Empower Wisconsin  | May 31, 2022

Tool is not a big enough descriptor for Beto O’Rourke. The failed Democratic presidential candidate and not-soon-enough-to-be defeated Texas gubernatorial candidate is truly “disgraceful.”

Beto turned Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s press conference on last week’s mass shooting at Robb Elementary School into a political rally.

A day after a deranged young man shot and killed 19 children and two adults, Beto, who is trailing Republican incumbent Abbott in the polls, decided it was a good time to barge into a press conference and put on his anti-gun show.

“(T)he time to stop the next shooting is right now, and you are doing nothing,” a grandstanding Beto, campaigning on the bodies of children and teachers, shouted.

After being escorted out of the room by law enforcement, Beto held his own press conference outside — with hungry media sucking up every last drop of the drip’s political theater.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick called the stunt “disgraceful.”

“We were there primarily for the families of these slain children murdered in their classrooms. And it shows that, and I really don’t even want to talk about the guy, but it shows that he was more interested in his political ambition than he was about these families,” Patrick told Fox News.

Hailed as a hero of the government-control crowd, O’Rourke may have just tanked his campaign for governor in a very pro-gun rights state.

Texas has more than one million gun owners and in a 2020 study by the RAND Corporation, 45.7 percent of adults in Texas said they live in homes with guns. They are very motivated voters.

As Newsweek recently reported:

A February poll conducted by the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin found that 43 percent of Texans were in favor of stricter gun laws, but 34 percent wanted the laws left as they are and 16 percent believed the laws should be less strict, while 7 percent of respondents didn’t know or had no opinion.

“Those figures could prove a problem for O’Rourke as he takes a hard line on regulating firearms,” Newsweek’s Darragh Roche wrote.

There’s another problem. It appears — once again — no gun control law old Beto has proposed or is in place would have stopped this shooter. Securing Robb Elementary, and many others around the nation, would.

That’s what O’Rourke’s opponent was saying at the press conference before he was so rudely interrupted by a colossal creep.

For his “disgraceful” and desperate political campaigning on a national tragedy, Beto O’Rourke is Empower Wisconsin’s Tool of the Week.