Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Wednesday he is "sickened and outraged by the senseless evil that struck Robb Elementary School in Uvalde in Texas" Tuesday.
Nineteen children and two teachers at a Texas elementary school were killed after an 18-year-old gunman barricaded himself inside a single classroom and “began shooting anyone that was in his way,” authorities said Wednesday.
Law enforcement officers eventually broke into the classroom and killed the gunman, who used an AR-style rifle.
"It's literally sickening, sickening to consider the innocent young lives that were stolen by this pointless, senseless brutality," McConnell said on the Senate floor, but offered no path forward from Republicans in the Senate regarding a response to the tragedy.
Moments earlier, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer implored his Republican colleagues to cast aside the powerful gun lobby and reach across the aisle for even a modest compromise bill on more restrictive gun laws.
Despite mounting mass shootings in communities nationwide — two in the past two weeks alone, including Tuesday in Texas and the racist killing of Black shoppers at a Buffalo, New York, market 10 days earlier — lawmakers have been unwilling to set aside their differences and buck the gun lobby to work out any compromise.
Photo courtesy of CSPAN 2.
