US Senator Ted Cruz was heckled in a Houston restaurant on Friday night, days after his speech at the National Rifle Association’s conference, in which he largely opposed plans for gun control.
Cruz is among the conservative senators facing public backlash over his views on gun control, after the tragic massacre in a school in Uvalde, where 19 children and 2 teachers died after an 18-year-old opened fire at them.
Cruz was seen at Uptown Sushi in Houston in a video published on social media as a man challenges him to support increasing background checks on gun sales, which the senator and many of his Republican colleagues have resisted..
“Why did you come here to the convention?” the man, who later identified as Benjamin Hernandez, asked Cruz, according to a report by the Washington Times. “Why? When 19 children died!”
“That’s on your hands!” Hernandez yelled to Cruz as he was being dragged away by security personnel. Ted Cruz, you have that on your hands!”
Before rejoining his family at their table, Cruz waved goodbye to him.
Hernandez told The Washington Post that he approached Cruz in the hopes of persuading him to change his mind about his opposition to laws requiring background checks for gun transactions, which are unlikely to pass in the Senate.
“I wanted to make him give me an answer about something so simple and basic as background checks,” said Hernandez, 39, who is a board member for Indivisible Houston, a liberal pro-democracy group that aims to hold elected officials accountable for their actions. “But it was as if he was deflecting responsibility from being a US senator.”
Cruz said in a speech to the National Rifle Association that communities needed weapons to stay safe. “Taking away guns will not make them safer.”
Hernandez said, “Since they don’t make themselves available for discourse, we have to make the time and confront them wherever we see them. And for me, that was last night at a restaurant.”
Governor Gregg Abbott, a Republican and staunch gun rights proponent who addressed the meeting in a pre-recorded video, seized on apparent police lapses in Uvalde, telling a news conference later he was misled and “livid about what happened.”
Abbott denied newly enacted Texas gun laws, including a controversial measure removing licensing requirements for carrying a concealed weapon, had “any relevancy” to Tuesday’s bloodshed. He suggested state lawmakers focus renewed attention on addressing mental illness.
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