Woman Whose Parents Died in Mass Shooting Blasts Gun Control in Congressional Hearing
The only people who oppose gun control are hateful rednecks who don’t care about crime victims — at least, that’s the impression you get listening to the left these days.
But a Texas woman just turned that narrative on its head during testimony before members of Congress. Far from being cold-hearted about mass shootings, Suzanna Gratia Hupp knows about the pain from tragedies all too well. Not only did she live through one, she lost both her parents to a gunman.
On Wednesday, Hupp pushed back against Democrats who have pledged to add more gun control and act as if they have the moral high ground. During testimony in front of the Joint Economic Committee, the Texas woman recalled a terrifying day when she reached for a gun to defend herself … but found an empty purse instead.
“I reached for the gun in my purse on the floor next to me,” Hupp told lawmakers, according to The Dallas Morning News. “But then I realized that a few months earlier I had made the stupidest decision of my life.”
“My gun was 100 yards away, dutifully left in my car to obey the law because at that time in the state of Texas, carrying a handgun was illegal,” the woman recalled.
The year was 1991. It seems a bit odd now, but concealed carry in Texas wasn’t something normal citizens could do. It wasn’t until 1995 that the state would change this, thanks in part to Hupp herself and a young governor named George Walker Bush.
Hupp and both her parents were eating at a busy Luby’s restaurant in Killeen on Oct. 16, 1991, when a deranged man purposely crashed his truck through the front window of the venue and opened fire at customers using a handgun. The anti-gun laws had done nothing to stop him, but kept patrons like Hupp defenseless.
The gunman ended up killing 23 people and then himself. Hupp’s parents were sadly among the dead.
Hupp has every reason to hate guns, but instead came to the same conclusion as millions of conservatives: Criminals don’t follow the rules, and giving Americans a fighting chance at self-defense is the best way forward.
“Hupp criticized gun control proposals floating around Congress, in particular the demand from former El Paso congressman Beto O’Rourke, who has focused his presidential campaign on a crusade to tighten gun laws and to ban and confiscate assault-style weapons,” The Morning News reported.
As The Western Journal, of course, covered when it happened, O’Rourke made waves when he promised to “take your AR-15,” one of the most popular sporting rifles in America. Rifles of all types, however, are involved in very low numbers of murders nationally.
“Representative O’Rourke finally said out loud what many have obfuscated for years,” Hupp stated. “He essentially said he does want to take away the guns that are designed to kill. And let me assure you, if someone threatens me or mine, that’s exactly what I want it to do.”
Sure enough, the 1991 rampage ended only after armed police officers arrived and engaged the shooter, wounding him and prompting him to commit suicide. While it’s impossible to know for sure, a customer with a concealed carry permit may have been able to stop the violence even sooner.
That’s the message that Hupp has been pushing ever since the tragedy.
Instead of hiding from the spotlight, the Texas woman entered public service, standing up for residents as a state representative for a decade. She was one of the reps who helped pass the state’s current concealed carry law and has been a strong pro-Second Amendment ever since.
Voices like Hupp’s are the ones who are all too often ignored by the left because their experiences don’t match the liberal anti-gun narrative.
For all the wailing about “national conversations” and the like, Democrats don’t seem interested in a real conversation that includes pro-gun arguments.
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