Have you heard much about the Santa Fe school shooting lately? The furor over the May 18 attack seems to have abated quickly and Texas Senator Ted Cruz says it is because the victims and their families don’t support the media’s gun control agenda.
In an interview with the Daily Signal, Cruz called the murders “horrific” and said, “There have been too dang many of these.”
“Something’s wrong,” Cruz continued. “When we were kids, this wasn’t a part of going to school. You might worry about getting a black eye at school or something, but you didn’t worry about someone, some lunatic coming in and shooting and murdering as many people as they could. That was not part of school.”
When asked what strategies could be followed to stop school shootings, Cruz said that he and Texas Gov. Abbott asked the victims and their families for opinions. “It was really striking,” Cruz said. “Out of a dozen students who just hours earlier had been in this shooting, every one of them said the answer is not gun control. They said, don’t take our guns. They said if you take our guns, it won’t make us safer, it will just mean the killers and murderers have guns.”
Cruz added that many of the students supported metal detectors and armed police guards in schools, two ideas that have been attacked by Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg. The Santa Fe shooting survivors also supported another idea lambasted by Hogg, arming teachers.
The senator told of a student who “said his teacher was a former Marine, who was trained to handle a firearm.” According to Cruz, the student “said he wished his teacher had been armed; he might have been able to stop the killer before he killed so many people.”
Cruz drew a contrast between the Parkland survivors and the Santa Fe students, saying, “It’s fairly striking that, you look at the mainstream media, CNN, after the Parkland shooting, it was round-the-clock coverage of the students calling for aggressive gun control because that happens to be the political agenda of most of the media. In this case, where the students aren’t calling for that, suddenly … the media isn’t interested in covering it.”
Media bias almost certainly plays a role in the lack of continuing coverage of the Santa Fe teens. After Parkland, media outlets made rock stars of Parkland survivors such as David Hogg, Cameron Kasky and Emma Gonzalez while all but ignoring pro-Second Amendment survivor Kyle Kashuv.
Nevertheless, there may be additional reasons that the story was downplayed as well. The Santa Fe shooting had fewer victims than the Parkland shooting as well as the fact that the Parkland shooting had the shock value of being the first in a series. The news was also overshadowed by President Trump’s claims that the FBI spied on his campaign as well as events in Korea.
Cruz is absolutely correct that the Texans from Santa Fe reacted differently from the Parkland victims, however. The Texas Tribune detailed a meeting between Santa Fe students and teachers with Gov. Abbott. Most agreed that more school counselors, armed teachers and school police officers were needed. There was also support for random checks of student bags.
The idea of metal detectors seemed to draw more resistance than arming teachers. Sophomore Tyler Morrison questioned whether the policy would be “treating kids like prisoners” while senior Grace Johnson asked, “Do we push back our education because we need to get 1,500 kids through a metal detector?”
What was absent from the list was support for gun control. In fact, a full-page ad placed by gun control group Everytown in the Houston Chronicle last week was signed by 40 students from around Texas. Although a number of the signatories were from the Houston area, there were apparently none from Santa Fe.
The Texan response can perhaps be summed up best by Jay Horn, the parent of a student hospitalized as a result of the shooting. “This is not a gun thing,” said Horn. “Evil's going to happen with anything.” The comment got a round of applause.
Originally published
on The Resurgent
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