At least 20 are dead in a cowardly act of terrorism in El Paso yet, within minutes of the breaking news, several 2020 Democratic Presidential candidates pounced to take advantage of the tragedy to advance their own political agenda.
From Business Insider:
Democratic presidential candidates expressed outrage Saturday that mass shootings have becoming chillingly common nationwide and blamed the National Rifle Association and its congressional allies after a gunman opened fire at a shopping area near the Texas-Mexico border.
“It’s not just today, it has happened several times this week. It’s happened here in Las Vegas where some lunatic killed 50 some odd people,” Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said as he and 18 other White House hopefuls were in Nevada to address the nation’s largest public employees union.
Sanders blamed Republican Senate leadership for being “more concerned about pleasing the NRA than listening to the vast majority of the American people” and said that President Donald Trump has a responsibility to support commonsense gun safety legislation.
Former Vice President Joe Biden said that he tried unsuccessfully to call O’Rourke and told reporters, “Enough is enough.”
“This is a sickness,” Biden said. “This is beyond anything that we should be tolerating.” He added: “We can beat the NRA. We can beat the gun manufacturers.”
Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar said: “I believe that the NRA have long dominated American politics to the point where they have stopped sensible legislation that would have prevented deaths and prevented killings. They have done it time and time again.”
California Sen. Kamala Harris promised to use an executive action within her first 100 days of taking office to impose gun control. New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker said, “This has got to be a movement, politics or not, we’ve got to make ending this nightmare a movement before it happens to yet another community or another person dies.”
From Washington Examiner:
Cory Booker calls for leadership willing to ‘stand up’ to NRA after deadly El Paso shooting
Democratic presidential candidate Cory Booker said there need to be leaders willing to stand up to the National Rifle Association in the aftermath of a deadly shooting Saturday at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas.
Asked about the incident at a campaign event in Las Vegas, the New Jersey senator expressed that he’s “had enough” of these tragedies and criticized leaders around the U.S. for failing to stand up to the “corporate gun lobby” and the NRA.
“In this election, we have to have leaders who are willing to stand up and say, ‘I’m not going to let this issue be determined by what the interests of the corporate gun lobby are and the NRA,'” he said. “Because this is a uniquely American problem, a uniquely American problem that we have such mass slaughter in our communities like this, that happens regularly.”
Booker then jumped into a defense of his gun control proposal, calling it “common sense.”
“If you have more Americans dying in the last 50 years to gun violence than all of our wars combined … that should raise alarms for everybody,” he said. “Stand up right now. Let’s not even wait for election day. Let’s start demanding right now that kind change. Because most Americans agree with me.”
