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May 26, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:00:21
Posturing On Graves Isn’t Virtue, It’s Moral Sickness | Ep. 1503
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Time Text
Failing gubernatorial candidate Beto O'Rourke crashes a press conference by Texas Governor Greg Abbott to posture on gun control.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer refuses to hold any vote on legislation, and we examine the mass shooter's copious red flags.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Slash Ben will get to all the news in just one moment.
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Well, we are finding out more about the circumstances surrounding this horrific shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
We have more about the circumstances.
We know more about the shooter and his life circumstances, which does give us some clues as to what we might do in the future to prevent stuff like this.
Some of the circumstances surrounding this shooting look an awful lot like the circumstances surrounding the Parkland, Florida shooting, in which school security officers did not do their jobs in protecting the kids at Parkland.
Same thing appears to have happened here, where you had cops who were arriving on scene, and knew that there was somebody inside who was shooting children, and did not charge in, and it took a border patrol agent basically breaking protocol in order to stop the shooting.
Apparently, according to the Associated Press, frustrated onlookers urged police officers to charge into the Texas elementary school where a gunman's rampage killed 19 children and two teachers.
Witnesses said Wednesday as investigators worked to track the massacre that lasted upward of 40 minutes and ended when the 18-year-old shooter was killed by a border patrol team.
Go in there, go in there, nearby women shouted at the officers soon after the attack began, said Juan Carranza, 24, who saw the scene from outside his house across the street from Robb Elementary School in the close-knit town of Uvalde.
Carranza said the officers did not go in.
Javier Cesares, whose fourth-grade daughter, Jacqueline Cesares, was killed in the attack, said he raced to the school when he heard about the shooting arriving while police were still gathered outside the building.
Upset that the police were not moving in, he raised the idea of charging into the school with several other bystanders.
He said, let's just rush in because the cops aren't doing anything like they're supposed to, he said.
More could have been done.
They were unprepared.
Minutes earlier, Carranza had watched as the shooter crashed his truck into a ditch outside the school, grabbed his AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle, and shot at two people outside a nearby funeral home who ran away uninjured.
Officials say he encountered a school district security officer outside the school, though there were conflicting reports on authorities on whether the men actually exchanged gunfire or not.
After running inside, he fired on two arriving Uvalde police officers who were outside the building, said Texas Department of Public Safety spokesperson Travis Considine.
The police officers were injured.
So apparently he was there before a couple of other police officers arrived.
Unclear whether he actually had an exchange of gunfire with the school district officer who was outside the school.
After entering the school, the shooter then charged into one classroom and began to kill one of the things we do on this program, as we do throughout Daily Wire.
We do not mention the names of mass shooters because we understand that the media are a major contributor to the epidemic of contagiousness when it comes to school shootings or suicide or issues like that.
Lieutenant Christopher Oliveros of the Department of Public Safety told CNN he barricaded himself by locking the door and started shooting children and teachers inside the classroom.
It just shows you the complete evil of the shooter.
All those killed were in the same classroom.
The Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw told reporters 40 minutes to an hour elapsed from when the shooter opened fire on the school security officer to when the tactical team shot him.
The department spokesman said later they could not give a solid estimate of how long the gunman was in the school or when he was killed.
McCraw said the bottom line is law enforcement was there.
They engaged immediately.
They contained him in the classroom.
But when they say contain him in the classroom, he locked himself inside the classroom and started shooting people.
So again, a failure to go in immediately.
And perhaps there is some sort of protocol that Makes some logical sense as to why officers wouldn't immediately charge in and try to shoot the guy.
But this looks very bad for the police department over there.
And if there indeed were a dozen police officers standing outside while this person was inside a classroom murdering children, and the parents of these children were outside telling the cops to go in and they were standing around for half an hour, 40 minutes.
That is horrific.
It is horrific.
You know, I understand on a human level why people would not want to do that.
But if you sign up to be a cop, that is indeed your job.
And again, we saw this at Parkland as well.
And this is why, unfortunately, when it comes to things like tremendous acts of evil, it turns out that it takes actual heroism to stop tremendous acts of evil.
And whatever laws are on the books tend to become quite secondary.
You can make all the preparations that you can, but when it comes right down to it, somebody is going to have to do something in order to stop the bad guy.
We are now finding out new details about the gunman as well.
And as always, there were a bunch of red flags.
Always, always and forever.
According to the Washington Post, the gunman bought two rifles, hundreds of rounds in the days before the massacre.
Of course, they're making it about his ability to obtain the weapons.
The real question is, given all the red flags about this person beforehand, why exactly would he have passed a background check?
He bought these weapons from a federally licensed firearms dealer.
So for all the folks out there who are talking about universal background checks, universal background checks wouldn't have stopped this.
This guy was background checked.
Usually when people talk about universal background checks, they're talking about my ability to sell a gun to a member of my family, and should I have to now take that gun to a federally licensed firearms dealer in order to...
Make that transaction happen with a background check.
The argument against is that that would require a federal gun registry where the government would then know where every gun was at every time in the United States and you could be prosecuted and put in jail for selling a gun to your brother or something.
That's the policy question.
It does not go to the heart of what would have stopped a shooting like this.
Again, this person was background checked when he was sold the rifles.
There are other people out there who are saying things like, Well, what if they just changed the laws with regard to the selling to above the age of 21?
Selling above the age of 21 ain't going to solve problems like this because the fact is that a huge number of people who commit shootings, not only school shootings, school shootings tend to be young, violent men between the ages of 18 and 21.
But a huge number of mass shootings have been perpetrated in the very recent past by people who are above the age of 60.
The New York subway shooting, for example, the Las Vegas shooting, the deadliest mass shooting in American history, perpetrated by people who are actually in the senior contingent of American Demographics.
So, if the idea is you stop mass shootings by doing this sort of stuff, the question really is why you should be 18 and allowed to vote, drive, but not carry a weapon.
The simple fact of the matter is that he was already violating gun laws, was this person.
He was apparently carrying a handgun.
You weren't allowed to carry a handgun in the state of Texas under the age of 21.
So, the laws were really not the question here, per se.
Alright, coming up, we'll get more into the details of this gunman.
There were a million red flags here, and again, the red flags don't mean that anybody does anything about the red flag.
That's a serious problem.
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According to the Washington Post, the gunman in Tuesday's elementary school massacre was a lonely 18-year-old who was bullied over a childhood speech impediment, suffered from a fraught home life, and lashed out violently against peers and strangers recently and over the years.
Friends and relatives said.
So once again, what we have here, and this happens so often, is a person whose life was clearly a series of potholes and this person then lashed out and murdered other people in the gravest and most evil possible fashion.
It is demonic.
I mean, when I say demonic I don't mean this person was possessed by some sort of spiritually outside thing.
I mean, demonic in the sense that when we use the term mental illness, the suggestion seems to be that there is just something wrong with you in your brain and that this affects your personality in some way.
Because mental illness is a very broad spectrum description.
It ranges from anything from generalized anxiety disorder to violent schizophrenia.
When I say demonic, that is not just a moral judgment.
It is, in fact, it is a fairly decent description of what happens when someone turns completely evil, where it is as though on a descriptive level, an outside force, has now overwhelmed the personality of the person they commit acts that are just beyond reason. I mean, this is an act beyond reason.
There are differences in kind, even between mass shooters, right? There's some mass shooters, like terrorists, who do these things for political purposes.
What they're doing is evil.
You also understand that they have a rationale in their own mind for doing this.
There's no rationale that you could possibly express that would even make any sort of evil sense as to why you would go into a classroom full of 7-year-olds and start murdering them.
Or 10-year-olds and start murdering them.
In any case, what we now know is that this person was the product of a broken life.
In the days after his May 16th birthday, he legally bought the weapons and ammo he'd used to wage war on grade schoolers in Uvalde, Texas.
Authorities said that the shooter shot and critically wounded his 66-year-old grandmother, which is a pretty good indicator of somebody who is sick.
I mean, somebody who has been possessed by forces beyond his control.
He then went on a shooting rampage at Robb Elementary School near his home, killing at least 19 children and two adults.
In a Wednesday news conference, state officials said that the shooter purchased a semi-automatic rifle at a local gun store on May 17th, bought 375 rounds of ammo the next day, then went back to the local gun store on Friday to purchase a second semi-automatic rifle.
Apparently, Santor Valdez Jr., 18, said he has known the shooter since early elementary school.
They were friends, he said, until this shooter's behavior started to deteriorate.
They used to play video games like Fortnite and Call of Duty.
But then the shooter changed.
Valdez said that the shooter once pulled up to a park where they often played basketball and had cuts all over his face.
He first said a cat had scratched his face.
Then he told me the truth, that he cut up his face with knives over and over and over.
I was like, you're crazy, bro.
Why would you do that?
The shooter said he did it for fun.
Valdez recalled.
So, right away, we have a failure in the system.
And when I say a failure in the system, I mean that normally, in a solid community, everyone in a community knows about a kid who is suffering like this, or a kid who has a condition like this, or a kid who is harming himself, and you can start to take precautions immediately.
In the existence of strong community bonds, when a kid is going wrong, pretty much everyone in the community knows about it and knows about it fairly early.
In this particular case, it seems like people knew about it, but who are they going to report that to?
Why was this kid apparent?
I mean, if you're cutting your face, you're by definition a danger to yourself.
This means he should have been institutionalized, but nobody took it upon themselves to actually go to mental health authorities.
I don't know what the laws are in the state of Texas with regard to involuntary commitment, but the simple fact of the matter is that nationwide, since the 1960s, there's been a dramatic loosening of the laws with regard to involuntary commitment because the suggestion has been, predominantly from the political left, that mental illness is a form of freedom, and that whether you are living on the street and doing drugs, or whether you are just a person acting in unconventional ways, like cutting your face, this means that you should never be put in a place where you are restricted in your activities.
That is stupid.
It is counterproductive.
The simple fact of the matter is that when people are a danger to themselves or others, they need to be...
Sometimes psychotropic pharmaceuticals can help.
Sometimes there are behavioral things like cognitive behavioral therapy that can be attempted.
And sometimes you can't cure the person at all and they're a danger.
And when that happens, the simple idea that that person ought to be out and about in society carries with it tremendous risk and pretending that risk does not exist.
comes with serious, serious consequences.
This kid was literally cutting his face with a knife, his own face with a knife.
If that's not an indicator of somebody who is deeply damaged and in danger, I don't know what is.
All right, coming up, we'll get some more on the shooter from the Washington Post first.
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In middle school and junior high, the shooter was apparently bullied for having a stutter and a strong lisp, according to friends and family.
Steven Garcia considered himself the shooter's best friend in eighth grade.
He said that the shooter didn't have it easy in school.
He said he would get bullied hard, like bullied by a lot of people, over social media, over gaming, over everything.
He was the nicest kid, the most shy kid.
He just needed to break out of his shell.
One time, he posted a photo of himself wearing black eyeliner, Garcia said, which brought on a slew of comments using a derogatory term for a gay person.
Garcia said he tried to stand up for him, but when Garcia and his mother relocated to another part of Texas for her job, he started being a different person.
He kept getting worse and worse, and I don't even know.
I will say that when it comes to bullying, I'm not a big believer that bullying is the chief problem when it comes to mass shooting.
It's not a defense of bullying.
As somebody who was viciously bullied in high school, bullies ought to be punished to the fullest extent of disciplinary procedures at schools.
It should not be allowed in schools.
Bullying is bad.
However, the attempt to kind of suggest broad scale that anyone who's bullied is likely to become a mass shooter is obviously not true.
So if we're going to look to deeper causes, I don't think that the bullying aspect, again, this goes to community, which is that in a general community, when kids are bullying other kids, parents are supposed to be able to go to other parents and tell them to tell their kids to cut it out.
So again, this goes to lack of, like, if we're talking about societal ills, and it seems as though in a fraying society where our community bonds are coming apart, this is one of the predictable side effects apparently, and it's just going to continue increasing over time as we have a generation of kids who are completely unmoored from any social structure, any sense of expectation, or any community social fabric that allows people to monitor what other people's kids are doing and then report them if they are doing something that is scary or a problem or wrong.
Apparently, he dropped out of school.
He started wearing all black and large military boots.
He grew his hair out.
He missed long periods of high school.
He was not on track to graduate with the other members of the high school this year.
There's a lot of red flags.
The shooter's cousin said she saw students mock his speech impediment when they attended middle school together.
He'd brush it off in the moment, then complain later to his grandmother he didn't want to go back to school.
His cousin said he wasn't very much of a social person after being bullied for the stutter.
I think he just didn't feel comfortable anymore at school.
He appears to have sought social connections online, as in-person friendships with peers have complicated and soured.
And again, this is a huge problem.
The fact that our kids live online and that they don't have in-person social connections, it alienates them from their own community.
It creates echo chambers for them.
It allows them to find some of the other people on the internet who have problems and then create a community, a faux community of people who supposedly believe in you and care about you, but actually don't.
They don't know you from Adam.
And those people encourage activity sometimes, they provide a forum for you, sometimes they're not going to report you, they're a safe space for you online.
The truth is, kids need boundaries, kids need restrictions, and kids need communities.
We sort of envision ourselves in a society right now as free-floating, atomistic individuals.
And the reality is that in a solid societal structure, when you are born, you're like a puzzle piece that fits into a broader puzzle.
The broader puzzle already exists before you are born.
And now, we have to attempt to adjust the puzzle to fit you, and we have to attempt to adjust you to fit the puzzle, and you are fit into a broader societal structure.
When that societal structure disappears, and you're just sort of a free-floating agent, bad things tend to happen.
Apparently, according to The shooter's former friend.
He often used the Yubo app, a platform where users can swipe on each other's profile Tinder style or hang out in live streaming rooms and virtually meet other users by playing games and chatting.
Before the shooting, he posted a photo on Instagram of his new gun collection, tagging a young woman who later said she'd never met him in person, but had previously accepted his follow request.
Valdez said the shooter drove around with another friend at night sometimes and shot at random people with a BB gun.
He also egged people's cars, Valdez said.
Okay, so, shooting at random people with a BB gun, by the way, that's dangerous.
That is a crime.
And no one reported this behavior?
Where were the friends reporting this behavior?
Where were the parents?
Where was anybody reporting this behavior?
And again, in the end, no one is responsible for the evil of a person except the person themselves.
But, where are all of the structures that used to exist in society to allow for awareness, for generalized consequences to take place for this sort of action?
About a year ago, the shooter posted on social media photos of automatic rifles that he would have on his wish list.
Four days ago, he posted images of two rifles he referred to as, my gun pics.
Two months ago, he posted an Instagram story in which he screamed at his mother, who said he was trying to kick him out of their home.
A high school classmate who is not related to the family said, he posted videos on his Instagram where the cops were there.
And he'd call his mom a b**** and say she wanted to kick him out.
He'd be screaming and talking to his mom really aggressively.
Again, posting Instagram stuff.
Like, online is a sick place.
And the attempt to create attention for yourself online because you feel alienated in reality, in the real world.
That becomes, for a lot of people, their real world, which is unbelievably dangerous.
And obviously, he had serious problems with his own mother.
Multiple people familiar with the family, including Ruben Flores 41, said that the shooter's mother used drugs, which contributed to an upheaval in the home.
Apparently the shooter has an older sister currently serving in the Navy.
A woman who identified herself as the shooter's mother declined to answer questions about her son on Wednesday.
I don't want to talk about him, she said in a brief phone conversation.
She said her mother was almost out of surgery, adding that the older woman was expected to make a full recovery.
Apparently he had had a pretty rough life with his mom, according to a person who lived next door.
And that person would invite the shooter to barbecues at their home and for sleepovers with their son, who was a few years younger.
Apparently the shooter went by the nickname Palon, Spanish for bald, because his hair was often cut so short when he was younger.
As he grew older, problems at home became more acute and more apparent to neighbors.
He described seeing police at the house, but is seeing blow-ups between the shooter and his mother.
The shooter moved from the Hood Street home to his grandmother's home across town a few months ago.
He said he last saw the grandmother on Sunday, this is according to the next-door neighbor, when she stopped by the Hood Street property, which she also owned.
The grandmother told him she was in the process of evicting the shooter's mother because of her own drug problems.
Reyes, the shooter's former classmate, said she could recall about five times that the shooter had fistfights with peers in middle school and high school.
His friendships were short-lived, she said.
Once, the shooter commented to a friend while playing basketball.
The friend only wanted to join the Marines one day so he could kill people.
The other boy, she said, ended the friendship on the spot.
I don't think he was necessarily bullied.
He would take things too far, say something that shouldn't be said, then he'd go into defense mode about it, said this classmate.
She and her Uvalde High School classmates had visited Robb Elementary School just one day before the massacre, wearing their graduation robes, high-fiving the grade schoolers who lined up in the hallways, a community tradition.
The kids were excited to see us in our cap and gown, said the schoolmate.
They're looking at us like, I'm gonna be there one day.
It's surreal, like we're in a movie.
It's horrible.
You do wonder whether if the shooters didn't attend, but knew that they were doing that, that raised the school in the mind of this evil, horrible human being.
Just a month or two ago, Garcia said he called the shooter to check in on him, but the shooter said he was going hunting with his uncle and didn't have any time to talk.
He then hung up.
Garcia later saw photos of large guns that the shooter posted online, wondered whether that's what they were for, going hunting or to the shooting range with his uncle.
So, again, this is a person with a broken home, a drug-abusing mother.
Father is not in the picture clearly.
I mean, it's just not part.
There's no male influence.
Apparently the grandfather is not really part of the picture either, so no male influences.
A person who is increasingly violent, a person who got into fights at school, a person who's shooting BB guns at strangers on the street, and no one... And the police knew about this guy, right?
The police have been there in confrontations between the shooter and his mom.
And nothing.
And nothing.
The answer for the left is remove 400 million guns from American society, from over 100 million Americans.
Instead of, what do we do to stop things like this?
And maybe the societal decay that has been fostered by a particular set of beliefs has despicable consequences.
It has an outlying, statistically rare, but predictable consequences.
Alright, coming up, we'll get some more on the circumstances surrounding the shooting, what we now know about how this thing went down, how this act of horrible Evil went down first.
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We have more information on the shooter as well.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the gunman apparently had a confrontation with an armed security guard before getting in to the elementary school and sends a private Facebook message about his intention to commit the mass shooting minutes before driving there, according to officials.
Apparently, the shooter wrote on Facebook Tuesday morning to a teenage girl overseas, quote, I'm going to shoot my grandma.
And then after doing so, wrote, I shot my grandma, according to the Texas governor and a law enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation.
Less than 15 minutes before arriving at Robb Elementary School, he wrote, I'm going to shoot an elementary school.
A spokesman for Facebook's parent company, Meta, said on Twitter, the communications were private messages sent to another individual, not public posts.
I mean, if someone private messaged that, I don't know if the person received the private message, or didn't look at it, or what the story is, but if that was received and not reported to law enforcement immediately, I don't know what's wrong with the person on the other end of that message.
The new details about the attack emerged one day after the shooting attack.
State officials said that the shooter was not well known to law enforcement before the shooting, had no documented mental health issues, and no known arrest record.
If the shooter had had a juvenile criminal record, it's possible the officials wouldn't have access to it.
So again, where is the community in all of this?
Where is dad?
Where is grandpa?
Where are the people who should have been reporting this person to the police apparently throughout his life for activity like this?
So there's a Tuesday press conference at which Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, spoke about the need for mental health resources, both for people like the shooter who could go on to commit mass shootings and for victims of the tragedies.
And he talked about the ability to buy rifles for 18-year-olds, and he correctly points out, he says, why is it the majority of those 60 years, for 60 years you've been able to buy rifles in Texas above the age of 18, why is it the majority of those 60 years we didn't have school shootings and we do now?
The reality is, I don't know the answer to that question.
What I do know is that we as a state and a society need to do a better job with mental health.
It is amazing what solutions people are willing to talk about and what solutions people are not willing to talk about.
So Greg Abbott holds this press conference with a bunch of Texas officials, including Senator Ted Cruz, the mayor of Uvalde, and a bunch of local officials.
And he started off by saying the Texans have to come together.
All Texans must come together and support the families who have been affected by this horrific tragedy.
What they need now more than ever is our love.
What they need is uplifting from all of our fellow Texans and all of our fellow Americans.
Okay, and then he continued by condemning the shooting itself, of course, as you would imagine.
It is intolerable and it is unacceptable for us to have in this state anybody who would kill little kids in our schools.
Their love is a gift that parents get to unwrap every single day.
Parents in Uvalde had that gift taken away from them.
Stolen.
By a demented person.
Okay, and then Abbott pointed out that these issues have multiple causes and are complicated and that the sort of leftist one size fits all, what if we just do something about guns, which has been their predictable response?
That is not going to solve the problem.
He is correct about this.
Here is the governor of Texas.
I know people like to try to oversimplify this.
Let's talk about some real facts.
And that is, there are, quote, real gun laws in Chicago.
There are, quote, real gun laws in New York.
There are real gun laws in California.
I hate to say this, but there are more people who were shot every weekend In Chicago than there are in schools in Texas.
Okay, he is correct about this, obviously.
Okay, so he is pointing out that if we're going to actually consider this as a holistic problem, you can't just look at guns.
If you have any gun proposals to make that seem rationally calculated to achieve the desired result and are not a violation of the rights of hundreds of millions of Americans, then I think most people are willing to hear about those.
The problem is that most of the proposals, in fact, nearly all the proposals that the left has made on this particular issue are not calibrated to stop school shootings, and they know this.
They're not calibrated to stop violence, and they know this.
The vast majority of violent crimes committed with guns in the United States are committed with handguns, and yet the left is focused in like a laser beam on, for example, rifles.
If you create quote-unquote solutions that are not designed to solve the problem, you have to wonder if there's an ulterior motive at a certain point.
Okay, so this press conference from the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, as well as some others, It took a sideways turn.
It took a sideways turn because a self-aggrandizing twerp, Beto O'Rourke, who is running a failed candidacy for the governor of Texas, decided to show up.
Now a bunch of the parents are here.
The parents of children who were murdered.
You have the mayor of the city who is there, a bunch of locals who are there, and this is when Beto O'Rourke decides that he is going to be governor and maybe president even, maybe dictator of Twitter.
He's not going to win the governor's race in Texas.
He isn't going to win many votes in Texas.
He believes that he's going to get all sorts of glowing media coverage, which he will.
He'll get all sorts of glowing media coverage for the most grandstanding act of political brazenness that I have seen, I think, in my life.
This is unbelievable.
You have the governor who is there to speak to the families of people whose kids were murdered literally two days ago.
And he shows up the next day in a pre-planned, it's a pre-planned political grandstanding move.
When I say pre-planned, I mean like fully pre-planned, as we'll talk about in a second.
He shows up and he starts yelling at Greg Abbott and the other text officials there, which include the two senators, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz.
He starts yelling at them that this is their fault.
It's not the fault of the shooter, it's their fault.
This is pretty despicable.
It is despicable, number one, to utilize a time of tragedy and a situation in which people are trying to deal with the tragedy in order to grandstand politically, raise money for Beto, in the middle of a failed gubernatorial run, and get attention from Rachel Maddow and the dolts over at MSNBC for this.
This is how you gain attention, is that you take advantage of a tragedy, By descending on a place where they're having a press conference that is apolitical in nature.
To make your political point.
And then so you can get a photo op of you wagging your finger at people.
And people on the left predictably pick this sort of stuff up and they start worshipping at the Beto O'Rourke altar.
Because again, Beto is president online.
In reality, he's a failed senatorial candidate, he's a failed presidential candidate, and he will be a failed gubernatorial candidate.
The full trifecta.
He'll be back to eating New Mexican dirt over the course of the next year or so.
Which is what happened after he lost to Ted Cruz.
But the media love it.
I mean, they literally post... There were people online who were posting photos of Beto standing in front of a board of elected officials who were talking about the shooting and treating it like it was Tiananmen Square.
Really, they were posting this next to pictures of Tiananmen Square, which was a dictatorial regime killing a man, attempting to resist the dictatorial regime.
So here's Beto O'Rourke in... I mean, this is... In the dictionary, under the word grandstanding, there should be a picture of this.
Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me.
Sit down.
You're out of line and an embarrassment.
Sit down, I don't like this stuff.
Sir, you're out of line.
This isn't a place to talk to each other.
This is totally predictable.
Sir, you're out of line.
Please leave this auditorium.
I can't believe you're a sick son of a, it would come to a deal like this to make a political issue.
Okay.
Okay, and then Beto O'Rourke is escorted out by security.
So he got his photo op, which is the thing that he really wanted, which again, you don't talk about political posturing.
So, so much of what the left is doing after situations like this is political posturing.
It's not about solving the problem.
It's not about discussing the problem.
It's about the idea that if you oppose anything they want to do, and they won't even specify what they want to do, anything they want to do, even things that are not Directed at solving the problem.
This means that you are evil and illegal at the shooter.
This is the routine nearly always.
You don't like what we are doing.
It's because you want kids to die.
You don't like what we are doing.
You oppose us.
It's not because we have rational policy differences.
And it's not even because we're not even proposing anything.
It's because you are an evil person.
So here's what O'Rourke is saying in case you can't actually hear him.
He says, Governor Abbott, I have to say something.
And then he just walked himself up to the front.
He said, the next time to stop the next shooting is right now and you are doing nothing.
You said this is not predictable?
This is totally predictable.
This follows on O'Rourke during his presidential campaign, suggesting we're going to take your AR-15 and your AK-47, and then backtracking that during his gubernatorial run.
And then he said, quote, this is on you until you choose to do something different.
This will continue to happen.
Someone needs to stand up for the children of the state or they will continue to be killed just like they were killed in Uvalde yesterday.
Again, this is just the political grandstanding issue.
How does Beto propose to stop this?
Really, if he wants to propose a full seizure of all AR-15s and AK-47s in the state of Texas, we will see if he gets himself elected governor on that basis.
If the people of Texas are willing to give up all of their rifles to somebody, a petty dictator like Beto O'Rourke, if this is what they want to do.
But instead, he's being treated as a hero of the Republic by the usual media suspect.
There are a bunch of people who you can hear in that tape shouting at Beto O'Rourke to stop.
That includes one man whose cousin was actually shot at the school.
This man's name is Cody Ituarte.
He explains why he told Beto to stop and also he used to be a Democrat.
This Hispanic man says, I used to be a Democrat, not a Democrat anymore.
Here he is explaining.
The tragedy is being addressed just so recently.
To come in and act in that way is pure propaganda.
I grew up a Democrat.
My whole life just believing in the, you know, that Democrats were We're for the little guy, for the middle man, and all that stuff.
And then just a lot of the division being caused by the race policies really drove me away from what the Democrats were screaming at everybody.
By the way, Democrats might take that under advisement, but they will not.
Meanwhile, the mayor of the city of Uvalde, he explains why he was calling Beto a son of a bitch right there.
This community is broken right now.
No community should have to go through what we've gone through in this community.
And for a person to come in there and start that crap, I have no respect for that stuff.
And the haters that hate would send me the emails and the texts to hell with you too.
I don't care if you're a Democrat, a Republican, an Independent.
We're American people.
We're trying to come together as a community.
And to do what you did today at that press conference was wrong.
I'm sorry, but it was wrong.
I was fully set up by Beto in advance as well.
CBS News reported that Beto had a couple of people in the room who were sitting there as placeholders and then they got up and left when he came so that he could take their seats.
Here is the explanation from CBS News.
You were in the room.
My goodness.
Could you make out what was being said by Beto O'Rourke?
There were two people across the aisle from me, and a moment before the press conference started, they got up from their seats when Beto walked in.
So they were seat holders for him.
And then he sat down.
So his presence wasn't really noticed in the 15 or 20 minutes.
That people were gathering inside because he was not in the room.
So this seems something very clearly staged by Beto O'Rourke and his campaign wanting to confront the governor at this moment.
I just want you to imagine for one second that there is a circumstance, in reverse, where somebody who is on, say it's the congressional baseball shooting, and there had been a bipartisan event at which Democrats, Independents, Republicans show up to pay some sort of tribute to people who'd been shot.
And let's say that a Republican failing candidate in the local area had then shown up to this event and started ranting at the people on the stage.
You think that would have been treated anywhere near similarly by the media?
Alrighty, coming up, Beto O'Rourke, after his ridiculous confrontation inside of this town hall, he then walked outside and spoke to his actual constituency, the members of the media, who predictably licked his feet.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
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But Beto had this set up and then he walked outside and he starts talking to the bros, you know, talking to all his friends in the media about how he's a hero.
The real hero here is Beto.
Beto's, in his own mind, he was born for this.
Born to be a grandstanding piece of human debris.
Here we go.
Let's do this.
If we had a governor who cared more about the people of Texas than he does his own political career or his fealty to the NRA.
Five of the worst mass shootings in US history right in this state on his watch.
What does he do about it?
He goes to the NRA convention to brag about how easy he has made it to purchase guns in this state and to carry them.
This one is on us.
Well, he doesn't say it's on us.
He says it's on you, right?
You disagree with Beto O'Reilly.
And the media love it.
The media just eat it up.
They eat it up.
It is insane that we allow an 18-year-old to go in and buy an AR-15.
What the hell did we think he was going to do with that?
This one is on us.
This one is on us.
Well, he doesn't say it's on us.
He says it's on you, right?
You disagree with Beto O'Rourke.
And the media love it.
The media just eat it up.
They eat it up.
The lapdogs at CNN, they're going to eat whatever crap Beto O'Rourke throws out there.
It's, you know, why don't people just listen to me?
And members of CNN, this is the objective press right here.
He's so heroic.
And Greg Abbott is so terrible.
From the governor was a focus on mental health, saying that there is a need to address a mental health crisis, but also acknowledging that there is no history of mental health issues or criminal history for this shooter.
I mean, it was almost a reach, talking about the lack of beds that were available for mental health patients.
This was a political event.
Where you had the governor focus on New York and focus on Chicago when he is one day out from the latest mass shooting, the second deadliest at a school in U.S.
history.
So Greg Abbott is the bad guy here.
Greg Abbott, who is sitting there and saying this is a complex issue in mental health.
I read you the profile from the Washington Post.
Selling mental health was not an issue there?
Sound like this kid was completely mentally healthy?
And it really is just about a perfectly rational person walking in, zero criminal history, buying guns, and then just momentarily going crazy and shooting a bunch of children?
Is that what that sounds like right there?
Again, the media will lap it all up.
Meanwhile, you have the full apotheosis of all stupidity, Whoopi Goldberg, sounding her way off, going after Greg Abbott.
She's so good at what she does, Whoopi Goldberg, the moral conscience of America.
I want to thank Governor Abbott because he signed 22 bills this year making it easier for mass shooters to buy, carry, and own guns in his state.
Let's apply his abortion laws to guns by deputizing citizens to sue anyone involved in gun violence.
So you sold an AR-15 at the gun show?
See you in court.
Okay, this is ridiculous.
I'm sorry.
She's a ridiculous, ridiculous human being.
And the basic idea that any of the laws that he passed have anything to do with the shooting, they still can't relate any of the laws that he actually signed into law to this particular shooting.
Because that's not the point.
The point is you're bad.
And we're going to get more into that point because that's all Democrats have here is you're evil.
You're evil.
You're responsible for this.
You, you law-abiding citizen who opposes mass shootings.
You, law-abiding citizen who might own a gun to stop things like this from happening.
You, law-abiding citizen Who wants more care for mental health and wants stricter laws with regard to things like involuntary commitment so people who are dangerous to themselves and others don't end up on the streets murdering children in school buildings.
You, the person who's suggesting that perhaps you ought to have billions of dollars more security in schools to protect it.
You're the bad guy.
This is the Democratic pitch because they got no other pitch.
When it comes to policy, as we'll discuss in a moment, they got nothing.
The pitch is you are evil.
So Kamala Harris, the brightest person in America, she picked purely on the basis of being amazingly good at her job, just a rhetorician of unbelievably oratorical skill, just smooth, brilliant, just terrific.
So she comes out and the first thing she says is, of course, everybody who opposes her is evil, because everyone who opposes her is a member of the gun lobby.
Now, I've never been paid by the quote-unquote gun lobby.
I won a prize from the NRA when I was in law school for writing a legal essay.
But that's about it.
I'm a member of the so-called gun lobby in the sense that I'm an advocate of gun rights.
That's the whole thing.
And that's true for hundreds of millions of Americans.
But according to her, if you oppose her, it's because you're a member of the corrupt gun lobby and maybe you're getting paid off.
As the president said last night, we must have the courage to stand up to the gun lobby.
and pass reasonable gun safety laws.
We must work together to create an America where everyone feels safe in their community, where children feel safe in their schools.
I don't know what any of those words mean because they don't have definitions.
She's using empty phrases in lieu of actual policy because she's got nothing.
They've got nothing.
Instead, it's common sense gun reform.
Okay, name it.
What's the reform?
They won't name it.
They'll say that everyone deserves to feel safe.
Sure.
Great.
Now, what is your policy solution?
That's not really what they're arguing.
What they're arguing is you're bad.
Some of them are more brazen about it.
So, for example, Senator Richard Blumenthal, who did not serve in Vietnam, he says you're putting guns above children.
This is the argument at root.
If this tragedy doesn't crystallize your sense of conscience, then you're putting guns above children.
That's what I would say to colleagues who are ducking their obligation to vote on real gun violence prevention.
They're ducking, you're putting guns above kids.
Meanwhile, Eric Swalwell, when he's not schtupping Chinese spies, is saying stupid garbage.
He says, this is all by design.
If you say to your kids they'll be safe at school today, you're lying to your kids.
First of all, statistically speaking, you're not lying to your kids.
Your chance of being shot in a school shooting in the United States is about 1 in 10 million.
It doesn't minimize the evils of school shooting.
But to suggest that when you say to your kid this morning, when you send them off to school, that they'll be safe at school, that you're a liar, unless you support his gun proposals, is absurd.
It is just incredible.
Here's Eric Swallow, a wet fart of a human.
Every parent in America right now is lying to their kids.
If you're telling your kid they're going to be safe at their school and everything's going to be okay, it's a lie.
And who wants to lie to their kids?
But right now, the truth is, not by a policy defect, but by design, by design of the Republican Party in this country, every kid in every classroom is exposed and vulnerable to a shooting.
By design, okay?
You who oppose Eric Swalwell, you have designed it so that kids will get shot.
You want kids to get shot.
This is not an argument.
This is a moral appeal, obviously.
You know, I have the irrepressibly idiotic AOC who's tweeting at Lauren Boebert.
So Lauren Boebert tweeted out that we have a spiritual sickness in the country, said you cannot legislate away evil.
Fact check true.
Caruso sees predictably imbecilic response.
Why even be in Congress if you don't believe in doing your job?
Just quit and let someone who actually gives a damn do it instead of acting like a useless piece of furniture when babies are shot with AR-15s that we let teen boys impulse buy before they can legally have a beer.
In other words, do what I want you to do or I will accuse you of not doing your job.
Strangely, she was elected not to do AOC's job because the only person who's ever been elected to do AOC's job is AOC.
Because her job is apparently going on Instagram while sticking her face in bowls full of ice water and then pretending that she does something useful in Congress.
That is her job.
And here's the thing.
You know that it's all bullcrap.
The reason you know it's all bullcrap is because when actual solutions are proposed, Democrats dismiss them out of hand.
They dismiss them out of hand.
Even their own solutions they don't bring up for a vote.
So you have Joe Biden out there and he's spewing out his usual hackneyed, boring rhetoric, whether it's Kevlar Vest Sandir or whether it is the Second Amendment has limitations.
It's just it's a bunch of slogans from him.
Of course, the Second Amendment has limitation.
Of course it does.
That's why every state in America has some form of gun law or another.
But here is Joe Biden pretending that if you don't believe in his proposed gun legislation, then this means that you're in favor of private citizens owning nuclear armed missiles or something.
Here we go.
Second M is not absolute.
When it was passed, you couldn't own a, you couldn't own a cannon.
You couldn't own certain kinds of weapons.
It's just always been limitations.
But guess what?
These actions we've taken before, they saved lives.
They can do it again.
Okay, I assume he is talking here about the 1996 assault weapons ban, which Congress failed to renew in the 2000s because it actually did not save lives.
There's no evidence that the assault weapons ban had any impact on murder rates broad writ in the United States.
In fact, one of the things that you saw throughout the early 2000s is a massive rise in the amount of gun ownership in the United States, combined with a dramatic decrease in the number of murders in the United States.
It depends who owns the guns.
As always, guns are but a tool, and the question is who owns them and what they are using those tools for.
Hey, Democrats don't even believe in the principles that they espouse.
They're not bringing their stuff up for a vote.
According to NBC News, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer signaled on Wednesday that the chamber will not quickly vote on a pair of House-passed background check bills, giving Democrats and Republicans time to negotiate a possible but improbable bipartisan deal.
So you would imagine that he would snap vote this, right?
I mean, after all, that's what Steve Kerr, the coach of the Golden State Warriors and great moral arbiter of our society, said that we should do.
We should vote on H.R.
8.
And immediately got a vote on whatever Democrats already proposed.
And they've got the wins with them, they say.
They say the American people agree with them.
So why not just bring it up for a vote?
Well, Chuck Schumer is not going to bring it up for a vote.
There he was yesterday.
Sadly, this isn't a case of the American people not knowing where their senators stand.
They know.
They know because my Republican colleagues are perfectly clear on this issue.
Crystal clear.
Republicans don't pretend that they support sensible gun safety legislation.
They don't pretend to be moved by the fact that 90% of Americans, regardless of party, support something as common sense as background checks, that the vast majority of gun owners support the background checks bill.
Okay, so if he thinks that the wins are with him, he controls the Senate.
Force people to a vote.
He won't force people to a vote because he knows that the vote will go down in flames.
He also knows that his bills, the ones he's proposing, are generally unpopular with the American people.
That stat that says 91% of Americans support background checks?
Hell, I support background checks when you're talking about buying a gun from a federally licensed firearm dealer.
Everybody does.
And you know what happened in this particular case?
The shooter was background checked and bought two rifles.
So you have a bunch of problems here.
You have a societal problem, lack of community, broken family structures, kids who are not being monitored.
And this is a serious problem.
You have these kids going online.
These are all issues that we should talk about as a society.
And one of the things that's going to have to happen over the course of time is a slow and gradual rebuilding of a social fabric that prevents this sort of stuff from happening and allows people to monitor other people's kids so that when kids do start exhibiting signs of this sort of behavior, everybody is on red alert.
Hey, that is one thing that can happen.
Then there are other things that we can do.
I proposed for many minutes on yesterday's show and have been proposing for years.
Some of those things, like a massive increase in the amount of security at schools.
Right?
This is not, this is not some sort of crazy idea.
I went to schools that had massive security.
Universities, broad writ, have large-scale security.
Private schools have large-scale security.
But when you propose this sort of stuff, Democrats immediately go, no, no, no, we can't do that.
Which suggests that this is all posturing nonsense.
If they really wanted to solve the problem, they would talk at least about a combo of these things, right?
Why not talk about, like, this is the only time Democrats have ever discovered that spending money costs money.
Like, all of a sudden, like, well, that'd be pretty expensive.
You guys are willing to spend, like, billions of dollars on random gender indoctrination in the military.
You're telling me that you won't spend money on making sure that there are enough armed guards at schools to prevent mass shooters?
Making sure there aren't enough hard barriers at schools to prevent people from driving their trucks up to the very doors of a situation?
This is what you're telling me?
This is where you choose to draw the line when it comes to the spending?
Really?
Or you choose to draw the line when it comes to mental health?
We can't spend on that, guys.
That would be bad.
Why are we even talking about mental health?
Why aren't we talking about guns?
We've been talking about guns non-stop with every mass shooting for as long as I have been alive.
And you know what has been found out?
The American people are not in favor of the kinds of stuff that you guys are pushing.
Because they do not see the relationship between what you are pushing and the violation of their rights and the goal that you are attempting to achieve.
They don't see it because you have not even articulated it properly.
Because the stuff that you're proposing does not work, and you can't prove that it works, because it doesn't.
The only thing that Democrats have ever proposed, and they won't propose it openly, but the thing that they really believe, is if you could magically snap your fingers and every gun in the United States would disappear, there wouldn't be any more mass shootings.
If we could only be like the UK, where gun ownership is basically banned.
Or like Australia, where gun ownership is essentially banned.
Or like New Zealand, where gun ownership is essentially... But it ain't gonna happen, guys.
And no one is gonna vote for you on that basis.
And you know that, which is why you're not proposing it.
So instead, what you say is, let's do something.
The thing you really want to do, you won't even articulate.
So instead what you do, is you say things like, what about universal background checks?
The kid was background checked.
The shooter was background checked.
This human piece of dreck was background checked.
And anytime any sort of alternative solution is presented, you immediately mock it.
So for example, Senator Ted Cruz came out yesterday and he pointed out that when it comes to the way that schools are structured, they need to be changed.
You need to have what we call single point of entry.
This is what it is at airports, for example.
You have a single point of entry.
At government buildings, you have a single point of entry.
If you've been to a federal building, they have single points of entry.
You all go through the metal detectors, and then there are usually multiple points of exit, right?
One-way doors.
When they close behind you, they are locked.
You can't get in through the outside.
point of entry because you are attempting to bottleneck the flow of human beings.
So if somebody wants to get into the school to shoot people, presumably they're going to have to go through this gauntlet.
This is the way that it worked in my private school where I went to school.
So here is Ted Cruz saying this and the entire media mocking it.
You want to talk about how we could have prevented the horror that played out across the street?
Look, the killer entered here the same way the killer entered Santa Fe.
Through a back door.
An unlocked back door.
I sat down at roundtables with the families from Santa Fe.
We talked about what we need to do to harden schools, including not having unlocked back doors.
Including not having unlocked doors to classrooms.
Having one door that goes in and out of the school.
Having armed police officers at that one door.
Okay, and people are mocking this.
This is perfectly obvious security protocol.
Perfectly obvious.
In fact, it's so obvious that we've had this discussion multiple times at private schools in the area where I live and where I used to live in LA.
The teachers had an unfortunate habit of propping open back doors.
And they were chided and castigated for this because they said, yeah, it might be more convenient for you to go to your car and then be able to come back in.
But while you're doing that, somebody could get in.
So you can't do that.
You have to close the door.
You have to walk around to the front of the school if you want to get back in and check in with security again.
The entire media mocked this.
Because this is a solution that might actually help.
It might be an obstacle to people attempting to murder children, but it's not good enough.
So you have Dave Weigel from the Washington Post mocking, how many doors do these buildings have?
If it's more, you have Karen Tumulty from the Washington Post.
Wouldn't building schools with only one door create other problems, like making it harder for kids to get out if, say, there is a fire?
You morons, that's not how doors work.
There are multiple points of exit.
They lock behind you automatically when they close.
This is true at every secure facility.
Every single one.
And just would you also have to build schools with no windows?
No, you wouldn't have to build schools with no windows.
You have to build schools where the windows don't open up big enough for people to get in.
I love the purposeful stupidity here.
Just because you don't like.
Honest to God, I wonder how.
How in the world do these people function in society when they can't understand basic concepts?
Or maybe they do.
They do, and it's just all political grandstanding.
Or, for example, you mentioned mental health, and you say that people who exhibit signs of danger, like cutting their own face or shooting random passersby with a BB gun, maybe those people should not be out circulating in society.
Maybe at the very least, the police should be on top.
How many times do we have to see a shooter do stuff like this before we recognize That there are certain people who are so depraved or have such a violent streak that they should not be out in society endangering other people and actually need to have mental health facilities prepared for them.
How many times do we have to see this?
We saw it in Sandy Hook.
We saw it in Parkland.
We saw it here.
How many times do we have to see it?
But if you mention mental health, this means that you're bad and trying to avoid the real problem.
Maybe you guys are attempting to avoid the real solutions because your real solutions are bulls**t. They don't actually solve the problem and they are designed to deprive millions of Americans of their own right to defend themselves because you can't come up with anything better that doesn't allow you to grandstand.
So for example, Chris Murphy from Connecticut.
Who's big speech the other day was what if I get up on the floor of the Senate and I just shout and rant about do something do something is not a plan.
You know what do something is do something is I'm so full of it.
Give me money.
It's better or work standing in front of a board shouting about doing something without actually proposing a thing that can be done that would stop things like this.
Here's Chris Murphy.
Many Republicans say the answer is more mental health funding.
Well, that's BS.
There's a mental health crisis in this country, but it doesn't explain the gun violence epidemic.
We don't have any more mental illness in the United States than any other country.
It's that in this country, when you have homicidal thoughts, you have easy access to weapons of war that allow you to kill 20 kids in one moment.
Okay, so the idea here is that we're not supposed to talk about the fact that mass shooters are by and large people who have an enormous number of red flags.
How do we target those people?
What he's actually saying there is it is easier to ban weaponry from hundreds of millions of Americans than it is to target people who actually are the threat.
This is somebody who doesn't want to solve the problem.
And then, he immediately dismisses the idea that more security at schools would matter.
Right?
This is where they draw the line.
More security at schools.
We can't have that.
Can't have more people at schools to actually shoot bad guys.
That would be a problem.
There were plenty of people with guns at that school, and that shooter outgunned them.
That shooter made it inside the school.
Unless you are literally planning on putting an army battalion at every school in this country, it only takes a handful of minutes for an individual with an assault weapon to kill 20 or 30 people.
There is no way, as we saw yesterday, that you are going to be able to prevent these murders simply by putting more weapons into schools, churches, and shopping malls.
Okay, that is a lie.
It's just not true.
There is a reason why we have hardened our schools.
There is a reason why Israel hardens its schools.
There's a reason why a wide variety of countries harden their schools.
What are you talking about?
You don't want solutions.
What you want is grandstanding.
Same thing from Texas Democratic Representative Veronica Escobar.
She says, if your solution is to jail the mentally ill, then I don't know what to tell you.
What if my solution is that this person should not have been on the street?
How is that not a solution?
We live in a state that deeply underfunds mental health care.
In fact, our state's solution to mental health care is jailing the mentally ill.
That's why so many of our mentally ill in the state of Texas languish in jails and prisons.
Just recently, Greg Abbott took hundreds of millions of dollars, I think it was $200 million, from the Health and Human Services Agency And pulled it away and is using it for his border stunt.
Okay, I just have a question.
Why is it that the Democratic proposals are always and forever things like, we'll have more social workers to deal with this problem.
We'll have less, this is the same party of defund the bullies.
We'll have less guns in the schools, less hard and security.
Who cares about doors?
What does it matter whether we actually fund mental health facilities that have and change our laws so that involuntary commitment of people who are actually violent can be restored?
And also, why can't we talk about the societal breakdown that has enabled the rise of atomistic young men who are wandering around seeking to do violence?
Those would actually be conversations worth having, but we're not going to have any of those conversations.
Instead, we're just going to yell and scream at the heavens that all of our political opponents who don't support vast gun confiscation schemes that will never happen in the United States are utterly unrealistic, and they know they're utterly unrealistic.
That all the people who oppose that somehow are in favor of shooting kids.
It's all political posturing all the way on down.
There are too many of these Democrats who are just Beto.
They don't want to discuss solutions.
They're not interested in solutions.
They're interested in raising money for their campaigns.
And that really is despicable.
All right, we'll be back here later today with more content.
In the meantime, go check out one of our newest podcasts, Morning Wire.
On today's episode, they report on the housing market, showing signs of cooling.
That episode is available right now on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Make sure to tune in.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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On today's episode, more details emerge about the mass shooting at an elementary school in Texas, the red-hot housing market shows signs of cooling off, and Princeton's firing of a tenured professor sparks debate.
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