A gunman opened fire at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas on Wednesday morning, killing at least 19 children and two teachers. No police were able to get into the building in time to stop the shooter, who was shot to death by a Border Patrol agent. The circumstances surrounding this shooting look a lot like the circumstances surrounding the shooting in Parkland, Florida, where school security officers did not do their jobs in protecting the kids. Well, we are finding out more about the circumstances behind this horrific shooting, and his life circumstances, which does give us some clues as to what we might do in the future to prevent stuff like this from happening in the first place. This is the Ben Shapiro Show, hosted by Ben Shapiro. This show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. It s time to stand up against big tech and protect your data. Protect your data at Express VPN. Shutterfly.co/ProtectYourData is a great place to store and store your most valuable data. You ll be saving hundreds of dollars in just one simple act of privacy and data protection. If you re still with Verizon, AT&T, or T-Mobile, your family could be saving over $900 a year. That s a lot of money you could be spending money where you don t need to be spending it. And if you re spending money, you ll be supporting a company who s right here in the United States and who proudly served our country, I really think you should be supporting our country and who s customer service is right here, I m talking about protecting your data, I made the switch to PureTalk. - Ben Shapiro Ben Shapiro, The Ben Shapiro's new show on the numbers are not going to be saving you $100,000 a month, saving you the most reliable 5G network in less than $1,000,000 in 2020. The numbers are in! PureTalk is saving you even more money than you re gonna be saving a fortune than you can be saving yourself in 2020, and you re saving yourself a bunch of money in the process of saving you time and getting a good deal on your first month of coverage. Listen to the show on this episode of the show, and more! Subscribe to get 50% off your first year of coverage, starting in just $5,000 or $100 in the second month, and get $50 off your very first month free, and still save a fortune!
00:01:41.000We 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.
00:01:48.000Some 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.
00:02:00.000Same 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.
00:02:13.000Apparently, 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.
00:02:21.000Witnesses 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.
00:02:28.000Go 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.
00:02:39.000Carranza said the officers did not go in.
00:02:41.000Javier 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.
00:02:49.000Upset that the police were not moving in, he raised the idea of charging into the school with several other bystanders.
00:02:53.000He said, let's just rush in because the cops aren't doing anything like they're supposed to, he said.
00:02:58.000Minutes 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.
00:03:10.000Officials 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.
00:03:18.000After running inside, he fired on two arriving Uvalde police officers who were outside the building, said Texas Department of Public Safety spokesperson Travis Considine.
00:03:27.000So apparently he was there before a couple of other police officers arrived.
00:03:32.000Unclear whether he actually had an exchange of gunfire with the school district officer who was outside the school.
00:03:37.000After 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.
00:03:43.000We 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.
00:03:57.000Lieutenant 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.
00:04:03.000It just shows you the complete evil of the shooter.
00:04:05.000All those killed were in the same classroom.
00:04:08.000The 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.
00:04:15.000The 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.
00:04:22.000McCraw said the bottom line is law enforcement was there.
00:04:26.000But when they say contain him in the classroom, he locked himself inside the classroom and started shooting people.
00:04:30.000So again, a failure to go in immediately.
00:04:34.000And 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.
00:04:41.000But this looks very bad for the police department over there.
00:04:44.000And 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.
00:04:59.000You know, I understand on a human level why people would not want to do that.
00:05:02.000But if you sign up to be a cop, that is indeed your job.
00:05:05.000And again, we saw this at Parkland as well.
00:05:08.000And 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.
00:05:18.000And whatever laws are on the books tend to become quite secondary.
00:05:21.000You 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.
00:05:28.000We are now finding out new details about the gunman as well.
00:05:31.000And as always, there were a bunch of red flags.
00:05:59.000Usually 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...
00:06:10.000Make that transaction happen with a background check.
00:06:12.000The 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.
00:06:25.000It does not go to the heart of what would have stopped a shooting like this.
00:06:28.000Again, this person was background checked when he was sold the rifles.
00:06:31.000There 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?
00:06:39.000Selling 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.
00:06:49.000But a huge number of mass shootings have been perpetrated in the very recent past by people who are above the age of 60.
00:06:53.000The 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.
00:07:04.000So, 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.
00:07:14.000The simple fact of the matter is that he was already violating gun laws, was this person.
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00:08:46.000According 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.
00:08:58.000So 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.
00:09:14.000I mean, when I say demonic I don't mean this person was possessed by some sort of spiritually outside thing.
00:09:19.000I 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.
00:09:29.000Because mental illness is a very broad spectrum description.
00:09:31.000It ranges from anything from generalized anxiety disorder to violent schizophrenia.
00:09:36.000When I say demonic, that is not just a moral judgment.
00:09:39.000It 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.
00:09:56.000There are differences in kind, even between mass shooters, right? There's some mass shooters, like terrorists, who do these things for political purposes.
00:10:06.000You also understand that they have a rationale in their own mind for doing this.
00:10:11.000There'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.
00:10:21.000Or 10-year-olds and start murdering them.
00:10:24.000In any case, what we now know is that this person was the product of a broken life.
00:10:29.000In 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.
00:10:35.000Authorities said that the shooter shot and critically wounded his 66-year-old grandmother, which is a pretty good indicator of somebody who is sick.
00:10:44.000I mean, somebody who has been possessed by forces beyond his control.
00:10:48.000He then went on a shooting rampage at Robb Elementary School near his home, killing at least 19 children and two adults.
00:10:54.000In 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.
00:11:07.000Apparently, Santor Valdez Jr., 18, said he has known the shooter since early elementary school.
00:11:11.000They were friends, he said, until this shooter's behavior started to deteriorate.
00:11:16.000They used to play video games like Fortnite and Call of Duty.
00:11:36.000So, right away, we have a failure in the system.
00:11:40.000And 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.
00:11:56.000In 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.
00:12:03.000In this particular case, it seems like people knew about it, but who are they going to report that to?
00:12:09.000I mean, if you're cutting your face, you're by definition a danger to yourself.
00:12:13.000This means he should have been institutionalized, but nobody took it upon themselves to actually go to mental health authorities.
00:12:19.000I 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.
00:12:47.000The simple fact of the matter is that when people are a danger to themselves or others, they need to be...
00:12:52.000Sometimes psychotropic pharmaceuticals can help.
00:12:55.000Sometimes there are behavioral things like cognitive behavioral therapy that can be attempted.
00:13:00.000And sometimes you can't cure the person at all and they're a danger.
00:13:02.000And 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.
00:13:09.000comes with serious, serious consequences.
00:13:12.000This kid was literally cutting his face with a knife, his own face with a knife.
00:13:17.000If that's not an indicator of somebody who is deeply damaged and in danger, I don't know what is.
00:13:22.000All right, coming up, we'll get some more on the shooter from the Washington Post first.
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00:14:29.000In middle school and junior high, the shooter was apparently bullied for having a stutter and a strong lisp, according to friends and family.
00:14:35.000Steven Garcia considered himself the shooter's best friend in eighth grade.
00:14:38.000He said that the shooter didn't have it easy in school.
00:14:39.000He said he would get bullied hard, like bullied by a lot of people, over social media, over gaming, over everything.
00:14:43.000He was the nicest kid, the most shy kid.
00:14:45.000He just needed to break out of his shell.
00:14:47.000One 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.
00:14:54.000Garcia 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.
00:14:59.000He kept getting worse and worse, and I don't even know.
00:15:02.000I 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.
00:15:10.000As somebody who was viciously bullied in high school, bullies ought to be punished to the fullest extent of disciplinary procedures at schools.
00:15:19.000However, the attempt to kind of suggest broad scale that anyone who's bullied is likely to become a mass shooter is obviously not true.
00:15:25.000So 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.
00:15:37.000So 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.
00:16:44.000It 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.
00:16:55.000And 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.
00:17:03.000The truth is, kids need boundaries, kids need restrictions, and kids need communities.
00:17:08.000We sort of envision ourselves in a society right now as free-floating, atomistic individuals.
00:17:13.000And 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.
00:17:19.000The broader puzzle already exists before you are born.
00:17:22.000And 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.
00:17:29.000When that societal structure disappears, and you're just sort of a free-floating agent, bad things tend to happen.
00:17:35.000Apparently, according to The shooter's former friend.
00:17:39.000He 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.
00:17:47.000Before 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.
00:17:56.000Valdez said the shooter drove around with another friend at night sometimes and shot at random people with a BB gun.
00:18:01.000He also egged people's cars, Valdez said.
00:18:03.000Okay, so, shooting at random people with a BB gun, by the way, that's dangerous.
00:18:14.000Where was anybody reporting this behavior?
00:18:17.000And again, in the end, no one is responsible for the evil of a person except the person themselves.
00:18:20.000But, 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?
00:18:32.000About a year ago, the shooter posted on social media photos of automatic rifles that he would have on his wish list.
00:18:37.000Four days ago, he posted images of two rifles he referred to as, my gun pics.
00:18:41.000Two 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.
00:18:47.000A high school classmate who is not related to the family said, he posted videos on his Instagram where the cops were there.
00:18:53.000And he'd call his mom a b**** and say she wanted to kick him out.
00:18:56.000He'd be screaming and talking to his mom really aggressively.
00:19:02.000And the attempt to create attention for yourself online because you feel alienated in reality, in the real world.
00:19:09.000That becomes, for a lot of people, their real world, which is unbelievably dangerous.
00:19:13.000And obviously, he had serious problems with his own mother.
00:19:15.000Multiple 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.
00:19:23.000Apparently the shooter has an older sister currently serving in the Navy.
00:19:26.000A woman who identified herself as the shooter's mother declined to answer questions about her son on Wednesday.
00:19:30.000I don't want to talk about him, she said in a brief phone conversation.
00:19:33.000She said her mother was almost out of surgery, adding that the older woman was expected to make a full recovery.
00:19:40.000Apparently he had had a pretty rough life with his mom, according to a person who lived next door.
00:19:44.000And that person would invite the shooter to barbecues at their home and for sleepovers with their son, who was a few years younger.
00:19:51.000Apparently the shooter went by the nickname Palon, Spanish for bald, because his hair was often cut so short when he was younger.
00:19:56.000As he grew older, problems at home became more acute and more apparent to neighbors.
00:19:59.000He described seeing police at the house, but is seeing blow-ups between the shooter and his mother.
00:20:04.000The shooter moved from the Hood Street home to his grandmother's home across town a few months ago.
00:20:07.000He 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.
00:20:13.000The grandmother told him she was in the process of evicting the shooter's mother because of her own drug problems.
00:20:19.000Reyes, 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.
00:20:26.000His friendships were short-lived, she said.
00:20:28.000Once, the shooter commented to a friend while playing basketball.
00:20:30.000The friend only wanted to join the Marines one day so he could kill people.
00:20:33.000The other boy, she said, ended the friendship on the spot.
00:20:37.000I don't think he was necessarily bullied.
00:20:38.000He would take things too far, say something that shouldn't be said, then he'd go into defense mode about it, said this classmate.
00:20:44.000She 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.
00:20:54.000The kids were excited to see us in our cap and gown, said the schoolmate.
00:20:57.000They're looking at us like, I'm gonna be there one day.
00:21:00.000You 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.
00:21:09.000Just 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.
00:21:17.000Garcia 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.
00:21:25.000So, again, this is a person with a broken home, a drug-abusing mother.
00:21:34.000Apparently the grandfather is not really part of the picture either, so no male influences.
00:21:39.000A 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?
00:21:47.000The police have been there in confrontations between the shooter and his mom.
00:21:54.000The answer for the left is remove 400 million guns from American society, from over 100 million Americans.
00:22:00.000Instead of, what do we do to stop things like this?
00:22:03.000And maybe the societal decay that has been fostered by a particular set of beliefs has despicable consequences.
00:22:11.000It has an outlying, statistically rare, but predictable consequences.
00:22:16.000Alright, 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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00:23:37.000We have more information on the shooter as well.
00:23:41.000According 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.
00:23:55.000Apparently, the shooter wrote on Facebook Tuesday morning to a teenage girl overseas, quote, I'm going to shoot my grandma.
00:24:00.000And then after doing so, wrote, I shot my grandma, according to the Texas governor and a law enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation.
00:24:07.000Less than 15 minutes before arriving at Robb Elementary School, he wrote, I'm going to shoot an elementary school.
00:24:12.000A spokesman for Facebook's parent company, Meta, said on Twitter, the communications were private messages sent to another individual, not public posts.
00:24:20.000I 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.
00:24:33.000The new details about the attack emerged one day after the shooting attack.
00:24:38.000State 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.
00:24:45.000If the shooter had had a juvenile criminal record, it's possible the officials wouldn't have access to it.
00:24:49.000So again, where is the community in all of this?
00:24:55.000Where are the people who should have been reporting this person to the police apparently throughout his life for activity like this?
00:25:05.000So 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.
00:25:16.000And 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?
00:25:33.000The reality is, I don't know the answer to that question.
00:25:35.000What I do know is that we as a state and a society need to do a better job with mental health.
00:25:39.000It is amazing what solutions people are willing to talk about and what solutions people are not willing to talk about.
00:25:43.000So 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.
00:25:53.000And he started off by saying the Texans have to come together.
00:25:57.000All Texans must come together and support the families who have been affected by this horrific tragedy.
00:26:07.000What they need now more than ever is our love.
00:26:12.000What they need is uplifting from all of our fellow Texans and all of our fellow Americans.
00:26:22.000Okay, and then he continued by condemning the shooting itself, of course, as you would imagine.
00:26:28.000It is intolerable and it is unacceptable for us to have in this state anybody who would kill little kids in our schools.
00:26:37.000Their love is a gift that parents get to unwrap every single day.
00:26:47.000Parents in Uvalde had that gift taken away from them.
00:27:00.000Okay, 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?
00:27:16.000That is not going to solve the problem.
00:27:30.000And that is, there are, quote, real gun laws in Chicago.
00:27:38.000There are, quote, real gun laws in New York.
00:27:42.000There are real gun laws in California.
00:27:48.000I hate to say this, but there are more people who were shot every weekend In Chicago than there are in schools in Texas.
00:28:00.000Okay, he is correct about this, obviously.
00:28:03.000Okay, 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.
00:28:09.000If 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.
00:28:21.000The 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.
00:28:28.000They're not calibrated to stop violence, and they know this.
00:28:30.000The 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.
00:28:41.000If 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.
00:28:46.000Okay, so this press conference from the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, as well as some others, It took a sideways turn.
00:28:55.000It 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.
00:29:05.000The parents of children who were murdered.
00:29:08.000You 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.
00:29:19.000He's not going to win the governor's race in Texas.
00:29:22.000He isn't going to win many votes in Texas.
00:29:24.000He believes that he's going to get all sorts of glowing media coverage, which he will.
00:29:27.000He'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.
00:29:36.000You have the governor who is there to speak to the families of people whose kids were murdered literally two days ago.
00:29:43.000And he shows up the next day in a pre-planned, it's a pre-planned political grandstanding move.
00:29:51.000When I say pre-planned, I mean like fully pre-planned, as we'll talk about in a second.
00:29:54.000He 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.
00:30:02.000He starts yelling at them that this is their fault.
00:30:04.000It's not the fault of the shooter, it's their fault.
00:30:11.000It 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.
00:30:29.000This 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.
00:31:05.000I 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.
00:31:17.000Really, they were posting this next to pictures of Tiananmen Square, which was a dictatorial regime killing a man, attempting to resist the dictatorial regime.
00:31:26.000So here's Beto O'Rourke in... I mean, this is... In the dictionary, under the word grandstanding, there should be a picture of this.
00:32:25.000It's not about discussing the problem.
00:32:26.000It'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.
00:32:34.000This means that you are evil and illegal at the shooter.
00:33:05.000This 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.
00:33:15.000And then he said, quote, this is on you until you choose to do something different.
00:33:33.000Really, 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.
00:33:40.000If 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.
00:33:48.000But instead, he's being treated as a hero of the Republic by the usual media suspect.
00:33:55.000There are a bunch of people who you can hear in that tape shouting at Beto O'Rourke to stop.
00:33:59.000That includes one man whose cousin was actually shot at the school.
00:34:23.000My 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.
00:34:32.000And 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.
00:34:52.000By the way, Democrats might take that under advisement, but they will not.
00:34:54.000Meanwhile, the mayor of the city of Uvalde, he explains why he was calling Beto a son of a bitch right there.
00:35:29.000I was fully set up by Beto in advance as well.
00:35:31.000CBS 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.
00:35:40.000Here is the explanation from CBS News.
00:35:44.000Could you make out what was being said by Beto O'Rourke?
00:35:47.000There 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.
00:35:58.000So his presence wasn't really noticed in the 15 or 20 minutes.
00:36:03.000That people were gathering inside because he was not in the room.
00:36:05.000So this seems something very clearly staged by Beto O'Rourke and his campaign wanting to confront the governor at this moment.
00:36:13.000I 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.
00:36:33.000And 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.
00:36:39.000You think that would have been treated anywhere near similarly by the media?
00:36:43.000Alrighty, 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.
00:37:23.000The facts don't care about your feelings line is here and you can don the most important quotation in human history today by heading on over to dailywire.com slash shop to shop my collection.
00:37:35.000You're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
00:37:39.000But 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.
00:39:08.000From 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.
00:39:23.000I mean, it was almost a reach, talking about the lack of beds that were available for mental health patients.
00:39:32.000Where 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.
00:39:46.000Greg Abbott, who is sitting there and saying this is a complex issue in mental health.
00:39:50.000I read you the profile from the Washington Post.
00:39:52.000Selling mental health was not an issue there?
00:39:54.000Sound like this kid was completely mentally healthy?
00:39:56.000And 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?
00:40:03.000Is that what that sounds like right there?
00:40:07.000Meanwhile, you have the full apotheosis of all stupidity, Whoopi Goldberg, sounding her way off, going after Greg Abbott.
00:40:14.000She's so good at what she does, Whoopi Goldberg, the moral conscience of America.
00:40:19.000I 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.
00:40:30.000Let's apply his abortion laws to guns by deputizing citizens to sue anyone involved in gun violence.
00:40:46.000She's a ridiculous, ridiculous human being.
00:40:48.000And 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.
00:41:06.000You, you law-abiding citizen who opposes mass shootings.
00:41:09.000You, law-abiding citizen who might own a gun to stop things like this from happening.
00:41:13.000You, 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.
00:41:25.000You, the person who's suggesting that perhaps you ought to have billions of dollars more security in schools to protect it.
00:41:38.000So 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.
00:41:51.000So 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.
00:41:59.000Now, I've never been paid by the quote-unquote gun lobby.
00:42:03.000I won a prize from the NRA when I was in law school for writing a legal essay.
00:43:51.000If you say to your kids they'll be safe at school today, you're lying to your kids.
00:43:54.000First of all, statistically speaking, you're not lying to your kids.
00:43:56.000Your chance of being shot in a school shooting in the United States is about 1 in 10 million.
00:44:00.000It doesn't minimize the evils of school shooting.
00:44:02.000But 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.
00:44:30.000But 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.
00:45:08.000Caruso sees predictably imbecilic response.
00:45:11.000Why even be in Congress if you don't believe in doing your job?
00:45:15.000Just 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.
00:45:23.000In other words, do what I want you to do or I will accuse you of not doing your job.
00:45:29.000Strangely, 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.
00:45:34.000Because 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.
00:45:52.000Even their own solutions they don't bring up for a vote.
00:45:54.000So 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.
00:46:06.000It's just it's a bunch of slogans from him.
00:46:08.000Of course, the Second Amendment has limitation.
00:46:11.000That's why every state in America has some form of gun law or another.
00:46:16.000But 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.
00:46:50.000Okay, 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.
00:46:59.000There's no evidence that the assault weapons ban had any impact on murder rates broad writ in the United States.
00:47:05.000In 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.
00:47:15.000As always, guns are but a tool, and the question is who owns them and what they are using those tools for.
00:47:20.000Hey, Democrats don't even believe in the principles that they espouse.
00:47:22.000They're not bringing their stuff up for a vote.
00:47:24.000According 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.
00:47:36.000So you would imagine that he would snap vote this, right?
00:47:39.000I 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.
00:48:13.000Republicans don't pretend that they support sensible gun safety legislation.
00:48:18.000They 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.
00:48:32.000Okay, so if he thinks that the wins are with him, he controls the Senate.
00:49:09.000These are all issues that we should talk about as a society.
00:49:11.000And 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.
00:49:24.000Hey, that is one thing that can happen.
00:49:25.000Then there are other things that we can do.
00:49:27.000I proposed for many minutes on yesterday's show and have been proposing for years.
00:49:31.000Some of those things, like a massive increase in the amount of security at schools.
00:50:41.000The American people are not in favor of the kinds of stuff that you guys are pushing.
00:50:46.000Because 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.
00:50:52.000They don't see it because you have not even articulated it properly.
00:50:56.000Because the stuff that you're proposing does not work, and you can't prove that it works, because it doesn't.
00:51:01.000The 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.
00:51:10.000If we could only be like the UK, where gun ownership is basically banned.
00:51:13.000Or like Australia, where gun ownership is essentially banned.
00:51:15.000Or like New Zealand, where gun ownership is essentially... But it ain't gonna happen, guys.
00:51:19.000And no one is gonna vote for you on that basis.
00:51:21.000And you know that, which is why you're not proposing it.
00:51:23.000So instead, what you say is, let's do something.
00:51:25.000The thing you really want to do, you won't even articulate.
00:51:27.000So instead what you do, is you say things like, what about universal background checks?
00:51:35.000This human piece of dreck was background checked.
00:51:39.000And anytime any sort of alternative solution is presented, you immediately mock it.
00:51:42.000So 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.
00:51:50.000You need to have what we call single point of entry.
00:51:52.000This is what it is at airports, for example.
00:53:06.000In 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.
00:53:11.000The teachers had an unfortunate habit of propping open back doors.
00:53:15.000And 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.
00:53:20.000But while you're doing that, somebody could get in.
00:54:19.000They do, and it's just all political grandstanding.
00:54:21.000Or, 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.
00:54:33.000Maybe at the very least, the police should be on top.
00:54:34.000How 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.
00:54:56.000How many times do we have to see this?
00:55:02.000But if you mention mental health, this means that you're bad and trying to avoid the real problem.
00:55:06.000Maybe 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.
00:55:20.000So for example, Chris Murphy from Connecticut.
00:55:22.000Who'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.
00:55:30.000You know what do something is do something is I'm so full of it.
00:55:33.000It'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.
00:55:48.000There's a mental health crisis in this country, but it doesn't explain the gun violence epidemic.
00:55:53.000We don't have any more mental illness in the United States than any other country.
00:55:58.000It'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.
00:56:08.000Okay, 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.
00:56:18.000What 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.
00:56:30.000This is somebody who doesn't want to solve the problem.
00:56:32.000And then, he immediately dismisses the idea that more security at schools would matter.
00:56:43.000There were plenty of people with guns at that school, and that shooter outgunned them.
00:56:48.000That shooter made it inside the school.
00:56:51.000Unless 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.
00:57:04.000There 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.
00:57:43.000We live in a state that deeply underfunds mental health care.
00:57:48.000In fact, our state's solution to mental health care is jailing the mentally ill.
00:57:54.000That's why so many of our mentally ill in the state of Texas languish in jails and prisons.
00:58:00.000Just 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.
00:58:31.000What 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?
00:58:39.000And 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?
00:58:48.000Those would actually be conversations worth having, but we're not going to have any of those conversations.
00:58:52.000Instead, 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.
00:59:04.000That all the people who oppose that somehow are in favor of shooting kids.
00:59:08.000It's all political posturing all the way on down.
00:59:11.000There are too many of these Democrats who are just Beto.
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.
00:59:59.000The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
01:00:04.000Hey there, this is John Bickley, Daily Wire editor-in-chief and co-host of Morning Wire.
01:00:09.000On 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.