Thursday, March 28

Trump speaks at NRA meeting after Uvalde massacre – latest


Texas police admit ruling gunman inactive was ‘the wrong decision’

Officials have admitted to critical delays in the law enforcement response to the massacre of 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in Texas, where students inside Robb Elementary School made several calls to 911 on Tuesday within the hour officers arrived and when the 18-year-old gunman was fatally shot by an officer.

Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, admitted that officers did not breach a classroom door and kill Salvador Ramos for more than an hour after initially arriving on Tuesday, falsely believing the gunman was “barricaded” and no longer an active shooter threat, despite pleas from schoolchildren inside their classrooms.

Meanwhile, hundreds of people gathered in Houston, Texas on Friday to protest the National Rifle Association’s annual conference, where Senator Ted Cruz and former president Donald Trump addressed the gun rights lobby group to claim their political opponents are exploiting tragedy, despite supporting the politically powerful lobbyists just days after the kilings.

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As Texas mourns, Al Sharpton offers a eulogy for 10 dead in Buffalo hate attack

Barely more than a week before the Uvalde shooting, a white supremacist killed 10 people in a mass shooting at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket.

Reverend Al Sharpton noted the parallel on Friday at a funeral for Geraldine Chapman Talley, one of the victims of the Buffalo shooting

“Unless we start dealing with this easy access to guns, all of us are targets,” the activist said. “It seems crazy that if you went in Texas to buy a beer, you gotta prove you’re 18 years old, but you can go buy an automatic rifle. That’s how jaded we are.”

Josh Marcus28 May 2022 02:30

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WATCH: Texas officials say no initial efforts made by 19 officers to break down door

Texas police are coming in for heavy criticism after it was revealed it took more than an hour for them to engage and kill Uvalde gunman Salvador Ramos, despite having large numbers of officers on scene.

In a heated exchange on Friday, CNN reporter Shimon Prokupecz grilled state officials about why the 19 officers stationed in a hallway near Ramos didn’t do more.

“None at that time,” Steven McCraw, of the state’s public safety agency, responded.

Josh Marcus28 May 2022 02:00

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Mitch McConnell needs 10 Republicans to support gun control legislation. Can he find them?

Former House Speaker John Boehneronce said that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell “holds his feelings, thoughts and emotions in a lockbox closed so tightly that whenever one of them seeps out, bystanders are struck silent”. On Thursday, he left everyone in Washington speechless when he told CNN that he directed Senator John Cornyn of Texas to begin working with Democrats, including Senators Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, to find a “bipartisan solution”.

For Democrats, Mr McConnell’s words offer a glimmer of hope. Ahead of Donald Trump’s second impeachment for inciting the 6 January Capitol attack, the minority leader never fully came out in favor of conviction even though he was not shy about his fury at Mr Trump; as New York Times’s Alex Burns and Jonathan Martin wrote in their book This Will Not Pass, the Kentucky Republican had hoped for an overwhelming bipartisan consensus to impeach Mr Trump for his actions, but soon realized not enough Republicans were willing to cross the president.

This time, Mr McConnell is coming out front, and likely knows there is a chance that 10 Republicans will get to yes.

Read more in Eric Garcia’s latest column from Washington.

Josh Marcus28 May 2022 01:40

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Handcuffs, climbing a fence, racing past police: a mother’s harrowing story

As police dithered for over an hour on how to respond to the Uvalde shooting, one mother took things into her own hands.

Angeli Rose Gomez, a mother of a second-grader at Robb Elementary School, told The Wall Street Journal that when she heard about the shooting in progress, she drove 40 miles to the school to rescure her two children.

A US Marshal then put her in handcuffs because she was attempting to get inside, with federal agents deeming this intervening in an active investigation.

She knew some local police officers, who convinced the Marshals to uncuff her.

Then, distancing herself from the crowd, she hopped a fence and ran into the school to rescue her children.

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A worthy question: Why are police statements on Uvalde mainly in English?

To an outsider looking, it might not seem that strange that police in Uvalde are giving their main updates to the public in English.

But that’s a glaring omission, given the local context. As Los Angeles Times writer Fidel Martinez notes, most residents of the small South Texas town speak Spanish as a first language, raising the question: whom are these updates really for?

“Their focus appears to be to exculpate themselves from their abject failure to [national] press,” Mr Martinez wrote on Twitter on Friday.

Josh Marcus28 May 2022 01:00

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Six major police mistakes in the Uvalde shooting have Texans ‘livid’

Texas Governor Greg Abbott says he is “livid” about what he’s learned of the police response to the Uvalde mass shooting—and so are families in the tight-knit South Texas community.

“Law enforcement is going to earn the trust of the public by making sure they thoroughly and exhaustively investigate exactly what happened,” Mr Abbott said on Friday.

As more details about the school shooting emerge, it’s clear multiple law enforcement failures contributed to the tragic final death toll of 21 people.

Officers made bizarre decisions, missed key factors, or failed to follow protocol at seemingly every moment along the way, from long before the shooting to its crucial early moments.

Josh Marcus has the details.

Josh Marcus28 May 2022 00:40

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Trump dings Abbott and other Republicans for pulling out NRA meeting after shooting in Uvalde

Former President Donald Trump mocked other Republicans for pulling out of the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting in Houston after the shooting in Uvalde killed 21 people earlier this week.

Mr Trump addressed the annual meeting at the George R Brown Convention Center just three days after Salvador Ramos opened fire and killed 19 children and two adults at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

“And unlike some, I didn’t disappoint you by not showing up,” Mr Trump told the crowd to applause.

Eric Garcia has the story.

Josh Marcus28 May 2022 00:20

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Donald Trump ties Texas shooting to midterms and 2024 campaign

He told the audience at a National Rifle Association event in Houston that the Second Amendment was “under siege” by people who “wish to turn citisens into subjects and take more power for themselves,” a seeming reference to gun control proposals.

As a result, the former president said, Republican voters are going to “vote for tough on crime, pro-Second Amendment candidates in record numbers” in 202, then take back the White House in 2024.

“We are going to protect our communities, protect our schools, and protect our precious children,” he said. “We are going to secure our liberties for ourselves and for every generation.”

Josh Marcus28 May 2022 00:00

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Donald Trump brags about being gun-owners’ ‘best friend’ during NRA speech

Just three days after 21 people were killed in a mass school shooting in Texas, Donald Trump is bragging at an NRA event in Houston about how he was the “best friend” of gun owners while he was in the White House.

Mr Trump highlighted how he deemed gun stores critical infrastructure during the pandemic.

He also spoke about an upcoming Supreme Court decision on self-defence rights, touting how he appointed three conservative Justices to the high court.

“Your rights to self-defence do not end when you step out your front,” he said.

Josh Marcus27 May 2022 23:41

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Trump joins Republican officials in blaming the state of mental health, not proliferation of high-powered guns, for gun violence

Trump joined Ted Cruz and other Republican officials and gun rights proponents in blaming “evil” and the nation’s mental health – as well as what he characterised as an American culture in decline, a lack of discipline and the erosion of so-called family values – for the epidemic of mass gun violence.

He also claimed that the “only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” – despite more than a dozen police officers on the scene at Robb Elementary that failed to stop the gunman while children called 911 at least nine times over an hour before he was killed.

Alex Woodward27 May 2022 23:18



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