Verdict with Ted Cruz - Do Something

00:00:00.000 This is an iHeart Podcast.

00:00:02.340 Guaranteed human.

00:00:04.740 Do something.

00:00:06.240 Do something.

00:00:08.040 Do something.

00:00:09.700 That is the loudest refrain of demagogues

00:00:13.500 in the wake of the tragic elementary school shooting

00:00:16.800 in Uvalde, Texas.

00:00:19.100 But what exactly are we supposed to do?

00:00:22.760 This is Verdict with Ted Cruz.

00:00:30.680 Today's episode of Verdict with Ted Cruz

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00:04:09.460 Welcome back to Verdict with Ted Cruz.

00:04:11.260 I'm Michael Knowles.

00:04:13.320 Senator, everyone is debating not just the horrific incident that happened in Uvalde,

00:04:21.140 the shooting at this elementary school, but it seems like from the very second that this

00:04:25.940 happened, you had demagogues pushing their own pre-existing political agenda and yelling

00:04:33.300 and saying, do something, do something, and mocking and deriding anyone who suggested that

00:04:38.480 we ought to pray about this and we ought to let people grieve and mourn.

00:04:43.060 You have not just been observing this from afar.

00:04:45.540 You have been down in Uvalde.

00:04:48.240 What have you seen?

00:04:49.720 Yesterday morning, I flew into Uvalde.

00:04:54.040 I went first to meet with the local leaders in law enforcement.

00:04:58.780 Met with the mayor.

00:05:00.200 Met with the county judge.

00:05:02.160 Met with a sheriff who's absolutely distraught.

00:05:05.440 Met with Texas DPS and the FBI, the district attorney's office, and the superintendent of

00:05:14.020 the school board, and the chief of the school police.

00:05:19.660 And we started the day with about a two-hour briefing of what we knew at that point.

00:05:25.240 You know, what we know is evolving.

00:05:27.320 We know more today than we knew yesterday.

00:05:28.920 But the shooter, 18 years old, as you know, in the morning got up and shot his grandmother in the face.

00:05:42.260 And then he got in a car, a truck actually, her truck, and drove the truck just down the street.

00:05:49.320 So her house is just a couple of blocks from the school, so he didn't go very far.

00:05:55.600 And he crashed the truck into a drainage ditch.

00:06:01.880 And the drainage ditch goes down about six, eight feet.

00:06:04.660 And I saw, I was at the school yesterday.

00:06:06.580 I saw the truck, which is still down in the drainage ditch.

00:06:10.480 He had gone through a fence and down into the ditch and crashed there, broken the tires off the axles.

00:06:15.400 And then he got out of the truck, and it was right next to the elementary school.

00:06:21.980 And he went into the elementary school.

00:06:24.580 And the facts are still unfolding about when exactly law enforcement encountered him.

00:06:31.940 What we were told yesterday appears to be different from what the facts are today.

00:06:35.780 But he entered the back door of the elementary school.

00:06:40.660 And it was a door that's right next to the teacher's parking lot.

00:06:45.400 And by all appearances, that back door was unlocked, and he walked directly into it.

00:06:51.260 He walked into it carrying a gun.

00:06:54.380 He went down the hallway and entered a classroom.

00:06:58.460 It was a fourth-grade classroom.

00:07:00.740 That classroom was adjoining to another classroom.

00:07:03.880 So there were two classrooms that were adjoining, connected by a door in between.

00:07:07.840 And he terrorized those children and executed those children.

00:07:15.700 And law enforcement arrived.

00:07:18.940 What they're saying today, what DPS has said today, is that law enforcement arrived 12 minutes after he crashed the truck into that ditch.

00:07:29.020 And he barricaded himself into that classroom.

00:07:36.880 And a gunfight ensued.

00:07:40.080 That gunfight lasted sometime anywhere between 40 minutes and an hour.

00:07:45.300 And when I met with the FBI and law enforcement, they were reviewing the footage.

00:07:48.940 And they're trying to set the precise timeline.

00:07:51.480 But it was an extended, it was a protracted gunfight.

00:07:55.460 Three law enforcement officers were wounded, although thankfully none of them were seriously wounded.

00:08:01.720 And 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.

00:08:16.000 You know, the community had a prayer vigil, and it was packed.

00:08:19.960 It was inside this big indoor barn where they have bull riding and they have rodeos there.

00:08:26.940 You know, Uvalde is a small town.

00:08:29.000 It's in South Texas.

00:08:29.960 It's a pretty rural town.

00:08:33.960 It's outside of San Antonio, but it's not a big city.

00:08:39.880 It's not a big suburb.

00:08:40.940 It is a small South Texas town.

00:08:44.020 And the community is just shattered.

00:08:48.220 Is the grief, the agony you could see.

00:08:53.900 You could see parents just in tears wailing.

00:08:59.960 You could see grandparents.

00:09:01.360 You could see students.

00:09:03.680 High school students walking in with just this look of sort of glazed shock.

00:09:08.840 You know, this was the first school shooting since I became a parent.

00:09:13.160 And 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.

00:09:20.060 But this was the first one since I became a parent.

00:09:22.920 And I didn't get it before I was a parent.

00:09:26.980 And you would always hear people say, you're hugging your kid closer tonight.

00:09:30.480 This is the worst thing you could possibly imagine.

00:09:32.340 And I always thought, obviously, this is incredibly tragic.

00:09:35.520 But what does that mean?

00:09:36.500 You hug your kid closer.

00:09:37.580 Because you just, if you are a parent, you just, you think this is the singular horror that you can imagine.

00:09:44.400 And 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.

00:09:52.240 I thought, can you let people mourn a little bit?

00:09:55.360 Can you let people grieve a little bit?

00:09:56.940 Can you just give it two seconds before this has to become some national debate on anyone's pet project?

00:10:04.200 And 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.

00:10:13.340 I've represented Texas for 10 years.

00:10:16.860 And we've had way too many of these.

00:10:19.600 Santa Fe High School is less than an hour outside of Houston.

00:10:22.000 When that lunatic began murdering high school kids there, I was at home.

00:10:28.560 I got a call at home. 0.68

00:10:29.860 I jumped in a truck and headed down to Santa Fe.

00:10:31.820 I was there within an hour of when the shooting happened.

00:10:37.180 Sutherland Springs is another small town, rural town outside of San Antonio.

00:10:43.020 Worst church shooting in U.S. history.

00:10:45.380 I was there the day after Sutherland Springs.

00:10:48.240 I 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.

00:11:07.640 He shot and murdered.

00:11:09.660 I was there in Midland, Odessa with another mass murderer there.

00:11:12.980 I was there in El Paso, Texas with another mass murderer there.

00:11:16.420 I was in Dallas with another mass murderer who targeted police officers.

00:11:21.560 There 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.

00:11:34.520 Many, if not most, of these murderers come from a home without a strong and loving father.

00:11:39.600 Whether 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.

00:11:53.740 And 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.

00:12:06.900 But what your political opponents are going to say is they're going to say, well, OK, yeah, enough.

00:12:11.280 We'll do something about it.

00:12:12.920 And I almost I mean, I guess now there is this national debate going on.

00:12:17.940 And so it's been a couple of days after this shooting and people are just going to be debating all of these policies.

00:12:23.260 But it seems almost tired at this point to recite the same old litany because it's the same old debate every time.

00:12:31.120 But the do something is not enough.

00:12:34.040 And 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.

00:12:44.360 Even The Washington Post admitted that when Marco Rubio said it in 2015.

00:12:48.160 Even the Post fact checker had to admit that that point was right.

00:12:51.340 Then you get on to other proposals that could possibly even be made here.

00:12:56.820 What would that be to ban guns entirely?

00:12:59.160 Well, you're going to run up against a constitutional problem, a practical problem.

00:13:02.700 There are more guns than people in this country.

00:13:04.520 There's no political will whatsoever to ban guns.

00:13:07.180 And there's not a lot of evidence that banning guns would reduce the murder rate.

00:13:10.200 When they banned handguns in the UK, the murder rate increased significantly.

00:13:13.920 It almost doubled in about six years.

00:13:15.380 So it's the same old litany of issues.

00:13:17.800 And 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.

00:13:26.620 Because they don't have any more of an answer on what to do than anybody else does.

00:13:30.940 They're just demagoguing the issue and pretending that their sympathetic outrage is somehow productive.

00:13:37.000 So let's assess, how do we stop these?

00:13:41.680 Inevitably, 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.

00:13:53.060 Which their objective, and more and more the left is quite candid about it, is to disarm law-abiding citizens throughout this country.

00:14:00.200 To take away your firearms, my firearms, and those of law-abiding citizens.

00:14:06.240 There are many problems with that, but let's just start with a basic one.

00:14:09.440 It doesn't work.

00:14:11.700 Taking away every firearm that Michael Knowles owns would not have stopped this psychopath from murdering children in Uvalde.

00:14:20.300 And by the way, we see that in Chicago and New York and D.C. and California, where they have very strict gun control.

00:14:27.960 And the criminals still have guns and still carry out murders.

00:14:33.120 If you could wave a magic wand and eliminate all firearms in America, there would be substantially more murders than there are today.

00:14:43.900 I'll give you a statistic from the Obama White House.

00:14:47.120 Now, the Obama White House is hardly a right-wing source.

00:14:50.700 Here'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.

00:15:03.080 Yeah.

00:15:04.060 Used to stop the commission of a crime.

00:15:06.380 So if the left succeeds in taking away everyone's firearms, all of the instances.

00:15:12.480 Now, that doesn't mean that there are between 500,000 and a million gunfights.

00:15:17.120 Many, many times firearms are used to stop a robbery, to stop an attempted murder, to stop a kidnapping, where the gun isn't fired.

00:15:25.860 But simply brandishing the gun causes the criminal to abandon the criminal effort.

00:15:30.960 And that happens, according to the Obama White House, between 500,000 and a million times a year.

00:15:36.960 So 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.

00:15:51.340 And 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.

00:16:02.940 And 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.

00:16:16.040 But let's not skip this question.

00:16:18.120 Is there something we can do to stop these?

00:16:20.520 And I believe the answer is yes.

00:16:21.720 When I first arrived in the Senate, I got elected in 2012.

00:16:27.000 Just after I arrived, Sandy Hook, the horrific school shooting in Connecticut occurred.

00:16:32.280 And so we had this debate 10 years ago.

00:16:34.620 And when I looked at it, I said, then we need to do something.

00:16:38.080 What do we need to do? 0.59

00:16:39.300 Let's get the guns out of the hands of the violent criminals, the felons and fugitives and those with serious mental illness. 0.63

00:16:45.160 And so I authored legislation.

00:16:47.120 It was called Grassley-Cruz.

00:16:48.420 Grassley-Cruz was legislation targeting the bad guys.

00:16:53.420 And so one of the things it did is it improved the background check system.

00:16:58.840 If you look at, we have a background check.

00:17:00.260 So if you or I go buy a gun, you got to run a background check.

00:17:03.120 It runs the check to see if you have a felony conviction.

00:17:06.760 That database is only as good as the information in it.

00:17:09.980 And a lot of the federal government has been lousy at reporting felony convictions to the database.

00:17:15.120 And a lot of states, interestingly enough, many of them blue states, have terrible records reporting the felonies to the background check database.

00:17:25.380 If you look at Sutherland Springs, which was the church shooting in Texas, in that instance, that crime should have been prevented.

00:17:32.180 Why?

00:17:32.620 Because the shooter there, it was already illegal for him to buy a firearm.

00:17:36.380 He was a felon, and he had a domestic violence conviction, so it was doubly illegal.

00:17:41.020 So why was he able to buy his firearm?

00:17:43.020 Well, the reason is that the Obama Air Force never reported the conviction to the background check database.

00:17:49.860 So he went into a gun store to buy his gun.

00:17:53.360 He filled out the background check form, and he lied.

00:17:55.820 He was asked, do you have a felony conviction?

00:17:57.780 He checked the box and said no.

00:17:59.600 He was asked, do you have a domestic violence conviction?

00:18:01.880 He checked the box and said no.

00:18:03.120 They 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.

00:18:15.020 So 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.

00:18:27.000 It also provided funds for states to do the same thing for state convictions.

00:18:31.040 But beyond that, every year, there's a vast number of felons and fugitives who try to illegally buy firearms.

00:18:41.100 The Department of Justice prosecutes almost none of them.

00:18:44.360 In fact, I'll give you the stats from 2010, which was the last year there were stats from before when I drafted Grassley-Cruz.

00:18:50.860 In that year, there were 48,000 felons and fugitives who tried to illegally buy firearms.

00:18:59.280 48,000 of those, do you know how many the Department of Justice prosecuted?

00:19:05.300 44.

00:19:07.000 And by the way, that continues to this day.

00:19:09.260 The Biden Justice Department still is not prosecuting felons and fugitives who tried to illegally buy firearms.

00:19:16.280 Grassley-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.

00:19:28.280 Now, what happened to Grassley-Cruz?

00:19:33.040 We voted on the Senate floor on that bill.

00:19:35.780 It got a majority.

00:19:37.660 It got 52 votes in favor of it.

00:19:40.960 Nine Democrats voted in favor of Grassley-Cruz.

00:19:43.880 Got the most bipartisan support of any of the comprehensive legislation that was voted on.

00:19:49.820 So why didn't it pass?

00:19:51.200 Well, it was the Harry Reid Democrat Senate.

00:19:54.820 And the Democrats filibustered it.

00:19:57.180 They demanded 60 votes.

00:19:59.180 So even though I had 52 votes, we didn't have 60.

00:20:02.640 And so it failed because Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer and the Democrats filibustered it.

00:20:07.680 They're not really focused on this issue, right?

00:20:09.240 They'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.

00:20:16.900 But 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.

00:20:24.000 You've got a kid who was showing serious signs of trouble.

00:20:27.980 He should have been identified much sooner.

00:20:30.420 There should have been safeguards placed around this kid much, much sooner.

00:20:34.060 There are now questions about when law enforcement got there, if law enforcement did enough in the moment.

00:20:39.820 You'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.

00:20:49.480 I 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.

00:20:59.980 And we talked about how do you prevent them.

00:21:02.060 And 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.

00:21:17.140 And in particular, here's what the experts have recommended.

00:21:19.360 They've said you don't want multiple means of entering the school.

00:21:24.200 You don't want lots and lots of open doors.

00:21:26.120 If you look at how the shooter got in in Uvalde, he went into a back door that was unlocked.

00:21:34.480 That'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.

00:21:43.500 Same thing in Santa Fe.

00:21:44.900 So twice the same thing happened.

00:21:46.640 What the recommendations were is have a single point of entry for the school.

00:21:53.040 One door that everyone comes through.

00:21:55.760 If 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.

00:22:06.120 At 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.

00:22:16.280 That has a greater impact on keeping kids safe than just about anything else you can do on school safety.

00:22:26.160 Funding for school safety should be a no-brainer.

00:22:29.480 There's not a single Democrat who opposes it on principle.

00:22:33.140 But 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.

00:22:46.980 I hope after this that changes.

00:22:49.760 Part of the problem, Michael, the press are active advocates and partisans.

00:23:00.600 I'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.

00:23:14.780 If 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.

00:23:21.060 Last 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.

00:23:29.040 And I'm walking out of the door and at first he asked me about what we were seeing there.

00:23:36.540 And I said, look, this is horrific.

00:23:38.340 This is, there are 19 sets of parents who are not going to be able to hug their child tonight or see their child.

00:23:46.440 And it is, it's the most unspeakable evil we could imagine.

00:23:49.940 And he immediately jumped into, well, don't we need to pass gun control?

00:23:53.040 And I didn't want to argue with this guy and I'm disengaging. 0.62

00:23:56.100 He's a British guy, was an obnoxious leftist. 1.00

00:23:58.300 And he's like, why does this only happen in America? 0.54

00:24:01.600 Doesn't happen anywhere else in the world.

00:24:03.420 It's only America. 0.86

00:24:04.580 Why is American exceptionalism so horrible?

00:24:08.880 The premise of his question is, is factually false.

00:24:11.840 And I actually, Newsweek just published something, which, which I'll point out.

00:24:18.840 I'm quoting from Newsweek that, that says since 1988, there've been a total of nine attacks similar to the Robb elementary school shooting.

00:24:27.300 Nine is nine too many.

00:24:29.280 But once you adjust for population, there are many other countries from Germany to Russia to Finland.

00:24:34.580 That have comparable rates of school shootings.

00:24:37.300 And in fact, it goes in and it breaks down according to a Crime Prevention Research Center report from 2020.

00:24:44.260 And this is a quote.

00:24:45.940 The U.S. is well below the world average in terms of the number of mass public shootings.

00:24:50.560 And the global increase over time has been much bigger than for the United States.

00:24:55.400 And 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.

00:25:10.460 All of these are much less than the United States' 4.6 percent share of world population.

00:25:17.020 And 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.

00:25:35.600 And 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.

00:25:50.100 Most 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.

00:26:02.260 Most people don't know that.

00:26:03.380 Most people don't know that the Democrats have been blocking more funding for school safety for years.

00:26:08.880 And the press will not report it, and that's why things like this podcast, I think, matter.

00:26:13.620 If 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.

00:26:23.860 Now, this isn't the only venue on which you can discuss these sorts of things.

00:26:28.580 As you know, you, Senator, and you, all of you out there in podcast land, there is another series where you can go even further.

00:26:36.340 If you are a Verdict Plus subscriber, that is The Cloak Room with Liz Wheeler.

00:26:40.960 Liz, what will you be talking about?

00:26:42.760 Hi, Senator.

00:26:44.000 Hi, Michael.

00:26:44.740 Unfortunately, we have to talk about Beto O'Rourke's shameful stunt at the press conference.

00:26:49.880 Senator, you were there at the press conference when Beto interrupted Governor Greg Abbott.

00:26:54.140 We're going to talk a little bit about that.

00:26:55.320 We'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.

00:27:06.400 Please join us for this important conversation on Verdict Plus.

00:27:09.780 You can go to verdictwithtedcruise.com slash plus for this special episode of The Cloak Room.

00:27:15.320 There is lots more coming up on The Cloak Room and, of course, on the next episode of Verdict.

00:27:19.620 So make sure to get your mailbag questions.

00:27:21.160 And, Senator, thank you very much.

00:27:22.600 I'm Michael Knowles.

00:27:23.440 This is Verdict with Ted Cruz.

00:27:33.900 This 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.

00:27:46.480 In 2022, Jobs, Freedom, and Security Pack plans to donate to conservative candidates running for Congress and help the Republican Party across the nation.

00:27:56.560 This is an iHeart Podcast.

00:27:59.340 Guaranteed Human.

Verdict with Ted Cruz - May 27, 2022

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