Opposition calls Hawley 'a fraud' after Tennessee school shooting

A Democratic opponent of Josh Hawley branded the Republican a fraud and a coward after the far-right Missouri senator demanded that the killing of three nine-year-old children and three adults at a Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee, be investigated as a federal hate crime.

In just two years ago, Hawley was the only US senator to vote against a bill to crack down on hate crimes against Asian Americans during the Covid epidemic.

The bill, Hawley said, would give the federal government the power to decide what counts as offensive speech, and then monitor it. Federal and state authorities have said any motive in the Nashville attack has not yet been established.

On Tuesday, Lucas Kunce, a Missouri Democrat running to oppose Hawley in 2024, said one out of 100 senators voted against the anti-hate crime bill in 2021. Josh Hawley is his name. He is a fraud and a coward. It is more obvious on some days than others. Hawley addressed the Nashville attack in remarks on the Senate floor, in a Senate resolution and in a letter to the FBI director Christopher Wray and secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas.

Condemning the murderous rampage at a Christian school known as Covenant School Hawley wrote: It is commonplace to call such horror senseless violence. That is false. The attack was targeted against Christians, according to the police.

I urge you to immediately open an investigation into this shooting as a federal hate crime. The full resources of the federal government must be brought to bear Hate that leads to violence and hate crimes must be prosecuted. Joe Biden was asked about Hawley's contention at the White House. The president said: Well, I probably don't think so. I am joking, I have no idea. In the Senate, the US attorney general was asked by John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, if he would open a hate crime investigation.

The motive hasn't been identified, according to Merrick Garland. We are working full time with federal agencies and Nashville and Tennessee law enforcement to determine what the motive is and of course motive is what determines whether it is a hate crime or not. The authorities in Tennessee continued to investigate. The shooter, who was killed, wrote a manifesto and planned the attack extensively, according to the police. The police chief, John Drake, told NBC that resentment over attending the school might have played a role in the shooting.

On Monday, police said the 28-year-old shooter, Audrey Elizabeth Hale, was transgender.

LGBTQ rights groups have expressed concern that Hale's writings could be published, a step police have said they will not take while the investigation continues.

Gun law reform group Gays Against Guns, formed after the Pulse Nightclub massacre in 2016, condemned the Nashville shooting but also criticised Republican policies and laws.

Gun violence and mass killings, the group said, can't be separated from the efforts of the cisgender white supremacist patriarchy to keep us divided along lines of race, ethnicity, religion, gender and sexual orientation Until our society confronts these realities, rather than hide from or obscure them as Don t Say Gay and Anti Critical Race Theory laws proliferating across the nation, we can, sadly, expect many more incidents like today. The group said expectations and demands can take their toll on members of our LGBTQ communities who receive hatred, ridicule, denigration and persecution instead of receiving support and understanding from their families and communities.