Nineteen students and two teachers were killed in the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
4th Grader Miah Cerillo survived by smearing her best friend’s blood all over her body and playing dead.
In a prerecorded video, Miah, wearing glasses and a tank top that said “Live by the sun,” recounted how the gunman came into her classroom and shot her teacher before turning his AR-15-style rifle on her friends.
“He shot my friend that was next to me and I thought he was going to come back to the room, so I grabbed the blood and put it all over me,” she recounted.
Arizona’s insurrectionist Coup Plotter Rep. Andy Biggs refused to attend the hearing. Instead of listening to this courageous young girl tell her harrowing story of survival, this partisan hack piece of shit tried to counter-program the congressional hearing by claiming that Democrats were exploiting the children.
I will not be physically attending the first panel of the House Oversight and Reform Committee’s hearing on gun violence today.
I object strongly to the Democrats’ exploitation of children who have been victimized so recently in Uvalde. pic.twitter.com/BBGPMLXgVC
— Rep Andy Biggs (@RepAndyBiggsAZ) June 8, 2022
Laurie Roberts of The Republic writes, Rep. Andy Biggs wants to protect Uvalde survivor from Congress, just not from armed gunmen:
A House Oversight committee on Wednesday heard from an 11-year-old child who recounted the horror of playing dead inside her classroom two weeks ago while a gunman killed 19 of her classmates and two teachers.
Rep. Andy Biggs couldn’t bring himself to show up.
“A child of tender years, brought before this Committee to relive the horror of the Uvalde murders is tantamount to child abuse and will no doubt add to the post-traumatic stress of the child going forward,” he said in a statement, explaining that he would instead watch her testimony from his office.
Biggs, you see, is all about protecting children. [sarcasm.]
He’s just not willing to consider so much as a single reform to the nation’s gun laws to do it. By day’s end, he voted against a bill that would have barred teens from buying assault-style weapons like the one used to eviscerate 11-year-old Miah Cerrillo’s classmates and teachers.
Miah Cerrillo recounted that gruesome day
The vote came several hours after the House Oversight and Reform Committee heard a second day of heart rending testimony from the family members and victims of the massacres in Uvalde, Texas, and Buffalo, N.Y.
Among them was Miah, who wasn’t present but instead appeared in a short pre-recorded video in which she answered questions from her father and talked about what happened that horrifying day at Robb Elementary School.
Miah told of how she covered herself in a dead classmate’s blood and played dead.
“He shot my friend that was next to me and I thought he was going come back to the room so I grabbed the blood and I put it all over me,” she said.
When Miah’s father, Miguel Cerillo, asked his daughter if she feels safe at school anymore, she shook her head no.
“Why,” he asked.
“I don’t want it to happen again,” she replied.
Biggs says Democrats are traumatizing her?
And Biggs is concerned … that Democrats are traumatizing the child?
“Today, during an Oversight hearing, Democrats used an 11 year old child who witnessed the Uvalde shooting as a political prop to advance their gun confiscation agenda,” he tweeted. “They literally made her relive the trauma after she said she had PTSD from the experience. Despicable.”
As opposed to, say, the perfectly acceptable behavior of Republicans who for the last decade have done nothing despite massacre after massacre after massacre carried out by deranged young men armed with assault-style rifles and those high-capacity magazines so useful in upping the body count.
Just last week, Biggs was explaining that gun reform proposals are premature so soon after Uvalde and they wouldn’t help the Miahs of the world, anyway.
“The public is not safer because of the gun control laws,” he said, noting gun violence in Chicago, Seattle “and other bastions of left-wing gun areas”. “In fact, they are more at risk.”
Translation: Biggs won’t be supporting any proposals to keep rifles that can decapitate children out of the hands of troubled teens. Or any expanded background checks. Or any limit on the size of ammunition magazines.
Biggs on Wednesday voted against a sweeping gun bill that, among other things, would raise the age to 21 to buy an assault-style rifles and ban large-capacity magazines. He called it “another attempt by the left to dismantle the Second Amendment and confiscate guns from law-abiding Americans” [like the 18 year old gunman in Uvalde who legally purchased two assault rifles and thousands of rounds of ammunition in Texas in preparation for massacring children.]
It passed the Democrat-run House, mostly on party lines, but has virtually no chance in the 50-50 Senate, given the Senate filibuster.
Will Sens. “Manchinema” value their precious Senate filibuster over the lives of innocent children? Also a disgrace.
He made it clear that nothing will change
The vote came just hours after Miah’s father tearfully told the oversight committee that something has to change.
“She’s not the same little girl that I used to play with and run with and do everything, because she was daddy’s little girl.”
Biggs, meanwhile, made it clear that nothing will change.
Brandon Wolf, a survivor of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Florida, and now the press secretary for The Dru Project was interviewed on MSNBC’s The Reidout, and tore the cowardly Rep. Andy Biggs a new one.
This is a gut check moment. If you can look in the eyes of 4th grade Miah who disguised herself with the blood of her classmate to avoid being murdered and say, “nothing can be done”, you are a disgrace to the position you hold.
They deserve action. We all do. pic.twitter.com/WlDek3CjG4
— Brandon Wolf (@bjoewolf) June 8, 2022
Arizonans can tear the cowardly Rep. Andy Biggs a new one by finally kicking this disgrace to the human race out of office.
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Republicans are running on the “tough on crime” theme, but they will do nothing to reduce the violent crime they are gaslighting the American public on. “Protect guns or combat violence? 7 in 10 Republicans say the former.”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/09/protect-guns-or-combat-violence-7-10-republicans-say-former/
In a new poll conducted by Marist for NPR and PBS NewsHour, though, the pollsters drew an interesting and useful line for considering the debate over guns and gun violence.
Respondents were asked which they felt was more important: protecting gun rights or controlling gun violence. It’s a simple dichotomy — admittedly more simple than the debate itself but one that allows for gradation. Is it more important to protect the right of people to own guns, or is it more important to address the spate of firearm-related deaths in the United States?
Overall, Americans were more likely to say that controlling gun violence is more important, 59 to 35 percent. Among gun owners, as you might expect, protecting gun rights was the majority position, although only barely.
The biggest divide, in fact, wasn’t on gun ownership. It was by party. Democrats said that controlling gun violence was more important by a nearly 90-point margin. Independents said the same, more narrowly. Among Republicans, though, more than two-thirds said protecting gun ownership was more important — a higher level of support than even among gun owners themselves.
Other divides in the poll similarly align with partisanship. White Americans without a college degree — a heavily Republican group — are more likely to say that it’s more important to protect gun rights. So are Americans who live in rural areas, in part, it’s safe to assume, because they’re also more likely to own a firearm.
[I]t’s interesting to point out that people without children in the house more heavily prioritized controlling gun violence than did parents with young children at home. Less surprising is the gender divide, with men being more likely than women to say that protection of gun rights is more important.
-On every issue this country is failing to address, it is because the problem is with those who identify as Republicans.