This entire nation was sent reeling last week after 18-year-old high school dropout turned gunman, Salvador Ramos, entered Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, where he barricaded himself inside a 4th-grade classroom and proceeded to gun down 21 human beings with an AR-15 assault rifle. Ramos remained in the classroom for 40-minutes to an hour, before a special Border Patrol unit was finally able to breach the classroom, shoot, and kill the unhinged, mass-murdering teen.
The heinous, mass murder massacre will go down as the state of Texas’s most deadly school shooting in modern history, the nation’s third most deadly shooting, just after the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting and 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, and the country’s third deadly mass shooting in a matter of weeks.
As if the lives of 19 innocent children and 2 beloved teachers weren’t bad enough, the responses we’ve seen coming out of some of the most notable names in the Republican stratosphere, starting well before all the bodies had even been counted, served to add more insult to injury than we can even describe.
We have had to watch as droves of Conservative talking heads and lawmakers have made it crystal clear to the American people that, yea, it’s sad, thoughts and prayers and all of that jazz, but at the end of the day, the lives of our children will never be more important to them than their guns.
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All of them have been absolutely disgusting. But there have been a few key Republicans who have been more gut-churningly heinous than the rest:
Marjorie Taylor Greene: The controversial Georgia Republican lawmaker was one of the first to open her fat mouth in the wake of the Uvalde, Texas, elementary school mass murder. Greene took to Twitter just mere hours after news of the massacre broke, quite literally before all of the bodies had even been counted, and wasted absolutely no time in leaning heavily into the mental illness trope, but finally flat-out saying the quiet part out loud.
“Our nation needs to take a serious look at the state of mental health today. Sometimes meds can be the problem,” Greene wrote in her social media post. “America is failing our youngest generations from decades of rejecting good moral values and teachings. We don’t need more gun control. We need to return to God.”
Ted Cruz: Ted Cruz, who serves as a Senator in the state of Texas where the tragedy took place, has found himself on the receiving end of a metric truckload of backlash that, to say it would be deserved, would be an understatement. The wanna-be Cancunen has served as yet another key Republican figure who has heavily leaned into the “anything but the gun” excuses that we’re consistently seeing out of the Right. However, Cruz got a little worse still when he peddled this talking point at none other than the NRA convention in Houston, TX, just 72 hours after and less than 300 miles away from the Robb Elementary School shooting.
Cruz’s behavior has been so abhorrent in the wake of the massacre that claimed the lives of 19 children and 2 teachers, that he can’t even enjoy a night out at a restaurant in peace, without being confronted by a pissed-off, fed up Texan.
Greg Abbott: Texas’ Republican Governor Greg Abbott has effectively had his ass handed to him by his own constituents over his disgustingly inept response to the Uvalde massacre. While Abbott did end up canceling his appearance at the Houston NRA convention at the very last minutes, opting instead to submit pre-recorded remarks to be played at the event, he has yet to do anything that’s actually useful for the people he is supposed to serve, who are burying their babies and loved ones this week as a result of out of control gun violence.
Abbott is another who has played hard on the “mental illness” blame game in the wake of the shooting, and it’s earned him two brutally interrupted press conferences, families who refuse to even meet with him, and an onslaught of boos and heckling by his own constituents when he met with President Joe Biden at the site of the mass murder yesterday.
Tony Gonzales: Texas state House Rep. Tony Gonzales has been a walking, talking disaster since the moment the news of the Uvalde massacre broke, effectively and consistently digging his own damn hole deeper and deeper with each passing moment. Gonzales first responded to the elementary school mass murder by quoting a Bible verse that seemed to laud the notion of 19 children now being in heaven. The same guy who once promised to “do everything I can to oppose gun grabs from the far Left” made an appearance on Fox News the day after the massacre to blame the murder of 21 human beings on… You guessed it… Mental illness.
Tony’s public image managed to get a little worse still when he was forced to publicly walk back blatantly false claims he made in another appearance on Fox, when he tried to say that Salvador Ramos, the 18-year-old Robb Elementary School gunman, was arrested when he was underage for plotting a school shooting.
Donald Trump: We all knew he would be here.
It took the disgraced former president a full day to breathe a word about the Uvalde shooting, and when he did, he took his post to his own floundering Truth Social platform, where he wrote, “So hard to think or report about anything else after watching the Texas school ‘massacre’ which took place yesterday,” putting the word massacre in quotations for reasons we’re unsure on. “Thank you to the great wisdom and bravery of our Law Enforcement Professionals, and condolences to all who are suffering so gravely with the loss of those incredible souls so close to you. No words can express the sorrow and grief of this absolutely horrible event. It is a moment in time which will never be forgotten!”
We really wish that was the worst he did, though.
Trump was another key GOPer who made quite the appearance at the Houston NRA convention just short days after 19 kids were slaughtered in their 4th-grade classroom. The day before his big speech, Trump did an interview, in which he openly bragged about his upcoming appearance and said that the event and his speech should be “interesting” given the timing of the convention in juxtaposition with the Uvalde massacre. Once actually at the convention and speaking from the stage, it was worse than we even expected it to be. The former guy made a complete mockery of the victims as he read their names from a list, butchering their pronunciation, as a dystopian death knell bell rang out after each name. The speech itself was monstrous, as Trump bragged about the “good guy with a gun” notion, despite the fact that Salvador Ramos remained barricaded in that classroom, slaughtering children, for more than an hour as the “good guy with a gun” police arrested panicked parents in the parking lot.
He also made sure to squeeze in a clear-cut jab at those who decided to cancel their appearances at the event, most namely Gov. Greg Abbott, and wrapped things up with a little dance on the stage following the same speech where he read out the names of 19 dead children.
The Washington Post has released a new analysis on the heels of the Uvalde massacre, detailing the gun violence that children in this nation have been subjected to since the infamous Columbine massacre. To call the statistics unsettling would be the understatement of this century. And yet this is what Republicans subject us to.
Featured image via screen capture
