The Republican US Senate candidate in Georgia was apparently caught off guard by a question about the Uvalde shooting on Tuesday after he easily secured his party’s nomination in the state’s primary election.
Herschel Walker was asked by CNN’s Manu Raju as the results showed that he had swept his opponents by double digits whether he supported “any new gun laws” in the wake of a horrific mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
An 18-year-old suspect is dead after opening fire at an elementary school and killing nearly two dozen people, most of them children.
Mr Walker had no real response to Mr Raju’s question, instead quipping that he wanted to “see” more, apparently regarding the details of the shooting.
“What I like to do is see it and everything and stuff. I like to see it, and everything,” he said, before walking off.
The moment was an example of the concerns that many GOP activists voiced about Mr Walker’s candidacy before he secured the nomination on Tuesday. The three-time Heisman trophy winner is a stranger to elected office and has no experience in government at any level other than making endorsements of local Republican candidates in years past.
As such, some fear that he may be outgunned in terms of policy chops by the incumbent Raphael Warnock, who was a political activist centered around the issue of Medicaid expansion for years before he took office in 2021 after winning a special election to become the first-ever Black senator in Georgia’s history.
Most Republicans asked about the shooting stuck to typical conservative messaging and roundly rejected the idea of supporting new restrictions on gun ownership, which the party’s hardline base strongly opposes.
One of those Republicans to make such a statement was Texas’ Ted Cruz, who found himself on the losing side of a GOP Senate primary earlier this month when the candidate he backed in Ohio, Josh Mandel, was defeated by Trump-backed JD Vance.
“Inevitably when there’s a murder of this kind, you see politicians try to politicize it, you see Democrats and a lot of folks in the media whose immediate solution is to try to restrict the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens,” Mr Cruz said on Tuesday after the shooting. “That doesn’t work. It’s not effective. It doesn’t prevent crime.”
