(Bloomberg) — Beto O’Rourke, the Democratic candidate for governor of Texas, interrupted a press conference held by Republican incumbent Greg Abbott, who blamed Tuesday’s mass school shooting on a mental health crisis amid a national debate over gun control.
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As Abbott turned the microphone over to his lieutenant governor after delivering his remarks, O’Rourke approached the stage. A loud back-and-forth ensued, with Senator Ted Cruz telling O’Rourke several times to sit down and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick telling O’Rourke he was a disgrace.
@BetoORourke crashing Gov. Abbott’s Uvalde news conference. “Sit down and don’t pull this stunt,” @tedcruz tells him. https://t.co/iz17312Pob
— Mike DeBonis (@mikedebonis) May 25, 2022
O’Rourke, who has been a vocal advocate of gun control, continued to shout as he was escorted out of the Uvalde school auditorium. His comments weren’t clearly audible on live feeds.
@BetoORourke says. #Uvalde
— Julio Ricardo Varela (@julito77) May 25, 2022
“Now is not the time to politicize pain and suffering,” Dade Phelan, House Speaker, said after the outburst.
On Tuesday, an 18-year-old gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school. The massacre came weeks after one at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, that left 10 Black people dead and wounded three others.
Legislative efforts on national gun control have made little progress on Capitol Hill. Texas is fiercely pro-gun rights, and Abbott last year signed legislation allowing Texans to carry handguns without any sort of license.
Abbott said 18-year-olds in Texas have been allowed to buy a long gun for 60 years, but that mass shootings seem to be a more recent phenomenon. He said that what had changed was a growing mental-health crisis.
“We haven’t had episodes like this before,” Abbott said. “One thing that has substantially changed is the status of mental health in our communities.”
Abbott’s comments about deficient mental-health resources came just a day before National Rifle Association leaders are expected to make similar assertions when their national convention opens in Houston.
The gunman, Salvador Ramos, on Tuesday warned about his plans in social media posts in the minutes before the attack, Abbott said.
Ramos posted on Facebook that he was going to shoot his grandmother, then posted that he had done it, Abbott told journalists Wednesday in Uvalde. Ramos then posted that he was going to shoot an elementary school.
A spokesman for Facebook said that the posts Abbott referred to were actually direct messages to a specific person. Read more: Texas Gunman Posted on Facebook About Plans, Abbott Says
They “were private one-to-one text messages that were discovered after the terrible tragedy occurred,” spokesman Andy Stone posted on Twitter. “We are closely cooperating with law enforcement in their ongoing investigation.”
After the gunman shot his grandmother, she called police, who pursued the gunman to the school, where he crashed his truck, then got out and went inside. After shooting children and school staff members, he barricaded himself in a classroom and was shot dead by a Border Patrol agent.
(Everytown for Gun Safety, which advocates for universal background checks and gun-safety measures, is backed by Michael Bloomberg, founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent company Bloomberg LP.)
(Updates with more details from press conference)
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