If there are any defenders left for law enforcement’s dithering response to last week’s school shooting, hearing the tale of one family’s heartbreak should put an end to that.
In an interview with CNN on Sunday, Texas state Sen. Roland Gutierrez recounted what he said was a conversation he had with the mother of a fourth-grade girl who was shot in the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde but apparently survived the initial wound.
What she could not survive, though, was the delay in armed men coming to her rescue.
“The mom told me her child had been shot by one bullet through the back, through the kidney area,” Gutierrez told CNN’s Dana Bash, at about the 45-second mark in the interview below.
“The first responder that they eventually talked to said that their child likely bled out.”
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“In that span of 30 or 40 minutes extra, that little girl might have lived. That little girl might have lived,” Gutierrez said.
“So, absolutely, these mistakes may have led to the passing away of these children as well.”
It’s impossible to imagine the feelings of any mother or father knowing that about a child’s death.
But those are words every law enforcement official should be bearing in mind when faced with the combination of evil and madness that an armed attack on a building full of innocent children represents.
And they should hammer home the irrefutable argument conservatives wield in favor of the constitutionally guaranteed right of the American people to defend themselves:
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. And that good guy has to be damn willing to use it.
If that segment of Gutierrez’s interview with Bash had been his only contribution to the discussion surrounding the Uvalde school massacre, he would have been doing his constituents proud.
Unfortunately, Gutierrez is a Democrat and has been generating most of his headlines since the attack by showboating for the Democratic fetish of restricting Second Amendment freedoms in the name of illusory safety.
Following on the heels of the abrasive Robert “Beto” O’Rourke, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate who disrupted a news conference by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Wednesday in order to make a Texas tragedy all about his political ambitions, Gutierrez pulled a similar stunt on Friday.
In the middle of an Abbott news conference, according to Austin’s KVUE-TV, Gutierrez used a question-and-answer session to demand that Abbott call a special session of the Texas Legislature to pass gun control measures.
According to KVUE, Gutierrez claimed that his move was not a political stunt, but reality dictates otherwise.
The odds against Abbott calling a special session on gun control at any time are astronomical. Now, in the immediate aftermath of a school shooting, some Republican lawmakers have come against it.
The chairman of the state Republican Party has called it a “terrible idea.”
A special session now is a terrible idea, which is why Democrats are calling for one. https://t.co/YCysAZvhw8
— Matt Rinaldi (@MattRinaldiTX) May 28, 2022
And the gubernatorial election is in November. Republican voters would be unlikely to approve of the idea of Abbott bending to Democrats on Second Amendment rights.
Do you think Texas Gov. Greg Abbott needs to call a special session for gun control laws?
Gutierrez had to know all of that, which makes his call for a special session sound less like a sincere proposal and more like a grab for publicity.
(Considering the last time the Texas Legislature had a special session, Democrats made a spectacle of themselves trying to destroy it, this newfound respect for the legislative process has to be taken with a considerable grain of salt.)
As if to prove the point that Gutierrez was doing little more than hustling for headlines, the chairman of the Texas Democratic Party released a statement Friday publicizing Gutierrez’s stunt and attacking Abbott’s “lies.”
“Not one more child. Not one more teacher. Not one more Texan,” Gilberto Hinojosa said. “We’re proud of our Democratic Leaders for standing up to Greg Abbott’s lies every chance they get, and the Texas Democratic Party joins their call for a special session to ban automatic weapons and pass life-saving legislation to end gun violence in Texas.”
When Democrats are talking like that, it’s because they’re not really interested in a political deal — and they know the other side isn’t, either.
So, like a broken clock, Gutierrez’s statements should be considered like any Democrats’ when it comes to a question of American freedoms (or anything else) — only periodically truthful, and rarely at that.
Still, under the circumstances, it’s difficult to imagine even a liberal Democrat lying about the words of a bereaved mother. And in this case, the words are heartbreaking.
What happened in Uvalde was a mass crime by one man, an 18-year-old named Salvador Ramos.
What made it worse was the dithering by many, fully grown men who should have known better.
And what’s best to be remembered is that one little girl might have died because good men, heavily armed, did nothing.
Gutierrez probably doesn’t realize it, but that wasn’t an argument for gun control. It was exactly the opposite.
