Last night we did a blog about how Congressman Matt Gaetz said that background checks for gun purchases wouldn't work by listing off names of people killed by illegal immigrants, and argued that a wall would protect us from gun violence.
While Gaetz went off on this white nationalist tangent, Parkland parents began to speak up during the hearing which resulted in Rep. Gaetz having a pissy fit, and tried to get them kicked out the room.
One of the fathers who were outspoken during the hearing was Manuel Oliver, Manuel's son Jacquin was one of the Parkland students slain in the Parkland mass shooting.
While appearing on MSNBC's Morning Joe, Manuel Oliver called Gaetz a "salesperson from the Republican Party."
“The reason why I call [Gaetz] a salesperson is because he’s selling a project that has no relationship at all to what the discussion was about,” Oliver said. “This person came in here trying to solve the problem with the argument that we need a wall. We’re discussing about gun violence in this room and how are we going to end with this epidemic.”
"You don't point at me like that," Oliver said of Gaetz pointing at him during the hearing. "And then he tried to get me out of the room. And you don’t do that. You don’t get me out of any room. I’ll get you out of that room as soon as I have the chance to vote for someone else," continued Oliver.
“Well, it’s not only irrational. It’s wrong," said Oliver, when asked a question by an MSNBC contributor about the irrationality that a wall is going to somehow prevent Americans from being murdered due to gun violence.
"But it’s also a big contradiction coming from them," said Oliver, before pointing out some statistics about causes of death. "The contradiction is yes, we want to save lives. But wait a minute the wall will save 4,000. What about the other 40,000?” And he took aim at the GOP’s anti-immigrant rhetoric as a parting shot."
It was not merely Gaetz stealing the hearing to talk immigration instead of gun violence that offended Oliver, it was all the fact that Oliver is himself an immigrant.
“You know who’s an immigrant? I’m an immigrant,” Oliver said. “My son came from Venezuela, I was trying to find a safer life in here. He got shot by an American white dude.”
“If I don’t get it from them," Oliver said about the Republicans at the hearing not giving him and others no answers to how to prevent gun violence, "they will get it from me.”
Republicans have as a whole chosen to be complete sociopaths. What Rep. Gaetz's actions at the hearing show is that he did not give a flying-fuck that children in his state were murdered, and did not give a flying-fuck about the pain that someone like Manuel Oliver and their friends and family will feel for the rest of their lives.
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