A killer reportedly wearing “Nazi symbols” opened fire at a school in Izhevsk, Russia Monday, killing more than a dozen people and wounding many others before taking his own life, undermining arguments from American gun prohibitionists that such things are an American phenomenon.
Fox News is reporting that “at least 13 people are dead and 21 others injured.”
Meanwhile, Reuters is putting the body count at 15, including 11 children, and 24 others were wounded. The gunman reportedly committed suicide.
So far, there does not appear to be a motive, but Russian authorities are investigating.
By no small coincidence, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz was speaking over the weekend at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin, and the subject of school shootings here in the U.S. came up. He reportedly told the audience about legislation he pushed to “provide funding to double the number of school resource officers and significantly increase mental health support at schools.”
Cruz didn’t stop there. According to Business Insider, the two-term Texas senator added, “Whenever you have a mass murder … you have Democrats in Washington, the step they immediately go to is we need to take away firearms from law-abiding citizens…except for the minor problem that it doesn’t work. If the objective is to stop these crimes, gun control is singularly ineffective.”
There is no small coincidence that Cruz offered his comments one week before the 37th annual Gun Rights Policy Conference convenes in Dallas. The conference opens this Friday with a legal seminar on Second Amendment cases, and the full conference opens Saturday morning with a day-long series of panel discussions and presentations, the annual Awards Luncheon, and reports from the Second Amendment Foundation and Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. Both groups co-sponsor the event, which continues through noon Sunday. The event will be livestreamed ( Day One) here and (Day Two) here.
According to Reuters, Monday’s attack was not the first such incident in Russia. It listed four incidents in recent years:
- Four years ago, in 2018, an 18-year-old student murdered 20 people, mostly students, in a mass shooting at a college in Russian-occupied Crimea.
- In May of last year, another teenage perpetrator killed seven children and two adults in the city of Kazan.
- In September 2021, a student reportedly using a hunting rifle killed at least six people at a university in Perm, a city in the Urals.
- In April of this year, a man killed two kindergarten students and a teacher in the central Ulyanovsk region. He also committed suicide.
Reuters said Monday’s school shooter was apparently armed with two handguns.
