Trump speaks at NRA meeting after Uvalde massacre – latest

While speaking at an NRA event on Friday, Sen. Ted Cruz reiterated a common Republican talking point on gun control that only the “good guys” with guns can stop active shooters.

“What stops the bad guys with guns is the good guys with guns,” he told the crowd in Houston.

That’s despite the fact that dozens of officers spent more than an hour waiting to load and apprehend Uvalde’s shooter, Salvador Ramos, earlier in the week.

At this point, we break down some of the biggest questions about the police response.

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

The Rev. Al Sharpton noted the parallel Friday at the funeral of Geraldine Chapman Talley, one of the victims of the Buffalo shooting.

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

Texas police are coming under fire after it was revealed it took them over an hour to attack and kill Uvalde gunman Salvador Ramos despite having a large number of officers on the scene.

In a heated exchange Friday, CNN reporter Shimon Prokupecz questioned state officials about why the 19 officers stationed in a hallway near Ramos did not do more.

“You say there were 19 officers gathered in the hall or somewhere. What efforts were made to try to get through that door? You say it was closed. What efforts were the officers making? she asked.

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

Former Speaker of the House John Boehneronce said That Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell “He keeps his feelings, thoughts, and emotions in such a tightly locked safe-deposit box that every time one of them leaks, passersby fall silent.” Thursday left everyone in Washington speechless when he told CNN that he directed Sen. John Cornyn from Texas to start working with Democratsincluding Senators Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Kyrsten Synema of Arizona, to find a “bipartisan solution.”

For Democrats, McConnell’s words offer a ray of hope. Prior to donald trumpTrump’s second impeachment trial for inciting the attack on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, the minority leader never fully came out in favor of conviction even though he was unashamed of his anger at Trump; as Alex Burns and Jonathan Martin of the New York Times wrote in his book This Shall Not Happen, the Kentucky Republican hoped for an overwhelming bipartisan consensus to impeach Trump for his actions, but soon realized that was not enough. republicans they were ready to cross the president.

This time, McConnell is out front and he probably knows there’s a chance 10 Republicans will get to yes.

Read more in eric garciaWashington’s last column.

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

Angeli Rose Gomez, mother of a second grader at Robb Elementary School, said The Wall Street Journal that when she learned of the ongoing shooting, she drove 40 miles to school to rescue her two children.

She was then handcuffed by a US Marshal because she was trying to break in, and federal agents considered this to be part of an active investigation.

He knew some local police officers, who convinced the bailiffs to remove his handcuffs.

Then, breaking away from the crowd, she jumped over a fence and ran to the school to rescue her children.

To an outside observer, it may not seem all that strange that the Uvalde police are giving their main updates to the public in English.

But that is a glaring omission, given the local context. What Los Angeles Times Writer Fidel Martinez points out that most residents of the small South Texas town speak Spanish as their first language, which begs the question: who are these updates really for?

“His approach seems to be excusing himself for his abject failure to [national] press,” Martinez wrote on Twitter on Friday.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott says he is “furious” at what he has learned about the police response to the Uvalde mass shooting, as are the families of the close-knit South Texas community.

“Police will earn the public’s trust by making sure they thoroughly and thoroughly investigate what exactly happened,” Abbott said Friday.

As more details about the school shooting emerge, it is clear that multiple lapses in law enforcement contributed to the tragic final death toll of 21 people.

Officers made bizarre decisions, missed key factors, or didn’t follow protocol seemingly every moment of the way, from long before the shooting to its first pivotal moments.

joseph marcus has the details.

Former President Donald Trump mocked fellow Republicans for walking out of the National Rifle Association annual meeting in Houston after the Uvalde shooting that killed 21 people earlier this week.

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

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

eric garcia has the story.

Donald Trump drew a not-so-subtle link between Tuesday’s mass shooting at a school in Uvalde and the fate of Republicans across the country.

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

As a result, the former president said, Republican voters “will vote for tough-on-crime, pro-Second Amendment candidates in record numbers” in 202, and then win 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 freedoms for ourselves and for every generation.”

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

Trump highlighted how he viewed gun stores as critical infrastructure during the pandemic.

He also discussed an upcoming Supreme Court decision on self-defense rights, touting how he has appointed three conservative justices to the high court.

“Your right to self-defense doesn’t end when you go to the front lines,” he said.