In the wake of the mass shooting at the elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, Utah Senator Mitt Romney tweeted …
"Grief overwhelms the soul. Children slaughtered. Lives extinguished. Parents' hearts wrenched. Incomprehensible," Romney wrote. "I offer prayer and condolence but know that it is grossly inadequate. We must find answers."
Jemele Hill, a contributing writer for The Atlantic, tweeted in response to Romney: "Grief does not overwhelm the soul nearly as much as $13M from the NRA overwhelms your bank account. The answer you seek is the money you continue to take."
Broadcaster Soledad O'Brien added: "The NRA gave you just under 14 million dollars, sir. I frequently call this man a coward. Maybe one day the words he says and what he actually does, will match."
(Ewan Palmer. “Full List of Republican Senators Who Receive Funding From the NRA.” Newsweek. May 26, 2022.)
Big money from the National Rifle Association – make no mistake, Republicans like Senator Romney receive it and thus feel indebted to the organization. No wonder these American politicians refuse to have a national dialogue on the epidemic of gun violence. And, as you can see by Romney's tweet, he wants the public to believe that he honestly seeks “answers” to the problem. Hypocrites and their manufactured lies perpetuate this ungodly practice of GOP open palms for blood money.
According to data compiled by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence in 2019, about two dozen sitting Republican senators have received contributions from the NRA. Of those senators, 16 have received more than $1 million.
Topping the list is Utah Senator Mitt Romney, who received more than $13 million in NRA contributions. The NRA money donated to Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, was raised by a number of social media users after Romney tweeted his condolences in the wake of the Uvalde mass shooting.
Included in the list of Republican politicians who receive huge sums of money from the NRA are the following characters we here in Scioto County know so well:
Rob Portman (Ohio) $3,063,327
Mitch McConnell (Kentucky) $1,267,139
Shelley Moore Capito (West Virginia) $341,738
Rand Paul (Kentucky) $104,456
And Texas, home to this last terrible school massacre, has a recent regrettable history of mass shootings. Past shootings targeted worshippers during a Sunday sermon, shoppers at a Walmart, students on a high school campus and drivers on a highway. These tragedies in Texas – which resulted in more than 85 dead in all – occurred in the last five years.
(Paul J. Weber. “School massacre continues Texas’ grim run of mass shootings.” KMTV 11. Twin Falls. May 25, 2022.)
The cycle in Texas – a mass shooting followed by few if any new restrictions on guns – mirrors GOP efforts to block stricter laws in Congress and the ensuring outrage from Democrats and supporters of tougher gun control.
Meanwhile, the National Rifle Association has spent millions of dollars lobbying Texas state lawmakers. In the last five years, the NRA has shelled out more than $2 million to lobby the Texas Legislature – more than double what it spent in any other state, according to Open Secrets, a nonprofit that tracks money in politics. Over that time, the GOP-led Legislature expanded rights for gun owners and sellers.
Exactly one year before the Uvalde shooting, the GOP-controlled Legislature voted to remove one of the last major gun restrictions in Texas: required licenses, background checks and training for the nearly 1.6 million registered handgun owners in the state at the time.
Texas Governor Abbott signed the measure, which came at the end of what was the Texas Legislature’s first chance to act after the Walmart attack.
A year later, a man went on a highway shooting rampage in the West Texas oil patch that left seven people dead, spraying bullets into passing cars and shopping plazas and killing a U.S. Postal Service employee while hijacking her mail truck.
Following a shooting at Santa Fe High School in 2018 that killed 10 people near Houston, Abbott signaled support for so-called red flag laws, which restrict gun access for people deemed dangerous to themselves or others. But he later retreated amid pushback from gun-rights supporters.
Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who won the GOP nomination for a third term Tuesday, told Fox News after the Uvalde shooting that the best response would be training teachers and “hardening” schools.
In Texas, any changes to gun access would not come until lawmakers return to the Capitol in 2023. In the past, calls for action have faded.
(Paul J. Weber. “School massacre continues Texas’ grim run of mass shootings.” KMTV 11. Twin Falls. May 25, 2022.)
And, as the NRA held their annual convention this weekend in Houston – just 280 miles east of Uvalde, Former President Donald Trump and other GOP leaders rejected efforts to overhaul gun laws and mocked Democrats and activists calling for change.
“The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” Trump said — repeating a refrain that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz had used onstage less than an hour earlier.
But Trump also nodded to the political reality that gun rights advocates represent a core constituency for Republicans, and for the former President in particular. “You are the backbone of our movement,” he said on May 27.
Donald Trump showed how little he cared about the victims of the Uvalde shooting by dancing at the end of his speech.
(Jason Easley. “Trump Danced After Speech Where He Read The Names Of 19 Dead Uvalde Children.” https://www.politicususa.com/2022/05/28/trump-danced-uvalde.html. May 28, 2022.)
How Do They Sleep At Night?
Matt Grossmann, a political science professor at Michigan State University who has studied the NRA, said the organization is weaker and less powerful politically than it was, but its real strength is its army of members willing to engage in politics.
“It is all about playing to the arch-conservative base,” said Robert Spitzer, chairman of the political science department at the State University of New York at Cortland, who has written extensively on politics and gun control. He said that since the 1994 vote when the Democratic-controlled Congress – with opposition from the NRA – narrowly passed a 10-year federal ban on assault-style weapons. the NRA “locked itself into a pattern of ever more apocalyptic, extremist, uncompromising rhetoric.” The progression, he said, coincided with the Republican Party’s shift to the right.
The NRA is about fear and stifling any progress for tighter gun control. Their political payoff money is meant to thwart efforts to finding evidence-based solutions to gun violence. No one denies the clout and the influence of the NRA even if it has suffered lately. GOP politicians are glad to receive NRA payments for their support. And, sadly, many people see nothing wrong with greasing their palms.
If you are a Republican who supports “draining the swamp” and “fewer crooked politicians,” how can you justify this money?
Now … unbelievably … Donald Trump, Jr. is lashing out at "wokeness" as he ranted in defense of guns following Tuesday's school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
Trump Jr. said in a video posted to Rumble …
"It's the gun, it's not the sociopath wielding it, folks. If it wasn't for the gun, this kid would be a well-adjusted, reasonable individual, he'd be a wonderful human being, right? He wouldn't have done the exact same thing with a bat or a bomb or some sort of improvised device or a machete, he's a great kid, don't judge him.”
Trump Jr. continued …
"We can't acknowledge what the actual causes are, it's not a drug-addict mother and a missing father and a lack of religion, indoctrination programs in our schools, crazy teachers teaching some of the crap I've talking about in these videos. It's none of those things. It never ends man … No one can admit somebody is actually a piece of garbage and screwed up."
(Bob Brigham. “Trump, Jr. lashes out at 'crazy teachers' as an 'actual cause' of school shootings." Raw Story. May 28, 2022.)
What a time to blame teachers for gun violence. Two lay dead after trying to defend the innocent children in their classrooms. But, perhaps that's the next strategy of the good old NRA and their Republican cronies. Who knows? Using money to influence public opinion in efforts to ignore the devastation wrought by firearms is evil. The GOP knows this all too well.
You know it too – you know how wrong it is that an 18-year-old purchased assault rifles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition when all signs pointed toward his evil intentions to commit deadly acts. A “bat” or a “machete” is the same as the AR-15s – someone who uses that logic today is definitely “screwed up.” Live with the blame, Jr.
And, guess what? One place you wouldn't be able to find firearms in Texas after the Robb Elementary School massacre is the National Rifle Association's forum. That does not surprise me. Daddy may have been in danger.
Schools scared to death.
The truth is, one education under desks,
Stooped low from bullets;
That plunge when we ask
Where our children
Shall live
& how
& if
“It takes a monster to kill children. But to watch monsters kill children again and again and do nothing isn’t just insanity—it’s inhumanity. The truth is, one nation under guns. What might we be if only we tried. What might we become if only we’d listen.”
Poem and quote by Amanda Gorman, 24-year-old US poet who rose to fame for her performance at Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration. Written on May 24, 2022.
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