Biden demands U.S. ‘stand up’ to gun lobby after Texas school shooting
Yahoo Finance Live anchors discuss President Biden’s response to Tuesday’s Texas school shooting.
Video Transcript
JULIE HYMAN: And now we want to bring you up to date on the latest toll on that devastating news out of Texas. 21 people are dead, including 19 children in an elementary school shooting. The 18-year-old gunman was killed by a border control agent on the scene. And this shooting marks the deadliest elementary school shooting since 2012, when 20 children were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut. President Biden expressed frustration with the current state of the US gun lobby following that shooting.
JOE BIDEN: As a nation, we have to ask, when, in God's name, are we going to stand up to the gun lobby? When, in God's name, will we do what we all know in our gut needs to be done? This is 3,448 days, 10 years since I stood up at a high school in Connecticut, a grade school in Connecticut, where another gunman massacred 26 people, including 20 first graders, at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Since then, there have been over 900 incidents of gun fires reported on school grounds.
JULIE HYMAN: And we also heard, speaking of Connecticut, from Senator Chris Murphy, who gave an impassioned speech in the Senate on this late yesterday. We should mention Texas Governor Greg Abbott and senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn still expected to speak at the National Rifle Association's annual convention in Houston on Friday. And Jared, full disclosure for our viewers, we're, obviously, a financial news network.
JARED BLIKRE: Right.
JULIE HYMAN: Right? This is not always the kind of stuff that we cover. But at a time like this, when you have an incident that is just so devastating, and we have seen 10 years since Sandy Hook, we just felt like we had to bring viewers the latest and talk about it.
JARED BLIKRE: Yes, we do. It's an unspeakable tragedy. And we are talking offline. We talked a lot about this morning. And the trend has been in the unfortunate direction for these shootings, these mass shootings, especially in schools. And an alarming statistic that you found and brought to my attention, Julie, was that school shootings actually killed more children every year than car crashes.
JULIE HYMAN: Yeah, well, not school shootings specifically, but--
JARED BLIKRE: Oh, shootings.
JULIE HYMAN: --firearm deaths, generally, yes.
JARED BLIKRE: Yes, and the trend, yes, cars are safer now, but the trend is definitely in the wrong direction for firearms. So we just have to acknowledge that for our viewers.
JULIE HYMAN: Yeah, this was some information that came to us from the University of Michigan, which has a research center there on firearm deaths. And these figures were for 2020 specifically, I believe, that they were looking at motor vehicle crashes. This is for children ages 1 through 19. And it looks at the commensurate funding into research for each of these areas as well.
JARED BLIKRE: Yes, it needs to be done. It needs to be addressed and hopefully that it will be, and in a productive manner without putting things off, as tends to be the case in these matters.
JULIE HYMAN: Yes, as has been the case for far too long.