Ted Cruz Comments on Guns in Banks Resurfaces, Sparks Debate

Recent comments by Ted Cruz, a Republican senator for Texas, which cited the presence of armed police officers securing banks while calling for increased security around schools to protect against mass shootings, have resurfaced after an armed employee killed five people in a bank in Louisville, Kentucky, on Monday morning.

Police identified Connor Sturgeon, a 25-year-old who worked at the Old National Bank, as the shooter. Alongside the dead, nine others were injured, including rookie police officer Nickolas Wilt, who was shot in the head while responding to gunshots and remains in critical condition.

The shooting comes just weeks after Audrey Hale entered the Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, and shot dead three 9-year-old pupils and a further three staff members before being killed by responding police officers. While gun safety advocates have used the incident to reiterate calls for increased gun control, others have said it showed schools needed enhanced security measures.

Following the shooting in Nashville on March 27, Cruz reintroduced the "Securing Our Schools Act" and the "Protect Our Children's Schools Act," both of which he had introduced in the previous legislative session, but which had not been passed.

The former would provide federal funding for school security measures including active shooter alert systems, metal detectors and "ballistic safety equipment for schools and responding law enforcement officers," while the latter would reappropriate unspent school funding previously designated for the coronavirus pandemic towards funding enhanced school security.

"When you go to the bank and you deposit money in the bank, there are armed police officers at the bank. Why? Because we want to protect the money we save," Cruz said on the Senate floor on March 30. "Why on earth do we protect a stupid deposit more than our children?"

However, in light of Monday's deadly shooting at the Louisville bank, social media users have suggested Cruz's comparison of the safety of banks to arguing for armed security guards for schools had been undermined.

"This didn't age well..." tweeted Shannon Watts, founder of gun safety group Moms Demand Action, on Monday, referencing Cruz's comments in the senate.

"Really Ted?" one user wrote. "How bout [sic] keeping semi-automatic weapons out of civilians hands."

Meanwhile, another said, "It's a stupid analogy anyway. The primary goal of a bank robber is theft which is much easier to stop with a gun than a criminal whose primary goal is murder and being killed."

But other users sided with Cruz's comments, arguing that the shooting in Louisville was just one incident among others in which an armed guard had stopped a crime from continuing to take place. Responding to Watts, one person tweeted: "It aged perfectly. If you truly value children like you say you do, then protect them with the same level or higher security."

John Mattingly, retired police officer from the Louisville Metro Police Department who wrote 12 Seconds in the Dark about the Breonna Taylor raid, said there wasn't an armed guard at the Old National Bank at all.

Replying to Ted Cruz and Fred Guttenberg, he said, "...there was no armed guard at this bank. It's not a typical bank with tellers etc. it's a lending bank that works in an office environment. No cash is moved through this "bank". Had they had an armed officer on scene, things could've been different. This young rookie cop made the 911 call."

Newsweek reached out to Cruz's office via email for comment on Tuesday.

The Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD) said that officers had attended Monday's bank shooting within minutes of it beginning, and Sturgeon, who was carrying a rifle during the assault, was fatally shot by police at the scene.

The force identified the five people killed as Joshua Barrick, 40, Thomas Elliot, 63, Juliana Farmer, 45, James Tutt, 64, and Deana Eckert, 57.

Police noted that Sturgeon had livestreamed the mass shooting on Instagram. A spokesperson for Meta, the parent company of Instagram, previously told Newsweek it was in contact with law enforcement and had "quickly removed the livestream of this tragic incident."

According to a joint mass killing database maintained by the Associated Press, USA Today and Northeastern University, 2023 has seen the most mass shootings in the first 100 days of the year since 2009. So far there have been 15 in the U.S., whereas there were 16 by April 10 in 2009.

One of those is the school shooting in Nashville, which also saw the perpetrator shot dead by responding police officers. Hale, who had previously attended the school, arrived that day with three guns and forced entry into the school.

Police later found evidence at Hale's home that suggested it was a "calculated and planned" attack. Children Evelyn Dieckhaus, William Kinney and Hallie Scruggs were killed along with school head Katherine Koonce, 60, Mike Hill, 61, and Cynthia Peak, 61.