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Twitter has been fired up during the last days by a photo op of Senator Ted Cruz taken during his Iowa visit in which untimely comments about gun control were made.
And even more untimely images were released by AP, portraying the Republican Senator of Texas with a gun pointed at his head.
Just days after the mass shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, Senator Ted Cruz took another swing by Iowa to celebrate the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and hold a speech to this extent.
During the event, AP photographer Charlie Neibergall took one photo of Ted Cruz with a background poster showing a gun that was aimed directly at his head. Ironically, the entire background was holding up while Ted Cruz was making a point about gun control being defined in both Iowa as in Texas as:
“hitting what you aim at”.
The town hall of Red Oak heard other seemingly funny stories coming from the Senator. Such as:
“My wife, Heidi, who its a petite, 5’2 California blonde, she was standing at the tripod unloading the full machine gun with a pink baseball cap that said ‘armed and fabulous’”,
making reference to a visit the couple had made to a New Hampshire gun range.
While the mass shooting in the Charleston church was not a feature of the Senator’s speech, it was consistent with his message that Democrats are making a convenient excuse of the tragic events for attacking Second Amendment rights.
In the views of the Republican contender for the presidential seat, the Charleston shooting is just one more excuse for Democrats to not address the real issues at hand: mental illness or people with loaded criminal records.
Instead, according to Ted Cruz, Democrats are trying to take away the rights of perfectly no wrong-doers, law-abiding citizens.
As with any debate sparked on the topic of gun control, this proves as controversial as ever before. As such, the speech held in front of approximately 70 attendees at the Red Oak town hall coupled with the AP photo made the round of Twitter under the @ThePoliticalHat umbrella.
The posts were ironically intended at both Senator Ted Cruz and the AP news organization’s perceived biases.
Sunday night, a statement coming from Paul Colford, the vice president and the director of media relation at Associated Press read that the photos were purely a conjunction of circumstances and that AP never intended to portray Senator Ted Cruz in a negative light.
Nonetheless, despite the controversy, the idea behind the Twitter cohort of posts, overtook since then by blogs and news outlets across the U.S. is that it was simply wrong to take those photos. Questions of biases were raised. Had it been a Democrat in that seat, would the same captures be taken?
The overwhelming majority of posts on the issue seem to believe that wouldn’t have been the case.
Image Source: politico.com
