Ted Cruz Got Rightfully Booed for Saying the Way To Stop Shootings Is To Put More Cops in Schools

Ted Cruz got an honest reaction to his terrible ideas this weekend. Speaking at a panel at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin—an event dedicated to discussing politics and policy—Cruz shared his thoughts on how to prevent mass shootings. They did not go over well.

“Whenever you have a mass murder, the political debate, you have Democrats in Washington, the step they immediately go to is ‘We need to take away firearms from law-abiding citizens,'” Cruz said, which got some applause from the audience. Cruz responded snarkily: “OK, you can clap for that except for the minor problem that it doesn’t work. If the objective is to stop these crimes, gun control is singularly ineffective.”

Cruz pushed the old laws don’t stop criminals argument (conveniently ignoring the obvious question of why we bother passing any laws banning anything, ever) before saying the answer to stopping school shootings is to fill schools with police.

“Two weeks ago, I stood on the Senate floor and tried to pass legislation I’ve introduced that would double the number of police officers in school,” Cruz said. The reaction from the audience is audible in video of the event. People were clearly getting pissed off, probably given the fact that Texas is still hurting from the extremely recent elementary school shooting in Uvalde, where police officers were present and did absolutely nothing to stop it.

Still, Cruz responds with flippant petulance. “OK look, if you want to have a reasonable conversation, we can; if you want to yell at each other, we can,” he quipped.

“If we want to keep our kids safe, and I desperately want to keep our kids safe, the most effective step we can do is to have police officers there to protect them who can intercept a mass murderer before he gets into the school and stop them,” Cruz continued. He rambled about throwing criminals in jail to stop repeat offenders, which has no application to the 18-year-old shooter in Uvalde, who purchased his gun legally.

As he was met with more boos, Cruz got more incensed. “Look, you guys can instead sing Kumbaya with them”—presumably meaning potential shooters—”and hope they’ll just stop but what you’re proposing doesn’t work.”

At that point, someone in the audience yelled, “Eighteen-year-old boys don’t need an AR-15” and was met with more applause and positive feedback than Cruz has likely ever heard directed his way in his entire miserable life.

(via Chron, image: Anna Rose Layden/Getty Images)