School shooting

On May 24, 2022, a teenage gunman killed 19 students and two adults at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. I've been following reaction by people in media, politics and special interest groups.

Wayne LaPierre of the NRA said the shooting showed the Second Amendment is working just like it's designed. "This young man was exercising his right to keep and bear arms. Nobody should criticize that right." Sean Hannity pointed out that U.S. founding documents declare that citizens are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights, including life, liberty and the right to own guns. "You can't argue with God-given rights, isn't that obvious?" he said on his popular radio show. Another conservative radio host, Dennis Prager, agreed with LaPierre, saying that "this young gentleman certainly knew his Constitutional rights and had no reason to think he could not exercise them." Prager added, "Not everybody will agree with what the young man did, but in a way, I'm encouraged, because his action showed that he clearly learned, even in our left-wing public schools, how much freedom and power the Second Amendment gives Americans."

Texas senator Ted Cruz, a Republican, said that Congress should continue to defeat legislation that might weaken Second Amendment rights. "Guns and the American way of life are synonymous," he said, adding that, "just because this young man got a little bit out of line does not mean we should rip up the Constitution and throw our rights out the window." Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, said school administrators deserve a lot of blame for lax security. "I mean, what were they thinking?" he asked. "Don't they know that any teenager can walk into a gun store, buy an AR-15, a large capacity magazine, hundreds of bullets, body armor and go visit their school?" He added, "the school staff seems to have made it as easy to get inside as Biden has made it for illegal aliens to get into the U.S. I'd like to stand up for the staff," he said, "but I just can't."

Dom Giordano, a substitute host on the little-heard Jim Bohannon radio show, agreed with Abbott and offered his own suggestion for better security. "There's been a lot of talk about arming teachers, but very little action," he said. "We need to do more, and that means giving guns to the school children. A teacher is only one person in the classroom. But it's a different story if every five, six, seven, eight, or nine-year old student has a gun. That's not too young. We've seen that a toddler in the back seat of mom's car can find a gun and pull the trigger, fatally shooting mom in the head. When a so-called bad guy with a gun shows up at school, we can have a whole classroom of good boys and girls with guns who can shoot back. It's a shame the school in Texas was not prepared like that. But I don't really know why people are so upset. Sure, the body count was higher than Columbine and Parkland, but it was lower than Newtown and Virginia Tech. We need to keep these things in perspective," Giordano said.

Mark Levin, another conservative radio host, said, "the radical extreme communist members of the Democrat party always try to politicize these so-called mass shootings. I mean, a mass shooting is what's happening in Ukraine. In America, we have gun rights, which are protected by the Second Amendment to our Constitution. The Democrat party just can't seem to understand our fundamental liberties. I think this young man in Texas understood his rights better than people in the Democrat party."