The Ben Shapiro Show - Posturing On Graves Isn’t Virtue, It’s Moral Sickness | Ep. 1503

00:00:00.000 Failing gubernatorial candidate Beto O'Rourke crashes a press conference by Texas Governor Greg Abbott to posture on gun control.

00:00:07.000 Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer refuses to hold any vote on legislation, and we examine the mass shooter's copious red flags.

00:00:12.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:00:13.000 This is the Ben Shapiro Show.

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00:00:25.000 Slash Ben will get to all the news in just one moment.

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00:01:33.000 Well, we are finding out more about the circumstances surrounding this horrific shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

00:01:39.000 We have more about the circumstances.

00:01:41.000 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.

00:01:48.000 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.

00:02:00.000 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.

00:02:13.000 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.

00:02:21.000 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.

00:02:28.000 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.

00:02:39.000 Carranza said the officers did not go in.

00:02:41.000 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.

00:02:49.000 Upset that the police were not moving in, he raised the idea of charging into the school with several other bystanders.

00:02:53.000 He said, let's just rush in because the cops aren't doing anything like they're supposed to, he said.

00:02:56.000 More could have been done.

00:02:57.000 They were unprepared.

00:02:58.000 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.

00:03:10.000 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.

00:03:18.000 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.

00:03:26.000 The police officers were injured.

00:03:27.000 So apparently he was there before a couple of other police officers arrived.

00:03:32.000 Unclear whether he actually had an exchange of gunfire with the school district officer who was outside the school.

00:03:37.000 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.

00:03:43.000 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.

00:03:57.000 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.

00:04:03.000 It just shows you the complete evil of the shooter.

00:04:05.000 All those killed were in the same classroom.

00:04:08.000 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.

00:04:15.000 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.

00:04:22.000 McCraw said the bottom line is law enforcement was there.

00:04:24.000 They engaged immediately.

00:04:25.000 They contained him in the classroom.

00:04:26.000 But when they say contain him in the classroom, he locked himself inside the classroom and started shooting people.

00:04:30.000 So again, a failure to go in immediately.

00:04:34.000 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.

00:04:41.000 But this looks very bad for the police department over there.

00:04:44.000 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.

00:04:56.000 That is horrific.

00:04:58.000 It is horrific.

00:04:59.000 You know, I understand on a human level why people would not want to do that.

00:05:02.000 But if you sign up to be a cop, that is indeed your job.

00:05:05.000 And again, we saw this at Parkland as well.

00:05:08.000 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.

00:05:18.000 And whatever laws are on the books tend to become quite secondary.

00:05:21.000 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.

00:05:28.000 We are now finding out new details about the gunman as well.

00:05:31.000 And as always, there were a bunch of red flags.

00:05:34.000 Always, always and forever.

00:05:36.000 According to the Washington Post, the gunman bought two rifles, hundreds of rounds in the days before the massacre.

00:05:41.000 Of course, they're making it about his ability to obtain the weapons.

00:05:44.000 The real question is, given all the red flags about this person beforehand, why exactly would he have passed a background check?

00:05:50.000 He bought these weapons from a federally licensed firearms dealer.

00:05:53.000 So for all the folks out there who are talking about universal background checks, universal background checks wouldn't have stopped this.

00:05:57.000 This guy was background checked.

00:05:59.000 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...

00:06:10.000 Make that transaction happen with a background check.

00:06:12.000 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.

00:06:24.000 That's the policy question.

00:06:25.000 It does not go to the heart of what would have stopped a shooting like this.

00:06:28.000 Again, this person was background checked when he was sold the rifles.

00:06:31.000 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?

00:06:39.000 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.

00:06:49.000 But a huge number of mass shootings have been perpetrated in the very recent past by people who are above the age of 60.

00:06:53.000 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. 0.88

00:07:04.000 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.

00:07:14.000 The simple fact of the matter is that he was already violating gun laws, was this person.

00:07:18.000 He was apparently carrying a handgun.

00:07:19.000 You weren't allowed to carry a handgun in the state of Texas under the age of 21.

00:07:22.000 So, the laws were really not the question here, per se.

00:07:26.000 Alright, coming up, we'll get more into the details of this gunman.

00:07:28.000 There were a million red flags here, and again, the red flags don't mean that anybody does anything about the red flag.

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00:08:46.000 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.

00:08:57.000 Friends and relatives said.

00:08:58.000 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.

00:09:13.000 It is demonic.

00:09:14.000 I mean, when I say demonic I don't mean this person was possessed by some sort of spiritually outside thing.

00:09:19.000 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.

00:09:29.000 Because mental illness is a very broad spectrum description.

00:09:31.000 It ranges from anything from generalized anxiety disorder to violent schizophrenia.

00:09:36.000 When I say demonic, that is not just a moral judgment.

00:09:39.000 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.

00:09:56.000 There are differences in kind, even between mass shooters, right? There's some mass shooters, like terrorists, who do these things for political purposes.

00:10:05.000 What they're doing is evil.

00:10:06.000 You also understand that they have a rationale in their own mind for doing this.

00:10:11.000 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.

00:10:21.000 Or 10-year-olds and start murdering them.

00:10:24.000 In any case, what we now know is that this person was the product of a broken life.

00:10:29.000 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.

00:10:35.000 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.

00:10:44.000 I mean, somebody who has been possessed by forces beyond his control.

00:10:48.000 He then went on a shooting rampage at Robb Elementary School near his home, killing at least 19 children and two adults.

00:10:54.000 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.

00:11:07.000 Apparently, Santor Valdez Jr., 18, said he has known the shooter since early elementary school.

00:11:11.000 They were friends, he said, until this shooter's behavior started to deteriorate.

00:11:16.000 They used to play video games like Fortnite and Call of Duty.

00:11:19.000 But then the shooter changed.

00:11:20.000 Valdez said that the shooter once pulled up to a park where they often played basketball and had cuts all over his face.

00:11:24.000 He first said a cat had scratched his face.

00:11:26.000 Then he told me the truth, that he cut up his face with knives over and over and over. 0.99

00:11:30.000 I was like, you're crazy, bro. 0.99

00:11:32.000 Why would you do that? 1.00

00:11:33.000 The shooter said he did it for fun.

00:11:34.000 Valdez recalled.

00:11:36.000 So, right away, we have a failure in the system.

00:11:40.000 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.

00:11:56.000 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.

00:12:03.000 In this particular case, it seems like people knew about it, but who are they going to report that to?

00:12:08.000 Why was this kid apparent?

00:12:09.000 I mean, if you're cutting your face, you're by definition a danger to yourself.

00:12:13.000 This means he should have been institutionalized, but nobody took it upon themselves to actually go to mental health authorities.

00:12:19.000 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.

00:12:45.000 That is stupid. 1.00

00:12:46.000 It is counterproductive. 1.00

00:12:47.000 The simple fact of the matter is that when people are a danger to themselves or others, they need to be...

00:12:52.000 Sometimes psychotropic pharmaceuticals can help.

00:12:55.000 Sometimes there are behavioral things like cognitive behavioral therapy that can be attempted.

00:13:00.000 And sometimes you can't cure the person at all and they're a danger.

00:13:02.000 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.

00:13:09.000 comes with serious, serious consequences.

00:13:12.000 This kid was literally cutting his face with a knife, his own face with a knife.

00:13:17.000 If that's not an indicator of somebody who is deeply damaged and in danger, I don't know what is.

00:13:22.000 All right, coming up, we'll get some more on the shooter from the Washington Post first.

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00:14:29.000 In middle school and junior high, the shooter was apparently bullied for having a stutter and a strong lisp, according to friends and family.

00:14:35.000 Steven Garcia considered himself the shooter's best friend in eighth grade.

00:14:38.000 He said that the shooter didn't have it easy in school.

00:14:39.000 He said he would get bullied hard, like bullied by a lot of people, over social media, over gaming, over everything.

00:14:43.000 He was the nicest kid, the most shy kid.

00:14:45.000 He just needed to break out of his shell.

00:14:47.000 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.

00:14:54.000 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.

00:14:59.000 He kept getting worse and worse, and I don't even know.

00:15:02.000 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.

00:15:09.000 It's not a defense of bullying.

00:15:10.000 As somebody who was viciously bullied in high school, bullies ought to be punished to the fullest extent of disciplinary procedures at schools.

00:15:17.000 It should not be allowed in schools.

00:15:18.000 Bullying is bad.

00:15:19.000 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.

00:15:25.000 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.

00:15:37.000 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.

00:16:04.000 Apparently, he dropped out of school.

00:16:06.000 He started wearing all black and large military boots.

00:16:08.000 He grew his hair out.

00:16:09.000 He missed long periods of high school.

00:16:10.000 He was not on track to graduate with the other members of the high school this year.

00:16:13.000 There's a lot of red flags.

00:16:16.000 The shooter's cousin said she saw students mock his speech impediment when they attended middle school together.

00:16:20.000 He'd brush it off in the moment, then complain later to his grandmother he didn't want to go back to school.

00:16:24.000 His cousin said he wasn't very much of a social person after being bullied for the stutter.

00:16:27.000 I think he just didn't feel comfortable anymore at school.

00:16:30.000 He appears to have sought social connections online, as in-person friendships with peers have complicated and soured.

00:16:35.000 And again, this is a huge problem.

00:16:37.000 The fact that our kids live online and that they don't have in-person social connections, it alienates them from their own community.

00:16:43.000 It creates echo chambers for them.

00:16:44.000 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.

00:16:53.000 They don't know you from Adam.

00:16:55.000 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.

00:17:03.000 The truth is, kids need boundaries, kids need restrictions, and kids need communities.

00:17:08.000 We sort of envision ourselves in a society right now as free-floating, atomistic individuals.

00:17:13.000 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.

00:17:19.000 The broader puzzle already exists before you are born.

00:17:22.000 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.

00:17:29.000 When that societal structure disappears, and you're just sort of a free-floating agent, bad things tend to happen.

00:17:35.000 Apparently, according to The shooter's former friend.

00:17:39.000 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.

00:17:47.000 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.

00:17:56.000 Valdez said the shooter drove around with another friend at night sometimes and shot at random people with a BB gun.

00:18:01.000 He also egged people's cars, Valdez said.

00:18:03.000 Okay, so, shooting at random people with a BB gun, by the way, that's dangerous.

00:18:07.000 That is a crime.

00:18:10.000 And no one reported this behavior?

00:18:11.000 Where were the friends reporting this behavior?

00:18:13.000 Where were the parents?

00:18:14.000 Where was anybody reporting this behavior?

00:18:17.000 And again, in the end, no one is responsible for the evil of a person except the person themselves.

00:18:20.000 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?

00:18:32.000 About a year ago, the shooter posted on social media photos of automatic rifles that he would have on his wish list.

00:18:37.000 Four days ago, he posted images of two rifles he referred to as, my gun pics.

00:18:41.000 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.

00:18:47.000 A high school classmate who is not related to the family said, he posted videos on his Instagram where the cops were there. 0.93

00:18:53.000 And he'd call his mom a b**** and say she wanted to kick him out.

00:18:56.000 He'd be screaming and talking to his mom really aggressively. 0.98

00:18:58.000 Again, posting Instagram stuff. 0.96

00:19:00.000 Like, online is a sick place.

00:19:02.000 And the attempt to create attention for yourself online because you feel alienated in reality, in the real world.

00:19:09.000 That becomes, for a lot of people, their real world, which is unbelievably dangerous.

00:19:13.000 And obviously, he had serious problems with his own mother.

00:19:15.000 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.

00:19:23.000 Apparently the shooter has an older sister currently serving in the Navy.

00:19:26.000 A woman who identified herself as the shooter's mother declined to answer questions about her son on Wednesday.

00:19:30.000 I don't want to talk about him, she said in a brief phone conversation.

00:19:33.000 She said her mother was almost out of surgery, adding that the older woman was expected to make a full recovery.

00:19:40.000 Apparently he had had a pretty rough life with his mom, according to a person who lived next door.

00:19:44.000 And that person would invite the shooter to barbecues at their home and for sleepovers with their son, who was a few years younger.

00:19:51.000 Apparently the shooter went by the nickname Palon, Spanish for bald, because his hair was often cut so short when he was younger.

00:19:56.000 As he grew older, problems at home became more acute and more apparent to neighbors.

00:19:59.000 He described seeing police at the house, but is seeing blow-ups between the shooter and his mother.

00:20:04.000 The shooter moved from the Hood Street home to his grandmother's home across town a few months ago.

00:20:07.000 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.

00:20:13.000 The grandmother told him she was in the process of evicting the shooter's mother because of her own drug problems.

00:20:19.000 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.

00:20:26.000 His friendships were short-lived, she said.

00:20:28.000 Once, the shooter commented to a friend while playing basketball.

00:20:30.000 The friend only wanted to join the Marines one day so he could kill people.

00:20:33.000 The other boy, she said, ended the friendship on the spot.

00:20:37.000 I don't think he was necessarily bullied.

00:20:38.000 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.

00:20:44.000 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.

00:20:54.000 The kids were excited to see us in our cap and gown, said the schoolmate.

00:20:57.000 They're looking at us like, I'm gonna be there one day.

00:20:58.000 It's surreal, like we're in a movie.

00:20:59.000 It's horrible. 0.70

00:21:00.000 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.

00:21:09.000 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.

00:21:16.000 He then hung up.

00:21:17.000 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.

00:21:25.000 So, again, this is a person with a broken home, a drug-abusing mother.

00:21:29.000 Father is not in the picture clearly.

00:21:31.000 I mean, it's just not part.

00:21:32.000 There's no male influence.

00:21:34.000 Apparently the grandfather is not really part of the picture either, so no male influences.

00:21:39.000 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?

00:21:47.000 The police have been there in confrontations between the shooter and his mom.

00:21:51.000 And nothing.

00:21:53.000 And nothing.

00:21:54.000 The answer for the left is remove 400 million guns from American society, from over 100 million Americans.

00:22:00.000 Instead of, what do we do to stop things like this?

00:22:03.000 And maybe the societal decay that has been fostered by a particular set of beliefs has despicable consequences.

00:22:11.000 It has an outlying, statistically rare, but predictable consequences.

00:22:16.000 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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00:23:37.000 We have more information on the shooter as well.

00:23:41.000 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.

00:23:55.000 Apparently, the shooter wrote on Facebook Tuesday morning to a teenage girl overseas, quote, I'm going to shoot my grandma.

00:24:00.000 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.

00:24:07.000 Less than 15 minutes before arriving at Robb Elementary School, he wrote, I'm going to shoot an elementary school.

00:24:12.000 A spokesman for Facebook's parent company, Meta, said on Twitter, the communications were private messages sent to another individual, not public posts.

00:24:20.000 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.

00:24:33.000 The new details about the attack emerged one day after the shooting attack.

00:24:38.000 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.

00:24:45.000 If the shooter had had a juvenile criminal record, it's possible the officials wouldn't have access to it.

00:24:49.000 So again, where is the community in all of this?

00:24:54.000 Where is dad?

00:24:54.000 Where is grandpa?

00:24:55.000 Where are the people who should have been reporting this person to the police apparently throughout his life for activity like this?

00:25:05.000 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.

00:25:16.000 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?

00:25:33.000 The reality is, I don't know the answer to that question.

00:25:35.000 What I do know is that we as a state and a society need to do a better job with mental health.

00:25:39.000 It is amazing what solutions people are willing to talk about and what solutions people are not willing to talk about.

00:25:43.000 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.

00:25:53.000 And he started off by saying the Texans have to come together.

00:25:57.000 All Texans must come together and support the families who have been affected by this horrific tragedy.

00:26:07.000 What they need now more than ever is our love.

00:26:12.000 What they need is uplifting from all of our fellow Texans and all of our fellow Americans.

00:26:22.000 Okay, and then he continued by condemning the shooting itself, of course, as you would imagine.

00:26:28.000 It is intolerable and it is unacceptable for us to have in this state anybody who would kill little kids in our schools.

00:26:37.000 Their love is a gift that parents get to unwrap every single day.

00:26:47.000 Parents in Uvalde had that gift taken away from them.

00:26:56.000 Stolen. 0.94

00:26:59.000 By a demented person.

00:27:00.000 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?

00:27:16.000 That is not going to solve the problem.

00:27:18.000 He is correct about this.

00:27:19.000 Here is the governor of Texas.

00:27:21.000 I know people like to try to oversimplify this.

00:27:27.000 Let's talk about some real facts.

00:27:30.000 And that is, there are, quote, real gun laws in Chicago.

00:27:38.000 There are, quote, real gun laws in New York.

00:27:42.000 There are real gun laws in California.

00:27:48.000 I hate to say this, but there are more people who were shot every weekend In Chicago than there are in schools in Texas.

00:28:00.000 Okay, he is correct about this, obviously.

00:28:03.000 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.

00:28:09.000 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.

00:28:21.000 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.

00:28:28.000 They're not calibrated to stop violence, and they know this.

00:28:30.000 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.

00:28:41.000 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.

00:28:46.000 Okay, so this press conference from the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, as well as some others, It took a sideways turn.

00:28:55.000 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.

00:29:03.000 Now a bunch of the parents are here.

00:29:05.000 The parents of children who were murdered.

00:29:08.000 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.

00:29:19.000 He's not going to win the governor's race in Texas.

00:29:22.000 He isn't going to win many votes in Texas.

00:29:24.000 He believes that he's going to get all sorts of glowing media coverage, which he will.

00:29:27.000 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.

00:29:35.000 This is unbelievable.

00:29:36.000 You have the governor who is there to speak to the families of people whose kids were murdered literally two days ago.

00:29:43.000 And he shows up the next day in a pre-planned, it's a pre-planned political grandstanding move.

00:29:51.000 When I say pre-planned, I mean like fully pre-planned, as we'll talk about in a second.

00:29:54.000 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.

00:30:02.000 He starts yelling at them that this is their fault.

00:30:04.000 It's not the fault of the shooter, it's their fault.

00:30:07.000 This is pretty despicable.

00:30:11.000 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.

00:30:29.000 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.

00:30:37.000 To make your political point.

00:30:39.000 And then so you can get a photo op of you wagging your finger at people.

00:30:42.000 And people on the left predictably pick this sort of stuff up and they start worshipping at the Beto O'Rourke altar.

00:30:47.000 Because again, Beto is president online.

00:30:50.000 In reality, he's a failed senatorial candidate, he's a failed presidential candidate, and he will be a failed gubernatorial candidate.

00:30:56.000 The full trifecta.

00:30:57.000 He'll be back to eating New Mexican dirt over the course of the next year or so. 1.00

00:31:01.000 Which is what happened after he lost to Ted Cruz.

00:31:05.000 But the media love it.

00:31:05.000 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.

00:31:17.000 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.

00:31:26.000 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.

00:31:34.000 Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me.

00:31:39.000 Sit down. 0.95

00:31:40.000 You're out of line and an embarrassment. 0.88

00:31:43.000 Sit down, I don't like this stuff. 0.91

00:31:45.000 Sir, you're out of line.

00:31:49.000 This isn't a place to talk to each other.

00:31:51.000 This is totally predictable.

00:31:52.000 Sir, you're out of line.

00:31:55.000 Please leave this auditorium. 0.99

00:31:56.000 I can't believe you're a sick son of a, it would come to a deal like this to make a political issue. 0.99

00:32:09.000 Okay. 0.99

00:32:12.000 Okay, and then Beto O'Rourke is escorted out by security.

00:32:15.000 So he got his photo op, which is the thing that he really wanted, which again, you don't talk about political posturing.

00:32:20.000 So, so much of what the left is doing after situations like this is political posturing.

00:32:23.000 It's not about solving the problem.

00:32:25.000 It's not about discussing the problem.

00:32:26.000 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.

00:32:34.000 This means that you are evil and illegal at the shooter.

00:32:37.000 This is the routine nearly always.

00:32:38.000 You don't like what we are doing. 0.89

00:32:39.000 It's because you want kids to die.

00:32:41.000 You don't like what we are doing.

00:32:42.000 You oppose us.

00:32:43.000 It's not because we have rational policy differences.

00:32:45.000 And it's not even because we're not even proposing anything. 0.99

00:32:47.000 It's because you are an evil person. 0.96

00:32:50.000 So here's what O'Rourke is saying in case you can't actually hear him. 0.94

00:32:52.000 He says, Governor Abbott, I have to say something.

00:32:54.000 And then he just walked himself up to the front.

00:32:56.000 He said, the next time to stop the next shooting is right now and you are doing nothing.

00:33:00.000 You said this is not predictable?

00:33:02.000 This is totally predictable.

00:33:05.000 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.

00:33:15.000 And then he said, quote, this is on you until you choose to do something different.

00:33:19.000 This will continue to happen.

00:33:21.000 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.

00:33:28.000 Again, this is just the political grandstanding issue.

00:33:31.000 How does Beto propose to stop this?

00:33:33.000 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.

00:33:40.000 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.

00:33:48.000 But instead, he's being treated as a hero of the Republic by the usual media suspect.

00:33:55.000 There are a bunch of people who you can hear in that tape shouting at Beto O'Rourke to stop.

00:33:59.000 That includes one man whose cousin was actually shot at the school.

00:34:03.000 This man's name is Cody Ituarte.

00:34:05.000 He explains why he told Beto to stop and also he used to be a Democrat.

00:34:08.000 This Hispanic man says, I used to be a Democrat, not a Democrat anymore.

00:34:10.000 Here he is explaining.

00:34:12.000 The tragedy is being addressed just so recently.

00:34:16.000 To come in and act in that way is pure propaganda.

00:34:20.000 I grew up a Democrat.

00:34:23.000 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.

00:34:32.000 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.

00:34:52.000 By the way, Democrats might take that under advisement, but they will not. 0.99

00:34:54.000 Meanwhile, the mayor of the city of Uvalde, he explains why he was calling Beto a son of a bitch right there. 0.99

00:35:02.000 This community is broken right now. 0.99

00:35:04.000 No community should have to go through what we've gone through in this community. 0.99

00:35:08.000 And for a person to come in there and start that crap, I have no respect for that stuff. 0.99

00:35:12.000 And the haters that hate would send me the emails and the texts to hell with you too. 1.00

00:35:17.000 I don't care if you're a Democrat, a Republican, an Independent. 0.97

00:35:20.000 We're American people.

00:35:21.000 We're trying to come together as a community.

00:35:23.000 And to do what you did today at that press conference was wrong.

00:35:26.000 I'm sorry, but it was wrong.

00:35:29.000 I was fully set up by Beto in advance as well.

00:35:31.000 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.

00:35:40.000 Here is the explanation from CBS News.

00:35:42.000 You were in the room.

00:35:43.000 My goodness.

00:35:44.000 Could you make out what was being said by Beto O'Rourke?

00:35:47.000 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.

00:35:54.000 So they were seat holders for him.

00:35:57.000 And then he sat down.

00:35:58.000 So his presence wasn't really noticed in the 15 or 20 minutes.

00:36:03.000 That people were gathering inside because he was not in the room.

00:36:05.000 So this seems something very clearly staged by Beto O'Rourke and his campaign wanting to confront the governor at this moment.

00:36:13.000 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.

00:36:33.000 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.

00:36:39.000 You think that would have been treated anywhere near similarly by the media?

00:36:43.000 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.

00:36:53.000 We'll get to that in just one moment.

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00:37:33.000 To be objective.

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00:37:35.000 You're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.

00:37:39.000 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.

00:37:53.000 The real hero here is Beto.

00:37:55.000 Beto's, in his own mind, he was born for this.

00:37:58.000 Born to be a grandstanding piece of human debris.

00:38:02.000 Here we go.

00:38:02.000 Let's do this.

00:38:05.000 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.

00:38:12.000 Five of the worst mass shootings in US history right in this state on his watch.

00:38:16.000 What does he do about it?

00:38:17.000 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.

00:38:24.000 This one is on us.

00:38:25.000 Well, he doesn't say it's on us.

00:38:27.000 He says it's on you, right?

00:38:28.000 You disagree with Beto O'Reilly.

00:38:30.000 And the media love it.

00:38:31.000 The media just eat it up.

00:38:32.000 They eat it up.

00:38:32.000 It is insane that we allow an 18-year-old to go in and buy an AR-15.

00:38:36.000 What the hell did we think he was going to do with that?

00:38:39.000 This one is on us.

00:38:42.000 This one is on us.

00:38:43.000 Well, he doesn't say it's on us.

00:38:44.000 He says it's on you, right?

00:38:45.000 You disagree with Beto O'Rourke.

00:38:46.000 And the media love it.

00:38:48.000 The media just eat it up.

00:38:49.000 They eat it up. 1.00

00:38:51.000 The lapdogs at CNN, they're going to eat whatever crap Beto O'Rourke throws out there. 1.00

00:38:58.000 It's, you know, why don't people just listen to me? 0.99

00:39:01.000 And members of CNN, this is the objective press right here.

00:39:04.000 He's so heroic.

00:39:05.000 And Greg Abbott is so terrible.

00:39:08.000 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.

00:39:23.000 I mean, it was almost a reach, talking about the lack of beds that were available for mental health patients.

00:39:30.000 This was a political event.

00:39:32.000 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.

00:39:42.000 history.

00:39:45.000 So Greg Abbott is the bad guy here.

00:39:46.000 Greg Abbott, who is sitting there and saying this is a complex issue in mental health.

00:39:50.000 I read you the profile from the Washington Post.

00:39:52.000 Selling mental health was not an issue there?

00:39:54.000 Sound like this kid was completely mentally healthy?

00:39:56.000 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?

00:40:03.000 Is that what that sounds like right there?

00:40:06.000 Again, the media will lap it all up. 1.00

00:40:07.000 Meanwhile, you have the full apotheosis of all stupidity, Whoopi Goldberg, sounding her way off, going after Greg Abbott. 1.00

00:40:14.000 She's so good at what she does, Whoopi Goldberg, the moral conscience of America. 0.99

00:40:19.000 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.

00:40:30.000 Let's apply his abortion laws to guns by deputizing citizens to sue anyone involved in gun violence. 0.63

00:40:38.000 So you sold an AR-15 at the gun show?

00:40:41.000 See you in court. 0.99

00:40:44.000 Okay, this is ridiculous.

00:40:46.000 I'm sorry. 1.00

00:40:46.000 She's a ridiculous, ridiculous human being. 1.00

00:40:48.000 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. 1.00

00:40:58.000 Because that's not the point.

00:40:59.000 The point is you're bad. 0.99

00:41:00.000 And we're going to get more into that point because that's all Democrats have here is you're evil. 1.00

00:41:04.000 You're evil. 0.99

00:41:05.000 You're responsible for this. 0.99

00:41:06.000 You, you law-abiding citizen who opposes mass shootings.

00:41:09.000 You, law-abiding citizen who might own a gun to stop things like this from happening.

00:41:13.000 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.

00:41:25.000 You, the person who's suggesting that perhaps you ought to have billions of dollars more security in schools to protect it.

00:41:30.000 You're the bad guy.

00:41:31.000 This is the Democratic pitch because they got no other pitch.

00:41:34.000 When it comes to policy, as we'll discuss in a moment, they got nothing.

00:41:36.000 The pitch is you are evil.

00:41:38.000 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.

00:41:51.000 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.

00:41:59.000 Now, I've never been paid by the quote-unquote gun lobby.

00:42:03.000 I won a prize from the NRA when I was in law school for writing a legal essay.

00:42:06.000 But that's about it.

00:42:08.000 I'm a member of the so-called gun lobby in the sense that I'm an advocate of gun rights.

00:42:12.000 That's the whole thing.

00:42:13.000 And that's true for hundreds of millions of Americans.

00:42:16.000 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.

00:42:22.000 As the president said last night, we must have the courage to stand up to the gun lobby.

00:42:29.000 and pass reasonable gun safety laws.

00:42:34.000 We must work together to create an America where everyone feels safe in their community, where children feel safe in their schools.

00:42:52.000 I don't know what any of those words mean because they don't have definitions.

00:42:54.000 She's using empty phrases in lieu of actual policy because she's got nothing. 0.93

00:42:58.000 They've got nothing.

00:42:59.000 Instead, it's common sense gun reform.

00:43:01.000 Okay, name it.

00:43:02.000 What's the reform?

00:43:03.000 They won't name it.

00:43:05.000 They'll say that everyone deserves to feel safe.

00:43:07.000 Sure.

00:43:08.000 Great.

00:43:09.000 Now, what is your policy solution?

00:43:11.000 That's not really what they're arguing.

00:43:12.000 What they're arguing is you're bad.

00:43:13.000 Some of them are more brazen about it.

00:43:14.000 So, for example, Senator Richard Blumenthal, who did not serve in Vietnam, he says you're putting guns above children.

00:43:20.000 This is the argument at root.

00:43:24.000 If this tragedy doesn't crystallize your sense of conscience, then you're putting guns above children.

00:43:32.000 That's what I would say to colleagues who are ducking their obligation to vote on real gun violence prevention.

00:43:43.000 They're ducking, you're putting guns above kids. 1.00

00:43:45.000 Meanwhile, Eric Swalwell, when he's not schtupping Chinese spies, is saying stupid garbage. 1.00

00:43:49.000 He says, this is all by design. 1.00

00:43:51.000 If you say to your kids they'll be safe at school today, you're lying to your kids.

00:43:54.000 First of all, statistically speaking, you're not lying to your kids.

00:43:56.000 Your chance of being shot in a school shooting in the United States is about 1 in 10 million.

00:44:00.000 It doesn't minimize the evils of school shooting.

00:44:02.000 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.

00:44:12.000 It is just incredible. 0.99

00:44:14.000 Here's Eric Swallow, a wet fart of a human. 0.99

00:44:20.000 Every parent in America right now is lying to their kids. 0.99

00:44:24.000 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.

00:44:28.000 And who wants to lie to their kids?

00:44:30.000 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.

00:44:44.000 By design, okay?

00:44:47.000 You who oppose Eric Swalwell, you have designed it so that kids will get shot. 0.99

00:44:51.000 You want kids to get shot. 0.93

00:44:54.000 This is not an argument.

00:44:55.000 This is a moral appeal, obviously. 1.00

00:44:57.000 You know, I have the irrepressibly idiotic AOC who's tweeting at Lauren Boebert. 0.99

00:45:01.000 So Lauren Boebert tweeted out that we have a spiritual sickness in the country, said you cannot legislate away evil. 1.00

00:45:07.000 Fact check true. 0.99

00:45:08.000 Caruso sees predictably imbecilic response. 0.99

00:45:11.000 Why even be in Congress if you don't believe in doing your job? 0.99

00:45:15.000 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.

00:45:23.000 In other words, do what I want you to do or I will accuse you of not doing your job.

00:45:29.000 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.

00:45:34.000 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. 1.00

00:45:42.000 That is her job.

00:45:43.000 And here's the thing. 0.99

00:45:44.000 You know that it's all bullcrap. 0.94

00:45:45.000 The reason you know it's all bullcrap is because when actual solutions are proposed, Democrats dismiss them out of hand. 0.89

00:45:50.000 They dismiss them out of hand.

00:45:52.000 Even their own solutions they don't bring up for a vote.

00:45:54.000 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.

00:46:06.000 It's just it's a bunch of slogans from him.

00:46:08.000 Of course, the Second Amendment has limitation.

00:46:10.000 Of course it does.

00:46:11.000 That's why every state in America has some form of gun law or another. 0.93

00:46:16.000 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.

00:46:27.000 Here we go.

00:46:28.000 Second M is not absolute.

00:46:31.000 When it was passed, you couldn't own a, you couldn't own a cannon.

00:46:37.000 You couldn't own certain kinds of weapons.

00:46:40.000 It's just always been limitations.

00:46:45.000 But guess what?

00:46:45.000 These actions we've taken before, they saved lives.

00:46:49.000 They can do it again.

00:46:50.000 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.

00:46:59.000 There's no evidence that the assault weapons ban had any impact on murder rates broad writ in the United States.

00:47:05.000 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.

00:47:13.000 It depends who owns the guns.

00:47:15.000 As always, guns are but a tool, and the question is who owns them and what they are using those tools for.

00:47:20.000 Hey, Democrats don't even believe in the principles that they espouse.

00:47:22.000 They're not bringing their stuff up for a vote.

00:47:24.000 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.

00:47:36.000 So you would imagine that he would snap vote this, right?

00:47:39.000 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.

00:47:45.000 We should vote on H.R. 0.63

00:47:46.000 8.

00:47:46.000 And immediately got a vote on whatever Democrats already proposed.

00:47:49.000 And they've got the wins with them, they say.

00:47:51.000 They say the American people agree with them.

00:47:53.000 So why not just bring it up for a vote?

00:47:55.000 Well, Chuck Schumer is not going to bring it up for a vote.

00:47:58.000 There he was yesterday.

00:48:00.000 Sadly, this isn't a case of the American people not knowing where their senators stand.

00:48:05.000 They know.

00:48:07.000 They know because my Republican colleagues are perfectly clear on this issue.

00:48:11.000 Crystal clear.

00:48:13.000 Republicans don't pretend that they support sensible gun safety legislation.

00:48:18.000 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.

00:48:32.000 Okay, so if he thinks that the wins are with him, he controls the Senate.

00:48:35.000 Force people to a vote.

00:48:36.000 He won't force people to a vote because he knows that the vote will go down in flames.

00:48:39.000 He also knows that his bills, the ones he's proposing, are generally unpopular with the American people.

00:48:44.000 That stat that says 91% of Americans support background checks?

00:48:47.000 Hell, I support background checks when you're talking about buying a gun from a federally licensed firearm dealer.

00:48:51.000 Everybody does.

00:48:54.000 And you know what happened in this particular case?

00:48:55.000 The shooter was background checked and bought two rifles.

00:48:59.000 So you have a bunch of problems here.

00:49:00.000 You have a societal problem, lack of community, broken family structures, kids who are not being monitored.

00:49:06.000 And this is a serious problem.

00:49:07.000 You have these kids going online.

00:49:09.000 These are all issues that we should talk about as a society.

00:49:11.000 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.

00:49:24.000 Hey, that is one thing that can happen.

00:49:25.000 Then there are other things that we can do.

00:49:27.000 I proposed for many minutes on yesterday's show and have been proposing for years.

00:49:31.000 Some of those things, like a massive increase in the amount of security at schools.

00:49:36.000 Right?

00:49:36.000 This is not, this is not some sort of crazy idea.

00:49:40.000 I went to schools that had massive security.

00:49:43.000 Universities, broad writ, have large-scale security.

00:49:46.000 Private schools have large-scale security.

00:49:48.000 But when you propose this sort of stuff, Democrats immediately go, no, no, no, we can't do that.

00:49:52.000 Which suggests that this is all posturing nonsense.

00:49:54.000 If they really wanted to solve the problem, they would talk at least about a combo of these things, right?

00:49:59.000 Why not talk about, like, this is the only time Democrats have ever discovered that spending money costs money.

00:50:04.000 Like, all of a sudden, like, well, that'd be pretty expensive.

00:50:07.000 You guys are willing to spend, like, billions of dollars on random gender indoctrination in the military.

00:50:11.000 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?

00:50:18.000 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?

00:50:26.000 This is what you're telling me?

00:50:26.000 This is where you choose to draw the line when it comes to the spending?

00:50:30.000 Really?

00:50:30.000 Or you choose to draw the line when it comes to mental health?

00:50:32.000 We can't spend on that, guys.

00:50:33.000 That would be bad.

00:50:34.000 Why are we even talking about mental health?

00:50:35.000 Why aren't we talking about guns?

00:50:36.000 We've been talking about guns non-stop with every mass shooting for as long as I have been alive.

00:50:40.000 And you know what has been found out?

00:50:41.000 The American people are not in favor of the kinds of stuff that you guys are pushing.

00:50:46.000 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.

00:50:52.000 They don't see it because you have not even articulated it properly.

00:50:56.000 Because the stuff that you're proposing does not work, and you can't prove that it works, because it doesn't.

00:51:01.000 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.

00:51:10.000 If we could only be like the UK, where gun ownership is basically banned.

00:51:13.000 Or like Australia, where gun ownership is essentially banned.

00:51:15.000 Or like New Zealand, where gun ownership is essentially... But it ain't gonna happen, guys.

00:51:19.000 And no one is gonna vote for you on that basis.

00:51:21.000 And you know that, which is why you're not proposing it.

00:51:23.000 So instead, what you say is, let's do something.

00:51:25.000 The thing you really want to do, you won't even articulate.

00:51:27.000 So instead what you do, is you say things like, what about universal background checks?

00:51:33.000 The kid was background checked.

00:51:34.000 The shooter was background checked. 0.99

00:51:35.000 This human piece of dreck was background checked. 0.80

00:51:39.000 And anytime any sort of alternative solution is presented, you immediately mock it. 0.80

00:51:42.000 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.

00:51:50.000 You need to have what we call single point of entry.

00:51:52.000 This is what it is at airports, for example.

00:51:54.000 You have a single point of entry.

00:51:56.000 At government buildings, you have a single point of entry.

00:51:57.000 If you've been to a federal building, they have single points of entry.

00:52:00.000 You all go through the metal detectors, and then there are usually multiple points of exit, right?

00:52:04.000 When they close behind you, they are locked.

00:52:04.000 One-way doors.

00:52:06.000 You can't get in through the outside.

00:52:09.000 point of entry because you are attempting to bottleneck the flow of human beings.

00:52:13.000 So if somebody wants to get into the school to shoot people, presumably they're going to have to go through this gauntlet.

00:52:19.000 This is the way that it worked in my private school where I went to school.

00:52:22.000 So here is Ted Cruz saying this and the entire media mocking it.

00:52:25.000 You want to talk about how we could have prevented the horror that played out across the street?

00:52:31.000 Look, the killer entered here the same way the killer entered Santa Fe.

00:52:36.000 Through a back door.

00:52:38.000 An unlocked back door.

00:52:40.000 I sat down at roundtables with the families from Santa Fe.

00:52:43.000 We talked about what we need to do to harden schools, including not having unlocked back doors.

00:52:50.000 Including not having unlocked doors to classrooms.

00:52:53.000 Having one door that goes in and out of the school.

00:52:56.000 Having armed police officers at that one door.

00:53:01.000 Okay, and people are mocking this.

00:53:02.000 This is perfectly obvious security protocol.

00:53:05.000 Perfectly obvious.

00:53:06.000 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.

00:53:11.000 The teachers had an unfortunate habit of propping open back doors.

00:53:15.000 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.

00:53:20.000 But while you're doing that, somebody could get in.

00:53:22.000 You have to close the door.

00:53:22.000 So you can't do that.

00:53:24.000 You have to walk around to the front of the school if you want to get back in and check in with security again.

00:53:27.000 The entire media mocked this.

00:53:29.000 Because this is a solution that might actually help.

00:53:33.000 It might be an obstacle to people attempting to murder children, but it's not good enough.

00:53:36.000 So you have Dave Weigel from the Washington Post mocking, how many doors do these buildings have?

00:53:40.000 If it's more, you have Karen Tumulty from the Washington Post.

00:53:42.000 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? 0.99

00:53:47.000 You morons, that's not how doors work. 0.99

00:53:50.000 There are multiple points of exit. 1.00

00:53:51.000 They lock behind you automatically when they close.

00:53:53.000 This is true at every secure facility.

00:53:56.000 Every single one.

00:53:57.000 And just would you also have to build schools with no windows?

00:54:00.000 No, you wouldn't have to build schools with no windows.

00:54:02.000 You have to build schools where the windows don't open up big enough for people to get in. 0.99

00:54:05.000 I love the purposeful stupidity here. 1.00

00:54:10.000 Just because you don't like. 1.00

00:54:12.000 Honest to God, I wonder how.

00:54:14.000 How in the world do these people function in society when they can't understand basic concepts?

00:54:18.000 Or maybe they do.

00:54:19.000 They do, and it's just all political grandstanding.

00:54:21.000 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.

00:54:33.000 Maybe at the very least, the police should be on top.

00:54:34.000 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.

00:54:56.000 How many times do we have to see this?

00:54:57.000 We saw it in Sandy Hook.

00:54:58.000 We saw it in Parkland.

00:54:59.000 We saw it here.

00:55:01.000 How many times do we have to see it?

00:55:02.000 But if you mention mental health, this means that you're bad and trying to avoid the real problem. 0.84

00:55:06.000 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.

00:55:20.000 So for example, Chris Murphy from Connecticut.

00:55:22.000 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.

00:55:30.000 You know what do something is do something is I'm so full of it.

00:55:32.000 Give me money.

00:55:33.000 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.

00:55:39.000 Here's Chris Murphy.

00:55:41.000 Many Republicans say the answer is more mental health funding.

00:55:46.000 Well, that's BS.

00:55:48.000 There's a mental health crisis in this country, but it doesn't explain the gun violence epidemic.

00:55:53.000 We don't have any more mental illness in the United States than any other country.

00:55:58.000 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.

00:56:08.000 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.

00:56:16.000 How do we target those people?

00:56:18.000 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.

00:56:30.000 This is somebody who doesn't want to solve the problem.

00:56:32.000 And then, he immediately dismisses the idea that more security at schools would matter.

00:56:35.000 Right?

00:56:36.000 This is where they draw the line.

00:56:37.000 More security at schools.

00:56:38.000 We can't have that.

00:56:38.000 Can't have more people at schools to actually shoot bad guys.

00:56:40.000 That would be a problem.

00:56:43.000 There were plenty of people with guns at that school, and that shooter outgunned them.

00:56:48.000 That shooter made it inside the school.

00:56:51.000 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.

00:57:04.000 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.

00:57:14.000 Okay, that is a lie.

00:57:15.000 It's just not true.

00:57:16.000 There is a reason why we have hardened our schools.

00:57:19.000 There is a reason why Israel hardens its schools. 0.81

00:57:22.000 There's a reason why a wide variety of countries harden their schools.

00:57:24.000 What are you talking about?

00:57:26.000 You don't want solutions.

00:57:27.000 What you want is grandstanding.

00:57:28.000 Same thing from Texas Democratic Representative Veronica Escobar.

00:57:32.000 She says, if your solution is to jail the mentally ill, then I don't know what to tell you.

00:57:36.000 What if my solution is that this person should not have been on the street?

00:57:39.000 How is that not a solution?

00:57:43.000 We live in a state that deeply underfunds mental health care.

00:57:48.000 In fact, our state's solution to mental health care is jailing the mentally ill.

00:57:54.000 That's why so many of our mentally ill in the state of Texas languish in jails and prisons.

00:58:00.000 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.

00:58:16.000 Okay, I just have a question.

00:58:18.000 Why is it that the Democratic proposals are always and forever things like, we'll have more social workers to deal with this problem.

00:58:24.000 We'll have less, this is the same party of defund the bullies. 0.91

00:58:27.000 We'll have less guns in the schools, less hard and security.

00:58:30.000 Who cares about doors?

00:58:31.000 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?

00:58:39.000 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?

00:58:48.000 Those would actually be conversations worth having, but we're not going to have any of those conversations.

00:58:52.000 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.

00:59:04.000 That all the people who oppose that somehow are in favor of shooting kids.

00:59:08.000 It's all political posturing all the way on down.

00:59:11.000 There are too many of these Democrats who are just Beto.

00:59:14.000 They don't want to discuss solutions.

00:59:15.000 They're not interested in solutions.

00:59:16.000 They're interested in raising money for their campaigns.

00:59:20.000 And that really is despicable.

00:59:22.000 All right, we'll be back here later today with more content.

00:59:24.000 In the meantime, go check out one of our newest podcasts, Morning Wire.

00:59:26.000 On today's episode, they report on the housing market, showing signs of cooling.

00:59:29.000 That episode is available right now on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

00:59:32.000 Make sure to tune in.

00:59:33.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:59:34.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:59:35.000 ♪♪ The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Bradford Carrington, executive producer Jeremy Boren, supervising producer Mathis Glover, production manager Pavel Wydowski, associate producer Savannah Dominguez-Morris, editor Adam Sajevitz, audio mixer Mike Coromina, hair and makeup artist and wardrobe Fabiola Christina, production coordinator Jessica Kranz.

00:59:59.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.

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01:00:04.000 Hey there, this is John Bickley, Daily Wire editor-in-chief and co-host of Morning Wire.

01:00:09.000 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.

The Ben Shapiro Show - May 26, 2022

Posturing On Graves Isn’t Virtue, It’s Moral Sickness | Ep. 1503

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