Actor Matthew McConaughey made a powerful and emotional plea for stronger gun laws in a speech at the White House briefing room.
McConaughey’s hometown is Uvalde, Texas, where a mass shooting at the elementary school claimed the lives of 19 children and two teachers.
McConaughey held up artwork and photos of the children murdered by an 18-year-old gunman with an AR-15 style rifle. He described the severity of the wounds inflicted by the weapon.
“Make these lives matter,” McConaughey said.
One item he brought with him was a pair of green Converse shoes. He said that the child’s distinctive sneakers were the only way that her body could be identified.
He told reporters at the White House how he met with a cosmetologist, who was working on making the victims’ bodies okay for viewing at funeral services. He said that the woman told him and his wife the bodies from the shooting “were very different” than typical bodies because they needed “much more than makeup to be presentable.”
The bodies of the children and the adults needed “extensive restoration” because of the exceptionally large exit wounds of an AR 15 rifle.
He said the children were left not only dead but “hollow.”
McConaughey called on Congress to lead with humanity and to acknowledge that values are above politics, and to finally pass much-needed laws to prevent massacres like the one in Uvalde from happening again.
He said the minimum purchase age for AR 15 rifles needs to be 21, and that there needs to be a waiting period for these specific types of guns. He also said red flag laws were needed, as well as consequences for those who abuse them.
“These are reasonable, practical, tactical regulations,” he said. McConaughey emphasized that these regulations were by no means a step back, but rather, a step forward for civil society, as well as the Second Amendment.
McConaughey himself owns a gun, and said that “responsible gun owners” have become “fed up with the Second Amendment being abused and hijacked by some deranged individuals”.
Be the first to comment