Ted Cruz responds to the mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas on Wednesday morning, and calls for immediate action to prevent more tragedies like this from happening in the future. Ted Cruz is a conservative senator from Texas and former presidential candidate.
00:07:40.080That gunfight lasted sometime anywhere between 40 minutes and an hour.
00:07:45.300And when I met with the FBI and law enforcement, they were reviewing the footage.
00:07:48.940And they're trying to set the precise timeline.
00:07:51.480But it was an extended, it was a protracted gunfight.
00:07:55.460Three law enforcement officers were wounded, although thankfully none of them were seriously wounded.
00:08:01.720And I got to say, all day yesterday, from meeting with the first responders to going to the school, to seeing the wreckage firsthand, to going last night to a prayer vigil.
00:08:16.000You know, the community had a prayer vigil, and it was packed.
00:08:19.960It was inside this big indoor barn where they have bull riding and they have rodeos there.
00:09:03.680High school students walking in with just this look of sort of glazed shock.
00:09:08.840You know, this was the first school shooting since I became a parent.
00:09:13.160And obviously there have been lots in my lifetime when I was a kid starting with Columbine and then so many, so many others, unfortunately, that have occurred.
00:09:20.060But this was the first one since I became a parent.
00:09:22.920And I didn't get it before I was a parent.
00:09:26.980And you would always hear people say, you're hugging your kid closer tonight.
00:09:30.480This is the worst thing you could possibly imagine.
00:09:32.340And I always thought, obviously, this is incredibly tragic.
00:09:37.580Because you just, if you are a parent, you just, you think this is the singular horror that you can imagine.
00:09:44.400And it is in part why my reaction just to the politics of it and the coverage in the media was a little different this time.
00:09:52.240I thought, can you let people mourn a little bit?
00:09:55.360Can you let people grieve a little bit?
00:09:56.940Can you just give it two seconds before this has to become some national debate on anyone's pet project?
00:10:04.200And I got to tell you, it's frustrating for me because this is not the first time I've been on the ground where some psychopath has carried out an act of mass murder.
00:10:29.860I jumped in a truck and headed down to Santa Fe.
00:10:31.820I was there within an hour of when the shooting happened.
00:10:37.180Sutherland Springs is another small town, rural town outside of San Antonio.
00:10:43.020Worst church shooting in U.S. history.
00:10:45.380I was there the day after Sutherland Springs.
00:10:48.240I was in that beautiful little sanctuary when there was still blood and shattered glass, shattered iPhones, pews, thrown in chaos as that lunatic executed people, including that lunatic executed a child that was 18 months old.
00:11:09.660I was there in Midland, Odessa with another mass murderer there.
00:11:12.980I was there in El Paso, Texas with another mass murderer there.
00:11:16.420I was in Dallas with another mass murderer who targeted police officers.
00:11:21.560There are broader causes that we can and should discuss, causes that we've seen, whether it's the destruction of the nuclear family, whether it is the loss of strong and loving father figures in families.
00:11:34.520Many, if not most, of these murderers come from a home without a strong and loving father.
00:11:39.600Whether it is the deterioration of faith and community in a church life and it seems almost all of these people are detached from their community.
00:11:53.740And there are lots of things that have nothing to do with government and policy that have led to angry teenage boys being filled with murderous rage.
00:12:06.900But what your political opponents are going to say is they're going to say, well, OK, yeah, enough.
00:12:34.040And the proposals that have been made by the Democrats almost exclusively to regulate guns, none of them would have prevented any of these mass shootings.
00:12:44.360Even The Washington Post admitted that when Marco Rubio said it in 2015.
00:12:48.160Even the Post fact checker had to admit that that point was right.
00:12:51.340Then you get on to other proposals that could possibly even be made here.
00:12:56.820What would that be to ban guns entirely?
00:12:59.160Well, you're going to run up against a constitutional problem, a practical problem.
00:13:02.700There are more guns than people in this country.
00:13:04.520There's no political will whatsoever to ban guns.
00:13:07.180And there's not a lot of evidence that banning guns would reduce the murder rate.
00:13:10.200When they banned handguns in the UK, the murder rate increased significantly.
00:13:15.380So it's the same old litany of issues.
00:13:17.800And I think this is why the people who criticize thoughts and prayers and the people who say, well, do something, do something, it's why they don't tend to get very specific.
00:13:26.620Because they don't have any more of an answer on what to do than anybody else does.
00:13:30.940They're just demagoguing the issue and pretending that their sympathetic outrage is somehow productive.
00:13:37.000So let's assess, how do we stop these?
00:13:41.680Inevitably, when there's a mass murder, within seconds, Democrats and the media begin calling for the exact same policies they were calling for the day before.
00:13:53.060Which their objective, and more and more the left is quite candid about it, is to disarm law-abiding citizens throughout this country.
00:14:00.200To take away your firearms, my firearms, and those of law-abiding citizens.
00:14:06.240There are many problems with that, but let's just start with a basic one.
00:14:11.700Taking away every firearm that Michael Knowles owns would not have stopped this psychopath from murdering children in Uvalde.
00:14:20.300And by the way, we see that in Chicago and New York and D.C. and California, where they have very strict gun control.
00:14:27.960And the criminals still have guns and still carry out murders.
00:14:33.120If you could wave a magic wand and eliminate all firearms in America, there would be substantially more murders than there are today.
00:14:43.900I'll give you a statistic from the Obama White House.
00:14:47.120Now, the Obama White House is hardly a right-wing source.
00:14:50.700Here's what the Obama White House concluded, is that firearms are used in the United States defensively between 500,000 and 1 million times per year.
00:15:04.060Used to stop the commission of a crime.
00:15:06.380So if the left succeeds in taking away everyone's firearms, all of the instances.
00:15:12.480Now, that doesn't mean that there are between 500,000 and a million gunfights.
00:15:17.120Many, many times firearms are used to stop a robbery, to stop an attempted murder, to stop a kidnapping, where the gun isn't fired.
00:15:25.860But simply brandishing the gun causes the criminal to abandon the criminal effort.
00:15:30.960And that happens, according to the Obama White House, between 500,000 and a million times a year.
00:15:36.960So eliminating all firearms, I believe, would cause far more loss of life because it would mean that criminals would be able to maraud, would be able to commit assaults and not be worried about people defending themselves.
00:15:51.340And by the way, the data, if you look at the jurisdictions with the strictest gun controls, almost without exception, they have among the highest crime rates and the highest murder rates.
00:16:02.940And places with lower rates of gun control, in other words, with more widespread firearms among the citizenry, you have typically much lower crime rates, much lower murder rates.
00:16:48.420Grassley-Cruz was legislation targeting the bad guys.
00:16:53.420And so one of the things it did is it improved the background check system.
00:16:58.840If you look at, we have a background check.
00:17:00.260So if you or I go buy a gun, you got to run a background check.
00:17:03.120It runs the check to see if you have a felony conviction.
00:17:06.760That database is only as good as the information in it.
00:17:09.980And a lot of the federal government has been lousy at reporting felony convictions to the database.
00:17:15.120And a lot of states, interestingly enough, many of them blue states, have terrible records reporting the felonies to the background check database.
00:17:25.380If you look at Sutherland Springs, which was the church shooting in Texas, in that instance, that crime should have been prevented.
00:18:03.120They ran the background check, and because the federal government, the Obama administration, never reported his felony conviction to the database, the background check came up clean, and they sold him the firearm.
00:18:15.020So one of the things Grassley-Cruz did is mandated the federal government, the Department of Justice, to do an audit of every federal agency to ensure that all felony convictions were in the database.
00:18:27.000It also provided funds for states to do the same thing for state convictions.
00:18:31.040But beyond that, every year, there's a vast number of felons and fugitives who try to illegally buy firearms.
00:18:41.100The Department of Justice prosecutes almost none of them.
00:18:44.360In fact, I'll give you the stats from 2010, which was the last year there were stats from before when I drafted Grassley-Cruz.
00:18:50.860In that year, there were 48,000 felons and fugitives who tried to illegally buy firearms.
00:18:59.28048,000 of those, do you know how many the Department of Justice prosecuted?
00:19:07.000And by the way, that continues to this day.
00:19:09.260The Biden Justice Department still is not prosecuting felons and fugitives who tried to illegally buy firearms.
00:19:16.280Grassley-Cruz mandated the creation of a gun crime task force at the Department of Justice to go and prosecute and put in jail felons and fugitives who illegally buy firearms.
00:19:59.180So even though I had 52 votes, we didn't have 60.
00:20:02.640And so it failed because Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer and the Democrats filibustered it.
00:20:07.680They're not really focused on this issue, right?
00:20:09.240They're focused on pushing the same legislation that they've wanted to push for decades now, and they'll use any circumstance to try to push that.
00:20:16.900But what we're seeing here in the specifics of this actual shooting is in some ways it seems like it's a repeat of the Parkland shooting.
00:20:24.000You've got a kid who was showing serious signs of trouble.
00:20:27.980He should have been identified much sooner.
00:20:30.420There should have been safeguards placed around this kid much, much sooner.
00:20:34.060There are now questions about when law enforcement got there, if law enforcement did enough in the moment.
00:20:39.820You're seeing – I'm not saying it's a repeat of history, but you're seeing lots and lots of similarities, none of which are addressed by the legislation that the Democrats are proposing.
00:20:49.480I sat down and participated in roundtables with the families of the victims who were murdered in Santa Fe, and it included families who were in Parkland, families who were in other mass shootings.
00:20:59.980And we talked about how do you prevent them.
00:21:02.060And as you talk to security experts, one of the things they said is for schools, many schools are very, very vulnerable, and there are concrete steps we can take to harden schools and make them safer.
00:21:17.140And in particular, here's what the experts have recommended.
00:21:19.360They've said you don't want multiple means of entering the school.
00:21:24.200You don't want lots and lots of open doors.
00:21:26.120If you look at how the shooter got in in Uvalde, he went into a back door that was unlocked.
00:21:34.480That's exactly how the shooter went in in Santa Fe, a back door that was unlocked he was able to get in, and then he was able to get right into a classroom.
00:21:55.760If you think about it, a secure facility, a courthouse, a federal building, they often have a single point of entry because from a security perspective, that's much safer.
00:22:06.120At that point of entry, the single most effective security step you can take is to have armed police officers there at that point of entry.
00:22:16.280That has a greater impact on keeping kids safe than just about anything else you can do on school safety.
00:22:26.160Funding for school safety should be a no-brainer.
00:22:29.480There's not a single Democrat who opposes it on principle.
00:22:33.140But every time I've tried to force a vote on it, Schumer has blocked it because his view is if he can't take away law-abiding citizens' guns, he's not willing to do anything.
00:22:49.760Part of the problem, Michael, the press are active advocates and partisans.
00:23:00.600I've never seen one Democrat asked why they vote against and filibuster school safety funding, funds for police officers in schools, funds to put bulletproof doors and bulletproof glass in classrooms and locks that an assailant can't enter the classroom.
00:23:14.780If this guy had entered the school and the school classrooms had been locked and he couldn't get in, he couldn't have murdered these children.
00:23:21.060Last night when I was at the prayer vigil, there was this British reporter, this kind of, you know, ran and chased me and stuck his TV camera in my face.
00:23:29.040And I'm walking out of the door and at first he asked me about what we were seeing there.
00:24:04.580Why is American exceptionalism so horrible?
00:24:08.880The premise of his question is, is factually false.
00:24:11.840And I actually, Newsweek just published something, which, which I'll point out.
00:24:18.840I'm quoting from Newsweek that, that says since 1988, there've been a total of nine attacks similar to the Robb elementary school shooting.
00:24:45.940The U.S. is well below the world average in terms of the number of mass public shootings.
00:24:50.560And the global increase over time has been much bigger than for the United States.
00:24:55.400And it goes on to say that, by our count, the U.S. makes up less than 1.13 percent of the mass public shooters, 1.77 percent of the murders, and 2.19 percent of their attacks.
00:25:10.460All of these are much less than the United States' 4.6 percent share of world population.
00:25:17.020And it goes on to say, again, this is a quote, out of the 101 countries where we have identified mass public shootings occurring, the United States ranks 66th in per capita frequency of these attacks and 56th in the murder rate.
00:25:35.600And on this issue in particular, the press is so wildly dishonest that I understand why people at home don't understand what to do about it.
00:25:50.100Most people at home don't know that there are laws we could pass that would stop felons and fugitives from illegally buying guns and put them in jail, but the Democrats are blocking them.
00:26:03.380Most people don't know that the Democrats have been blocking more funding for school safety for years.
00:26:08.880And the press will not report it, and that's why things like this podcast, I think, matter.
00:26:13.620If this show and other shows like it can do nothing else beyond break up what is an extremely dishonest, uniform narrative, that could be politically quite productive.
00:26:23.860Now, this isn't the only venue on which you can discuss these sorts of things.
00:26:28.580As you know, you, Senator, and you, all of you out there in podcast land, there is another series where you can go even further.
00:26:36.340If you are a Verdict Plus subscriber, that is The Cloak Room with Liz Wheeler.
00:26:44.740Unfortunately, we have to talk about Beto O'Rourke's shameful stunt at the press conference.
00:26:49.880Senator, you were there at the press conference when Beto interrupted Governor Greg Abbott.
00:26:54.140We're going to talk a little bit about that.
00:26:55.320We're also going to talk about the police response or lack thereof to this shooting, what happened, what went wrong, what could have been done, what should have been done that could have potentially saved the lives of these children.
00:27:06.400Please join us for this important conversation on Verdict Plus.
00:27:09.780You can go to verdictwithtedcruise.com slash plus for this special episode of The Cloak Room.
00:27:15.320There is lots more coming up on The Cloak Room and, of course, on the next episode of Verdict.
00:27:19.620So make sure to get your mailbag questions.
00:27:33.900This episode of Verdict with Ted Cruz is being brought to you by Jobs, Freedom, and Security Pack, a political action committee dedicated to supporting conservative causes, organizations, and candidates across the country.
00:27:46.480In 2022, Jobs, Freedom, and Security Pack plans to donate to conservative candidates running for Congress and help the Republican Party across the nation.