Chris Hayes Shreds NRA’s ‘Good Guy With a Gun’ Theory: ‘It’s All B.S.!’
MSNBC host Chris Hayes on Friday excoriated the National Rifle Association and its supporters for stubbornly continuing to insist, despite the heartbreaking details of law enforcement’s bungled response to the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas this week, that the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
In the past day, a much more accurate account of the mass shooting has emerged than what law enforcement officials had initially told the public, some of which was false. Reporting by The Wall Street Journal on Thursday and The Washington Post on Friday has helped illustrate a tragic failure of judgment, as 19 officers inside the school delayed confronting the gunman by “nearly 45 minutes” while children trapped inside the classroom with him made repeated, desperate calls to 911. (NBC News also reported Friday that when Border Patrol officers ultimately did move toward the gunman, they were ignoring local police who told them not to even enter the school.)
The director of the Texas Department of Safety, Steven McCraw, admitted at a news conference Friday that “it was the wrong decision.”
Hayes was “left speechless” by this acknowledgement, he told viewers. Given the changing stories coming from authorities, he added, “there is no reason to take anything [that] anyone from law enforcement in this situation says at face value.”
Hayes then turned his attention to the typical right-wing talking points that have sprung up since the massacre.
“The worst possible set of facts appears to be the true one: that the police utterly failed with their guns. The good guys with guns, in the school, utterly failed to protect those kids,” Hayes charged.
“They set up a cordon outside the school, and yelled at, threatened and prevented parents from rushing in–even it seems as the gunman was still inside. And in addition to the police response being an unfathomable failure, it is also just a profoundly upsetting demonstration of the bankruptcy of the arms race theory of violence prevention.”
At the NRA conference in Houston on Friday, the usual suspects like ex-president Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) uttered some version of the argument that the way to prevent mass shootings is more guns.
“It’s all B.S.!” a frustrated Hayes exclaimed before showing clips from the pair’s speeches. “They built up to this moment, and here it was. Here’s the proving ground. And we just saw it fail in real time.”
If “good guy with a gun” and “bad guy with a gun” are the sole categories, Hayes continued, “I’m curious for Donald Trump and Ted Cruz: which category were the police in this estimation?”
“Of course, it’s not two categories of people, that’s the whole point,” he continued. “Whatever Donald Trump and Ted Cruz say, the entire NRA worldview collapsed in on itself in a pool of blood in that elementary school in Uvalde, Texas on Tuesday. And in the end, the sheer, brutal bankruptcy of what these cretins have been proposing…has been laid bare.”
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