s carnage at a Texas elementary school, sending a tweet listing the gun control measures the Democratic-controlled state has taken. He finished with: “Your turn Congress.”
But gun control measures are likely going nowhere in Congress, and they also have become increasingly scarce in most states. Aside from several Democratic-controlled states, the majority have taken no action on gun control in recent years or have moved aggressively to expand gun rights.
That’s because they are either controlled politically by Republicans who oppose gun restrictions or are politically divided, leading to stalemate.
“Here I am in a position where I can do something, I can introduce legislation, and yet to know that it almost certainly is not going to go anywhere is a feeling of helplessness,” said state senator Greg Leding, a Democrat in the GOP-controlled Arkansas Legislature. He has pushed unsuccessfully for red flag laws that would allow authorities to remove firearms from those determined to be a danger to themselves or others.
After Tuesday’s massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, that left 19 students and two teachers dead, Democratic governors and lawmakers across the country issued impassioned pleas for Congress and their own legislatures to pass gun restrictions. Republicans have mostly called for more efforts to address mental health and to shore up protections at schools, such as adding security guards.
Among them is Texas governor Greg Abbott, who has repeatedly talked about mental health struggles among young people and said tougher gun laws in places like New York and California are ineffective. In Tennessee, GOP representative Jeremy Faison tweeted that the state needs to have security officers “in all of our schools,” but stopped short of promising to introduce legislation during next year’s legislative session: “Evil exists and we must protect the innocent from it,” Faison said.
Gunman sent Facebook messages that he was ‘going to shoot an elementary school’
Salvador Ramos sent Facebook messages he was “going to shoot an elementary school” 15 minutes before his deadly attack, it has emerged.
A15-year-old girl from Germany has told The New York Times that Ramos had text messaged her just before the shooting, saying “Ima go shoot up a elementary school rn.”
Desperate parents urged ‘unprepared’ police to stop Texas primary school gunman
Police who responded to the Texas school massacre have been accused of being “unprepared” and failing to respond quickly enough to the mass school shooting.
Officers had to be urged to enter the building where the gunman’s rampage killed 21 people, witnesses to the atrocity have said.
ICYMI: Teenage gunman posted ‘lil secret’ Instagram message before shooting 21 people dead
The Texas school shooter who gunned down 19 children and two teachers messaged a woman online just hours earlier saying: “I got a lil secret I wanna tell you.”
Salvador Ramos, 18, appeared to hint at his plans to attack at Robb Elementary in Uvalde in an alleged private Instagram chat with the woman, telling her “I’m about to.”
The shooter’s gunman has broken her silence following the school attack that killed 19 students and two teachers and says that her son “wasn’t a violent person”, Graeme Massie reports.
Tributes and memorials are being paid to the 21 victims of the shooting. See here:
Flowers are placed on a makeshift memorial in front of Robb Elementary School
A woman holds a photo of Nevaeh Bravo, who was killed in the mass shooting, during a vigil for the victims of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde
US Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz said dozens of on-duty and off-duty agents responded to the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday, adding that as soon as officers arrived, “they didn’t hesitate.”
“We responded from various locations. I had both on-duty, off-duty, folks that were in a training environment all responded to this location,” Ortiz said, adding between 80-100 officers responded.
Among those who responded were members of the Border Patrol Tactical Unit, or BORTAC, which is a specialized unit made up of highly trained officers that respond to “emergent and high-risk incidents,” according to the agency.
One agent was injured and has since been released from the hospital.
“I talked to my officers and certainly talked to the agent that was injured yesterday. Nothing prepares you for a scene like they saw and witnessed yesterday,” Ortiz said.
Border Patrol will participate in the investigation, given its involvement.
Earlier Wednesday, Chief Jason Owens, who heads the Del Rio sector for Border Patrol, told CNN’s Mark Morales that the uniforms of the agents who responded to the scene were “covered in blood.”
US Customs and Border Protection has a large presence in Uvalde, which is located about 60 miles from the Texas-Mexico border. Some agents had family members who attended the school, according to Owens.
“I had agents that were responding to this scene that had kids in there that they didn’t know were okay or not. We had a couple that were impacted by this. And we had one agent that lost a granddaughter, we had others that lost extended family members,” Owens said.
Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke interrupted Texas Gov. Greg Abbott during a press conference in Uvalde after the mass shooting that left 19 children and two adults dead.
Abbott said he would be passing the microphone to Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, when O’Rourke stood up. “You are doing nothing,” O’Rourke said, adding that the shooting was “totally predictable” because gun laws were not strengthened following other shootings in the state.
Beto O’Rourke confronts Gov. Abbott in the middle of a press conference on the Uvalde school shooting, saying, “The time to stop the next shooting is right now and you are doing nothing.”
In response, officials on stage call him a “sick son of a b—h” and police escort him out. pic.twitter.com/0YsQp3ZNTO
Patrick told O’Rourke to “sit down … you’re out of line in an embarrassing encounter” and called on O’Rourke to leave the auditorium.
“I can’t believe you’re a sick son of a b**** to come to a place like this to make a political issue,” Patrick shouted over O’Rourke.
Law enforcement officers appeared to escort O’Rourke out of the news conference afterward. CBS News’ Janet Shamalian said it appeared that some people had saved seats for O’Rourke.
After O’Rourke was escorted out, Abbott did not address the incident directly but called for unity, saying that “every Texan, every American has a responsibility where we need to focus not on ourselves and our agendas, but we need to focus on the healing and hope that we can provide those who have suffered unconscionable damage to their lives and loss of life.”
“We need all Texans in this moment in time to decide to personal agendas, think of somebody other than ourselves, think of somebody who has been hurt and help somebody who has been hurt,” he continued.
After O’Rourke left, he told reporters, “these kids died because the governor of the state of Texas, the most powerful man in the state, chose to do nothing.”
“After every one of these, he holds a press conference just like this – and I wish to hell when he came to El Paso that someone would have stood up and held him to account and confronted him and shocked the conscience of this state into doing something,” O’Rourke said. “Because if we do nothing, we will continue to see this. Year after year, school after school, kid after kid. This is on all of us, every single one of us to do something.”
During his failed presidential run in 2019, O’Rourke was an outspoken advocate for gun control measures. A former congressman, O’Rourke represented El Paso, where a gunman shot and killed 23 people.
After that shooting, O’Rourke memorably said during a presidential debate, “Hell yes, we are taking your guns” about AR-15s. Abbott and other law enforcement officials stated Wednesday that the shooter in Uvalde used an AR-15.
Before O’Rourke’s interruption, Abbott called for solutions to the mental health crisis in Uvalde, although he also said that the shooter had no known history of mental illness. Abbott said local officials told him that “we have a problem with mental health, illness, in this community.”
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