During a recent campaign stop, Texas Democratic gubernatorial contender Beto O’Rourke sharply condemned the state’s Republican Governor Greg Abbott for failing to take meaningfully expansive action on gun policy even after the mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, earlier this year.
At a recent debate between O’Rourke and Abbott, the Democratic contender challenged Abbott, who is seeking a third term, for having refused to even call a special session to deal with gun policy issues. After a mass shooting at a high school in Florida, that state’s GOP-leaning state government found it in themselves to make certain changes to gun regulations, restricting teenagers from purchasing firearms in certain contexts. At the federal level, Congress passed — and the president signed — a sweeping gun reform package this year including additions to the background check process for younger purchasers. (The shooter at an elementary school in Texas this year was 18.) And what is Abbott doing? Is it anything?
“Those kids were not at 500 yards,” O’Rourke told the event attendees, clearly channeling Texans’ simmering anger. “They were at five feet. They didn’t have a steel helmet on. They had maybe a baseball cap at best. Their parents could identify their bodies only by the shoes that they were wearing. But they weren’t just defenseless against that gunman and that kind of firearm. They were defenseless against the governor, who after five of the worst mass shootings in American history occurred in this state in just the last five years… And this governor has not lifted a finger to make it any less likely that any other child — my three kids go to school in El Paso. Your younger brothers and sisters, wherever they are in Texas will not meet the same fate as those 19 children there.” Polling suggests the race could be close. Check out O’Rourke’s comments below:
Beto O’Rourke (D) calls out Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) for refusing to reform gun laws after the Uvalde mass shooting:
“They didn’t have a steel helmet on their head — maybe a baseball cap at best. Their parents could identify their bodies only by the shoes that they were wearing.” pic.twitter.com/xlSnWah7ew
— The Recount (@therecount) October 11, 2022
There’s not much additional help for Texas at the federal level among their Congressional representatives. Sen. Ted Cruz (R) claimed at a recent event in the state that gun control wouldn’t work — an obviously familiar Republican argument, although the gun reform package passed in Congress this year garnered bipartisan backing. “Whenever you have a mass murder,” Cruz told attendees, “You have Democrats in Washington, the step they immediately go to is we need to take away firearms from law-abiding citizens.” Some in the crowd applauded. “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 elementary school shooter in Texas earlier this year obtained a key weapon used in the attack through legal means. If the laws were different, there is what seems like a good chance the shooting wouldn’t have happened. Quite simply, Cruz doesn’t sound like he knows what he’s talking about.
