Video shows Houston community leader confront Ted Cruz on gun laws after NRA convention

“Nineteen children died. 19 children died, and that is on your hands. Ted Cruz, that is on your hands.”

That’s what a man yelled at the Republican senator while the mans was being escorted out of a restaurant where Cruz was eating after the NRA convention in Houston on Friday. The convention was held days after an 18-year-old gunman took a legally purchased rifle and killed 19 students and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, west of San Antonio.

A video posted to Twitter appears to show the man, Indivisible Houston board member Benjamin Hernandez, pretending he wanted to pose with a picture with Cruz while somebody else instead took a video.

“Ready? Alright: one, two, three,” the person behind the camera says before the man starts asking Cruz about gun control.

“Senator, can you please tell me why it’s so hard to support gun laws in this country?” Hernandez asked after the camera operator said to go.

Cruz seemed to be willing to discuss the topic and began to answer, referencing a speech he gave at the convention earlier in the day he suggested Hernandez go and watch and saying that there are “a lot of laws I support.”

Hernandez cut Cruz off, saying he has a young daughter and asking why Cruz doesn’t support stronger gun laws.

“What about background checks? Background checks?”

A person who appears in the video to be a member of Cruz’s security team, comes up and asks Hernandez to leave, but Cruz, who still had his hand placed on the Hernandez’s shoulder from when he thought they were posing for a photo, continued to engage with the man for another second before he said it seemed he didn’t want to listen to Cruz’s side.

“No, go ahead, go ahead, I’ll listen,” Hernandez says.

He lets Cruz talk for a few seconds, during which the senator says the laws Democrats want to introduce wouldn’t stop the gunman in Uvalde, before he starts to talk again.

“Do you know that this shooter waited until the day he was 18,” the man says.

In the back and forth between Hernandez and Cruz, during which the two each cut the other off and try to talk over each other in the restaurant, Hernandez said Cruz is taking blood money from the NRA and should be doing more to support stronger gun laws that could prevent future mass shootings.

Cruz says several times that he has tried to introduce bills into the U.S. Senate that would have prevented the shooting, but doesn’t specify about which bills he is referencing.

At the end of the 2 minute, 20 second video, men who appear to be members of Cruz’s security team stand in front of Hernandez and physically move him away from the senator as Hernandez yells that Cruz bears responsibility for the deaths of the children and teachers in Uvalde.