Alisyn Camerota and Victor Blackwell Blast Abbott’s Press Conference Following School Shooting: ‘Very Scant on Solutions’
CNN’s Alisyn Camerota and Victor Blackwell blasted Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s press conference on Wednesday, one day after the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
Salvador Ramos, 18, allegedly shot and killed 19 children and two adults before being killed by police.
During CNN Newsroom, Camerota called the press conference “very interesting.”
“We definitely learned some new things, details about the investigation, but it was very heavy on calls for healing and calls for mental health help. Very scant on solutions and, in fact, the lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, said there will be plenty of time to analyze what happened and try to prevent the next one,” she said. “But that’s not what the stats show. The stats show that the next mass shooting will happen tomorrow.”
Camerota cited 213 mass shootings in 2022. That figure is from the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as “four or more shot and/or killed in a single event, at the same general time and location not including the shooter.”
“That’s more than days of the year, and of course, Victor, you just 10 days ago were in Buffalo at a different mass shooting at the grocery store, and you wondered when the next one would be, and now we know,” she said. “Here we are.”
Blackwell said:
Yeah, and I said later this year, not next week, and for the control room I can hear myself in my ear, if you can correct that, please. Listen, what we heard from the governor was a focus on mental health saying that there is a need to address a mental health crisis, but also acknowledging that there is no history of mental health issues or criminal history for this shooter.
I mean, it was almost a reach talking about the lack of beds that were available for mental health patients. We heard from the lieutenant governor where he said that the problem is that the school had too many doors. I mean, he wants a single door. Maybe that is it’s a structural problem for the building. It is almost as if they were reaching for everything else except for the weapon he was able to purchase, the ammunition he was able to purchase and the role that that played in the shooting.
Blackwell went on to praise former Rep. Francis “Beto” O’Rourke, who interrupted the press conference. Additionally, he incorrectly said the school shooting was the second-biggest in U.S. history. The massacre was the third-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history, behind the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting and 2012 Sandy Hook shooting.
“To hear from the governor this is not the time to politicize this and Beto O’Rourke served it up on a platter to give him that opportunity, this was a political event where you had the governor focus on New York and focus on Chicago when he is one day out from the latest mass shooting, the second deadliest at a school in U.S. history,” he said.
Camerota said that not so many school shootings would help with the issue of mental health.
You know what would help mental health, not so many school shootings. And in fact, maybe there could be a connection between a screening for mental health because, certainly, this gunman was exhibiting certain symptoms that there have been reports that his friends and family may have seen, and so maybe a screening from a gun shop owner to ask some questions? Are you feeling isolated? Do you want to hurt people? Maybe something like that could connect the two.
Watch above, via CNN.
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