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.

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.

How her fourth-grade class was watching a movie when one of the teachers, having received an alert, went to the door and made eye contact with the gunman in the hallway then told the children, “go hide”.

How the children hid among backpacks behind the teacher’s desk as the gunman shot out a window and entered the adjoining classroom.

“He … told my teacher good night and shot her in the head,” Miah said. “And then he shot some of my classmates and the white board.”

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."

Joining him in voting no on the Protect Our Kids Act were Republican Reps. Paul Gosar, Debbie Lesko and David Schweikert.

The bill passed the Democrat-run House, mostly on party lines, but has no chance in the 50-50 Senate, given the filibuster rules that requires 60 votes a bill to pass.

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.

Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LaurieRoberts.

Support local journalism: Subscribe to azcentral.com today.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Rep. Andy Biggs refused to attend Uvalde testimony. That says a lot