Just a few days in the wake of a man murdering 19 children at an elementary school, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) issued an impassioned defense of the Second Amendment while attending the annual National Rifle Association convention hosted in Texas.
These statements from Cruz take place just after a young 18-year-old Latino man stormed Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, this past Tuesday before opening fire. He was later killed by an off-duty agent of the U.S. Border Patrol. The response seen from the local police forces and officials has been the focal point of the extreme criticism in the wake of the tragic event as numerous mistakes were made.
“If children are the picture of innocence, then the lunatics and the monsters like this one, the one who would deliberately murder children, they are the picture of evil,” exclaimed Cruz. “The anguish of those families right now is unimaginable. The very worst pain on Earth. All of us in Texas need to come together and comfort those families right now. We need to love them, embrace them, and take care of them.”
Cruz also stated that it was very important for officials to understand what was driving horrific events such as the one that took place in Uvalde because “when we were growing up, this kind of thing didn’t happen.”
“Kids may have worried about getting into a fist fight at school, maybe a bloody nose at recess, but we never worried about a psychopath coming into our classrooms to commit murder.” Cruz shot at “the elites who dominate our culture” for attempting to highlight the idea that “firearms lie at the root of the problem.”
“It’s far easier to slander one’s political adversaries and to demand that responsible citizens forfeit their constitutional rights than it is to examine the cultural sickness giving birth to unspeakable acts of evil,” exclaimed Cruz. “It’s far less comfortable to ask why despair and isolation and violent hatred is so prevalent in America. It requires a sick soul to drive a truck into a crowded sidewalk, to plan a bomb at a marathon, or to fly a plane into a building. It requires a sick soul to open fire in a movie theater or in a church or in a school. A speeding automobile in the hands of a madman is as deadly as is a jet airplane.”
“Tragedies like the events of this week are a mirror forcing us to ask hard questions, demanding that we see where our culture is failing, looking at broken families, absent fathers, declining church attendance, social media bullying, violent online content, desensitizing the act of murder in video games, chronic isolation, prescription drug, and opioid abuse and their collective effects on the psyche of young Americans is both complicated and multifaceted,” Cruz went on. “It’s a lot easier to moralize about guns and to shriek about those you disagree with politically, but it’s never been about guns.”
Cruz stated that for a large portion of Americans, the Second Amendment is not just some ephemeral idea, they live in conditions that necessitate them to protect themselves from evil. Cruz stated that it was reported by Obama’s White House that guns “are used defensively to stop a crime between 500,000 and one million times every single year.”
“Taking guns away from these responsible Americans will not make them safer, nor will it make our nation more secure,” stated Cruz. “In an age where elites embrace defunding the police, when homelessness runs rampant, when gangs dominate entire communities, and when radical district attorneys refuse to prosecute violent crime in cities across America, rarely has the Second Amendment been more necessary to secure the rights of our fellow citizens.”
As Cruz closed out his statements, he said, “We must not react to evil and tragedy by abandoning the Constitution or infringing on the rights of our law-abiding citizens.”
“Now is not the time to yield to panic or intimidation or fear,” he concluded. “Now is not the time for lies. It is not the time for empty political gestures. Now is the time for unity. Now is the time for love. And now is the time for action to protect our rights, to stop those with evil in their hearts and to do everything humanly possible to protect our children and to protect our families.”
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