The National Rifle Association’s leadership forum started about an hour late, likely because of the long lines of NRA members waiting to pass through the magnetometers.
After NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre began the event by calling for fully funding police and touting the NRA’s training for school security officers, the first address from an elected official was from Texas governor Greg Abbott. Abbott’s decision to send a video address and travel to Uvalde was a wise one. Abbott attempted to argue that a law against crimes committed with a firearm are not sufficient without enforcement. “In Uvalde, the shooter committed a felony before he pulled the trigger. In Texas, it is a felony to possess a firearm on school premises, but that did not stop him.” (Before his school rampage, the shooter committed another felony when he shot his grandmother in the face; she is receiving care at a San Antonio area hospital.)
Shortly after his pre-taped remarks played in Houston, Abbott addressed reporters at a press conference in Uvalde. “I was misled. I am livid about what happened. I was on this very stage two days ago . . . telling the public information that had been told to me.” Abbott pledged that a law enforcement investigation will “get to the bottom of every fact with absolute certainty. There are people who deserve answers the most, and those are the families.”
Abbott was followed by South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, who offered a speech that did not appear to have been dramatically rewritten or altered after the school shooting in Uvalde. Noem offered appropriate remarks about the shooting, but then offered up a lot of red meat on conservative issues.
“George Mason warned, ‘to disarm the people is the most effectual way to enslave them.’ The pandemic showed us that freedom is just as fragile and our time as it was in 1775. Fortunately, more Americans are waking up to this. From 2020 to 2021, around 11 million people in this country purchased a firearm for the very first time . . . About half of them were women. Yeah. And almost sixty percent of them were over the age of 45. I believe the number one reason was because of fear of civil unrest and to protect themselves and their families. We have seen the same type of radical mob mentality taking place on the streets of American cities that swept Paris in the 1790s.”
The third elected official to address the convention, Texas senator Ted Cruz, seemed to recognize that Uvalde was front and center on the country’s mind, and that was the centerpiece of his remarks.
“We’re gathered today under crushing darkness,” Cruz began. He described visiting Uvalde: “The entire community was reeling. We prayed together and we cried together . . . There are no words to describe the monster who enters a school and murders little children — nineteen little kids, 19 families who lost their little boys and little girls, and two families of teachers who are not with us anymore . . . It is an evil that has happened too many damn times.”
Fuming about the Uvalde shooter, Cruz swore, “that son of a bitch passed a background check.”
Cruz argued that certain mass shootings, but not all, might have been prevented if Congress had passed legislation offered by Senators Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, and himself — several times since 2013. That bill would have authorized $20 million per year for five years to ensure that information is rapidly entered into the National Instant Check System; increased the maximum sentences for straw purchases, firearms trafficking, and lying and buying offenses; and changed the operative definition related to mental health from “mental defective” and “committed to a mental institution” to “mentally incompetent” and “committed to a psychiatric hospital.”
The most notorious case of the NICS system not working correctly in recent years came in the case of the Charleston church shooter in 2015. Local and FBI officials simply didn’t do their job correctly. The shooter should have been denied his firearm purchase because of a felony drug charge, but the FBI examiner called the wrong police department to verify it. No law can overcome human error.