Live from Music Row Thursday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed all-star panelist and The Epoch Times’ Editor-at-Large Roger Simon in-studio to discuss the Uvalde, Texas, shooter and mental health in America.
Leahy: In-studio with me also, our panelist, Roger Simon. Roger, the couple elements of this story that I think need to come out … of course, let’s talk about how the Left is going crazy.
It seems to me what we have here is a situation. If the way the Associated Press described the timeline, it does look like the first lines of law enforcement failed to do their job. That’s what it looks like.
Simon: Yep.
Leahy: Security officer at the school, two police officers, all arriving there before the shooting.
Simon: You know, the irony in that, besides the sadness, it’s awfully sad, is that, the less likely that gun control is going to save things when in actuality – and they say, well, let the police do it. But the police didn’t do it. So actually, the reverse is true.
And that, possibly in some situations, the constitutional-carry citizens might have saved the day, or a teacher who had gun training. None of this is even remotely simple.
Leahy: Right now we have 21 dead people. They’re all innocent, and killed.
Simon: Beto O’Rourke, of course, understands all.
Leahy: So the story is Beto O’Rourke, he’s just made a fool of himself yesterday at a press conference. Governor Greg Abbott was laying out the details of what happened and the aftermath and more people could be … addressed the ongoing mental health issues related to this.
And in the midst of that press conference, Beto O’Rourke, who is running for governor as a Democrat, started shouting at the governor and the lieutenant governor and just saying it’s all your fault, basically.
Simon: That’s an indication of the kind of brain that we have to watch out for, because he’s out of control, and not in the way that this Ramos kid was out of control – I mean, he was really out of control – but he’s out of control.
Leahy: The other problem is it seems to me that there are law enforcement protocols in these situations, when they happen, that should be followed in a certain way, a more aggressive way than the police.
Simon: Absolutely. They should be. But, you know, we got human beings here. Who knows how any of us would behave when confronted with a situation like this?
Leahy: I was talking with my friend John Solomon at Just the News. He had a story yesterday. You remember the mass shooting at Virginia Tech a decade ago. They went and outlined all of the things that should be taken to address the issues onsite, and also the sort of mental health warnings at the beginning.
And he said very few of them have actually been implemented. And this, I think, might be an example of it. The mental health of all people, but particularly young people …
Simon: Yes. It’s the first line of defense against this …
Leahy: … is in decline.
Simon: … the most important line of defense.
Leahy: Let me read to you the Daily Mail. Of course, you know the Daily Mail, London-based, perhaps one of the best newspapers in the world today.
Simon: Yes. Of course, way better than New York Times. Who reads The New York Times? And The Epoch Times, I should add.
Leahy: Well, of course, of course, The Epoch Times. But from the Daily Mail, here’s the story about Ramos. I don’t see it in this report, but we’ve seen other reports that he smoked marijuana regularly and that he had disagreements with his grandmother about that and was very angry with both his grandmother and his mother. Asterisk.
So let me just tell you. Reportedly, Ramos was bullied for a stutter and lisp. Classmates also allegedly called him out with gay slurs. At one point, he uploaded a picture of himself wearing eyeliner.
He would get bullied hard, like bullied by a lot of people, his friend Stephen Garcia told the Post – over social media, over gaming, over everything.
In early childhood, friends claimed that he was a normal kid. But then he started to change. He was branded an emo or an alternative at school where he got into multiple fistfights, including increasingly playing truant.
During the last few months of his life, he was working at a Wendy’s, hardly in attendance at school. He was not set to graduate. This was a fact he apparently despised.
But his personal life was very odd. His parents both had criminal records and his mother – apparently, he lived with his mother at a house owned by his grandmother, about a mile from the shooting site. But his grandmother was about to evict his mother from that house for her drug use.
Simon: Okay, well, there we have it. Drugs are always at the center of these things. The reason, I think, is that these people can’t stand their lives. Because if you have a decent life, you don’t need drugs.
But people talk about bullying all the time as if it’s a new thing. I mean, bullying has been going on since there were human beings on the planet.
So some of this stuff, you start to wonder, what we do about it? How do you stop bullying? Well, I don’t know. I don’t know, too, whether it’s healthy to entirely stop bullying. I know that’s a weird statement.
Leahy: I don’t think it’s so weird. Tell us why.
Simon: Because it’s part of learning to grow up. When I was on the schoolyard and got bullied at the age of 8 or whatever it was, I had to learn how to deal with it in whatever way it was. And whether it was pushing back at the other person or walking away. These are things that, they’re part of life.
Leahy: Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. And this kid, very troubled kid, bad family situation, and apparently, he just couldn’t deal with it. And it gets back to, I think, what’s the solution to this problem?
Well, to me, it’s the exact opposite of what the Left says. The Left says more gun control. Or as Mike Moore, the documentary filmmaker, said, let’s get rid of the Second Amendment.
Simon: Well, with Moore, it’s just an opportunity to get on television. That’s really what it is, like with any amendments, it’s just him.
Leahy: But the mental health situation, it seems to me is the big problem that we have right now, at getting somebody to the point where they’re going to do this. Once they are doing it, then it’s a different situation.
Listen to the interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Roger Simon” by Roger Simon. Background Photo “Robb Elementary School” by UCISD.
