At a victory party on Tuesday night in Georgia, the newly nominated, Trump-endorsed Senate candidate Herschel Walker evaded questions over the massacre.Īsked if he supported any new gun control measures in the aftermath, Walker responded: “What I like to … what I like to do, is see it and everything and stuff,” before being ushered away. There was no sign either that a new generation of Republican senators might offer any hope for bipartisan gun reform measures. On Tuesday, the conservative Democrat Joe Manchin also reiterated he did not support calls from within the party to reform senate filibuster rules, which could allow the passage of legislation with a simple majority. While Democrats, who control the House of Representatives, passed two House gun control bills last year, which aimed to expand and strengthen background checks, there remains little to no hope of their passage through the split US Senate where 60 votes are required to pass legislation. In 2019 bipartisan efforts in the US Senate to support such laws failed and on Tuesday Tillis reiterated his concern that such laws were “overreach”. Tillis continued to express skepticism over so-called “red flag laws” adopted by a handful of US states in the wake of Parkland, which aim to allow authorities to restrict gun ownership from individuals deemed a threat to public safety. North Carolina senator Thom Tillis told reporters on Tuesday he had not seen any indication in initial reports that suggested the shooter’s record “was in any way affected by Congress’s actions or inaction”. That, in my opinion, is the best answer.”Īmong other US Republican senators, perceived as more open to bipartisan agreement, the sentiment remained largely the same. “We can potentially arm and prepare and train teachers and other administrators to respond quickly. “We can’t stop bad people from doing bad things,” Texas attorney general Ken Paxton told Fox News on Tuesday. Other senior Texas Republicans, who have presided over a series of measures aimed at loosening restrictions on firearm ownership in the state, reiterated calls to arm teachers, despite the fact the shooter engaged a number of armed officers as he successfully stormed the school building. Meanwhile, Cruz is set to speak at the National Rifle Association leadership summit on Friday, in Houston, just 280 miles from Uvalde, alongside Donald Trump and Texas governor Greg Abbott. Jury selection in the death penalty trial of the Parkland shooter continues this week, a further marker of the trauma these mass shootings leave behind. Despite a grassroots protest movement, in which hundreds of thousands of school children descended on Washington in a March for Our Lives, no federal legislation was passed. His remarks were almost identical in the aftermath of the Parkland school shooting in Florida back in 2018, which claimed the lives of 17 students and teachers. “You see Democrats and a lot of folks in the media whose immediate solution is to try to restrict the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens. “Inevitably when there’s a murder of this kind you see politicians try to politicize it,” he said. Texas senator Ted Cruz, who also sent prayers to the community in Uvalde, castigated Democrats and members of the media during a brief interview with CNN. Within hours of the bloodshed on Tuesday, many of the national Republican Party’s most outspoken voices on gun ownership recited talking points now rote in the aftermath of mass shootings. Shortly after the shooting, Republican Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, who for well over a decade has led his party in vehemently blocking a raft of federal gun control measures, decried the “disgusting violence” in Uvalde and said: “The entire country is praying for the children, families, teachers, and staff and the first responders on the scene.”īut prayers aside, there remains little to no hope of commonsense gun control measures making their way into federal law, despite support from the majority of American voters. Thoughts and prayers, obfuscation and inaction.
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