An activist posed for a photo with the senator before their conversation about gun control escalated. “Nineteen children died! That’s on your hands!” Cruz heard as the man was pulled away
Hours after speaking at a National Rifle Association meeting Friday, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz was confronted at a sushi restaurant by a man who expressed anger at the Republican lawmaker for attending at the conference and over the deaths of 19 children and two adults in the Uvalde school shooting earlier in the week.
“Why did you come here to the convention?” a man, identified as Benjamin Hernandez, asked Cruz. “Why? When 19 children died!”
Hernandez posed for a photo at the bustling Uptown Sushi restaurant before engaging with the senator about the issue of background checks for firearms, according to video of the confrontation.
“You can make it hard for people to get guns in this country,” Hernandez said. “You know that.”
Cruz can be heard blaming “ignorance and hatred” for the violence and telling Hernandez, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The conversation escalated as security guards attempted to move Hernandez away from the Texas Republican.
“Nineteen children died! That’s on your hands! That’s on your hands, Ted Cruz! That’s on your hands!” Hernandez shouted as he was pulled away from the senator, who waved goodbye and then sat back down at a table.
“I wanted to make him give me an answer about something so simple and basic as background checks,” Hernandez, 39, told The Washington Post, which notes he’s a board member for Indivisible Houston, a liberal pro-democracy group that aims to hold elected officials accountable for their actions.
“It was as if he was deflecting responsibility from being a U.S. senator,” Hernandez said of Cruz’s response to the heckling.
Earlier in the day, Cruz spoke on stage at the NRA’s annual meeting, dubbed by organizers as a “celebration of Second Amendment rights.”
“The elites who dominate our culture tell us that firearms lie at the root of the problem,” Cruz said in his speech, the Post reports. “It’s far easier to slander one’s political adversaries and to demand that responsible citizens forfeit their constitutional rights than it is to examine the cultural sickness, giving birth to unspeakable acts of evil.”
Cruz, who shared the NRA stage with former President Donald Trump, also accused Democrats of using the shooting, which he called “the ultimate nightmare for every parent,” to justify attempts to “disarm Americans.”
“Ultimately, as we all know, what stops armed bad guys is armed good guys,” Cruz said in his remarks.
Also on Friday, Col. Steven McCraw, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, told the news media in Uvalde that approximately 20 officers waited in a hallway for more than 45 minutes before engaging the shooter inside a locked Robb Elementary School classroom.
“From the benefit of hindsight where I’m sitting now, of course, it was not the right decision,” McCraw said of the delay in entering the classroom, where panicked students called 911. “It was a wrong decision. There’s no excuse for that. We believe there should have been an entry as soon as you can. When there’s an active shooter, the rules change.”
Once the officers finally entered the room, 21 victims were dead.
The school district in Uvalde has opened an official account with First State Bank of Uvalde to support Robb Elementary families affected by the tragedy. People can send checks through the mail (payable to the “Robb School Memorial Fund”) or donate money through Zelle to robbschoolmemorialfund@gmail.com. People can also donate by calling 830-356-2273.
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