Texas Democratic Gov. candidate Beto O’Rourke interrupted Texas Gov. Greg Abbott during a news conference in Uvalde after the massacre that left 19 children and two adults dead.
Abbott said he would pass the microphone to Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick when O’Rourke stood up. “You’re not doing anything,” O’Rourke said, adding that the shooting was “totally predictable” because gun laws were not enforced after other shootings in the state.
Beto O’Rourke confronts Governor Abbott at a press conference on the Uvalde school shooting, saying: “The time has come to stop the next shooting right now and you are doing nothing.”
In response, officials on stage call him “sick son of ab-h” and the police accompany him. pic.twitter.com/0YsQp3ZNTO
– CBS News (@CBSNews) May 25, 2022
Patrick told O’Rourke that “his … you’re offline in an embarrassing encounter” and asked O’Rourke to leave the auditorium.
“I can’t believe you’re an ab **** son to come to a place like this to do a political issue,” Patrick shouted about O’Rourke.
Law enforcement officers appeared to escort O’Rourke out of the press conference afterwards. Janet Shamalian of CBS News said it looked like some people had saved seats for O’Rourke.
After O’Rourke was escorted, Abbott did not address the incident directly, but called for unity, saying that “every Texan, every American has a responsibility that we should focus on not ourselves and in our agendas, we must focus on healing and hope that we can offer to those who have suffered unacceptable damage to their lives and their loss. “
“We need all Texans right now to decide personal agendas, think of someone other than ourselves, think of someone who has been hurt, and help someone who has been hurt,” he continued.
After O’Rourke left, he told reporters, “these children died because the governor of the state of Texas, the most powerful man in the state, decided to do nothing.”
“After each of these, he gives a press conference like this, and I wish that when he got to El Paso someone would have gotten up and forced him to be accountable and confronted him and shocked his conscience. “This state to do it. Something,” O’Rourke said. “Because if we don’t do anything, we’ll keep seeing it. Year after year, school after school, child after child. It depends on everyone, on each of us, to do something.”
During his failed presidential career in 2019, O’Rourke was an open advocate for arms control measures. A former congressman, O’Rourke, represented El Paso, where a gunman shot and killed 23 people.
After that shooting, O’Rourke said memorably during a presidential debate, “Yes, we’re taking up arms” about the AR-15s. Abbott and other law enforcement officials said Wednesday that the shooter in Uvalde used an AR-15.
Prior to O’Rourke’s interruption, Abbott called for solutions to the mental health crisis in Uvalde, although he also said the shooter had no known history of mental illness. Abbott said local officials told him “we have a mental health problem, illness, in this community.”
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