Texas Citizens Boo Ted Cruz For Failing To Protect Kids

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Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has some ideas for the scourge of gun violence in the United States: fix the, uh, door problem and add police officers to schools, although hundreds of personnel responded to the scene of this year’s elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, where the situation nevertheless continued — with the shooter eventually entering one of the school rooms — for over an hour.

“Have one door into and out of the school, and have… armed police officers at that door,” Cruz said after the Uvalde shooting, as reported by The Texas Tribune. What about fire safety? What about windows? Cruz recently took his accompanying message of adding thousands of cops to schools to an event hosted by the same publication, and the crowd booed him. “Whenever you have a mass murder,” Cruz told the crowd, “You have Democrats in Washington, the step they immediately go to is we need to take away firearms from law-abiding citizens.” Some applauded, seemingly surprising Cruz. “Okay, you can clap for that except for the minor problem that it doesn’t work,” the Senator self-confidently told listeners. “If the objective is to stop these crimes, gun control is singularly ineffective.”

The shooter in Uvalde legally obtained an AR-15-style rifle that he used in the incident. If the laws were changed, there is a good chance the attacker, who was 18, would not have obtained the weapon. “If you want to stop crime, let me tell you what actually works,” Cruz — who often sounds perturbed at the prospect of explaining his positions to constituents — said. “You target the bad guys. You target the criminals, the felons, the fugitives. You prosecute them, you put them in jail, you get them off the street, and you also enhance security at vulnerable targets.” So Cruz’s grand plan is… “target the bad guys”? Does he, um, think he’s the first one who thought of that possibility? He was booed when he got to the subject of legislation he recently unsuccessfully pushed in the Senate that, if passed, would have — per Cruz — doubled the police presence on school campuses.

“Two weeks ago, I stood on the Senate floor and tried to pass legislation I’ve introduced that would double the number of police officers in schools,” Cruz said. Boos and jeers emerged from the crowd, irking the profoundly irritable Cruz. “If you want to have a reasonable conversation we can, if you want to yell at each other we can,” the Senator said, sounding annoyed. Cruz seeming frustrated at even the slightest push-back is a consistent feature of his public run-ins with folks opposing him. “If we want to keep our kids safe, and I desperately want to keep our kids safe, the most effective step we can do is to have police officers there to protect them who can intercept a mass murderer before he gets into the school and stop them,” Cruz told the crowd, discussing his arguments in the Senate.

Cruz insisted the reason police — many of whom responded in Uvalde — didn’t stop the shooter there is because nobody was onsite when the attacker arrived. However, officers evidently got to the school before the shooter went inside the building, and Cruz’s argument obscures the facts. He claimed the shooter was “murdering kids before the police got there.” Available information suggests that, since Cruz also specified the shooter already entered the building in his telling, the Senator’s account is brazenly false. Cruz eventually began basically insulting the crowd, which is certainly odd for a public official. “You guys can instead sing kumbaya with them and hope they’ll just stop, but what you’re proposing doesn’t work,” he ranted. Check it out below: