On Tuesday, an 18-year-old gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. The massacre, inflicted on a group gathered in a classroom, is now the second-deadliest shooting on record in the country. The shooter had purchased two AR-15-style rifles in the week before the attack Tuesday, largely thanks to vigorous gun lobbying efforts to allow gun sales to those under 21.
The parallels to Columbine and how the NRA decided to keep its annual meeting at the time are uniquely American and gruesome.
Governor Greg Abbott and Senator Ted Cruz offered their thoughts and prayers following the Uvalde shooting. But the two Republicans are curiously silent about their plans for next weekend to headline, along with the party's de facto leader, Donald Trump, the annual conference of the National Rifle Association a few hundred miles east of the shooting. of Uvalde in Houston.
Facts Matter - Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter. Support our nonprofit reports. Subscribe to our print magazine.
On Tuesday, an 18-year-old gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. The massacre, inflicted on a group gathered in a classroom, is now the second-deadliest shooting on record in the country. The shooter had purchased two AR-15-style rifles in the week before the attack Tuesday, largely thanks to vigorous gun lobbying efforts to allow gun sales to those under 21.
Governor Greg Abbott and Senator Ted Cruz offered their thoughts and prayers following the Uvalde shooting. But the two Republicans are curiously silent about their plans for next weekend to headline, along with the party's de facto leader, Donald Trump, the annual conference of the National Rifle Association a few hundred miles east of the shooting. of Uvalde in Houston.
Reviews:- original sites for browse Trump, Cruz Headlining the NRA’s Texas Conference this Weekend For the Gun Lobby, It’s Déjà-Vu around this websites.
Could this silence be a sign of tense deliberations over whether to go ahead with this weekend's rally? That is highly unlikely, and indeed such an assumption would be overly generous given the history of men gleefully wielding guns to attract voters. Cruz, in a video resurfacing today, even fried bacon with a gun similar to the one used in Tuesday's shooting. Abbott and his fellow Texas Republicans relaxed gun laws, even after more mass shootings.
Yes, the NRA ultimately decided to go ahead with the event, basing its decision largely on the idea that doing otherwise would send the message that the gun lobby had been "brought to its knees." Yes, an executive at the time argued that the media would "have fun" if they decided to cancel. It was 1999, after the deadliest school shooting in decades, a horror often considered the first in modern times. America has witnessed countless acts of gun violence, inside schools, supermarkets, parking lots and beyond since then, each never pushing for meaningful gun legislation, but instead the same parade of tired responses: thoughts and prayers for now is not the time. that politics attribute this to the mentally ill, that it take the place of action.
So you can probably expect Abbott, Cruz and Trump to keep up their headline appearances this weekend, where they will almost certainly clamor for pro-gun proposals that, in bad faith, claim they would have renounced Tuesday's massacre. (They're already on Fox News for armed bodyguards; actually, it's been debunked as useful.) If anything, this weekend gives these three men a chance to shout how damned good they are.
But one thing you won't see when Trump takes the stage? Firearms. They are too dangerous for the event.
Now imagine if we were all offered the same protections as our former president.
