Tipsheet

Houston Police Chief Excoriated For Partisan Tirade Against Guns, Republican Senators

Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo was blasted on Monday for suggesting Republican senators and the NRA were to blame in the death of one of his officers in a case of domestic violence involving a firearm. 

“I don’t want to hear about how much they support law enforcement,” Acevedo said, pointing to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn. 

“I don’t want to hear about how much they care about lives and the sanctity of lives yet, we all know in law enforcement that one of the biggest reasons that the Senate and Mitch McConnell and John Cornyn and Ted Cruz and others are not getting into a room and having a conference committee with the House and getting the Violence Against Women’s Act (passed) is because the NRA doesn’t like the fact that we want to take firearms out of the hands of boyfriends that abuse their girlfriends,” Acevedo said. “And who killed our sergeant? A boyfriend abusing his girlfriend. So you’re either here for women and children and our daughters and our sisters and our aunts, or you’re here for the NRA.”

He continued: “So I don’t want to see their little smug faces talking about how much they care about law enforcement when I’m burying a sergeant because they don’t want to piss off the NRA.”

He then began to shout about how they need to make up their minds. “Whose side are you on? Gun manufacturers, the gun lobby, or the children that are getting gunned down in this country every single day.”

Conservatives were quick to push back.

“This is abhorrent,” Second Amendment advocate Dana Loesch responded. “My first experience with defensive gun use was a good guy with a gun protecting his family against such an abuser. To men like Acevedo: Stop treating us like weak creatures. Encourage women to empower themselves, get educated re firearms, and train.”

She continued: “The idea that Acevedo promotes in that clip, that firearm ownership is a man’s thing, so if you support it you’re standing against women, is so disgustingly and moronically sexist, it’s logical vomit. Domestic violence is literally a classification of prohibited possession with NCIC, Acevedo lies that it isn’t. That classification is why criminals like the abuser in my situation referenced get guns on the black market.”

Over at her website, she goes into much greater detail about why Acevedo is wrong, including some noteworthy pieces of information about his own history, which include a sexual harassment lawsuit, several instances of disobedience on the job, and “frequently grandstand[ing] for liberal causes.”

Loesch also relays the time he tried to bully her “with the threat of lawfare” because she challenged some of his claims and then tried to have him on her radio show to discuss them.  

As for his criticisms about the Violence Against Women's Act, The Daily Wire flagged a response from Amy Swearer, a senior legal policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, who called his rant "absurd."