On May 25, Beto O’Rourke, who is currently the Democratic candidate for governor of Texas, attended a press conference regarding the May 24 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. The meeting was called by Greg Abbott, the current governor of the state, who is running for re-election. With the governor were his lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, the mayor of Uvalde, Don McLaughlin, and Sen. Ted Cruz, among others. After listening to the proceedings for 10 minutes, O’Rourke left his seat in the audience, approached the stage and addressed Gov. Abbott directly.

According to the New York Times report, O’Rourke said roughly this: “The time to stop this was after Santa Fe (referring to the Texas high school at which a shooting took place in 2018). The time to stop this was after El Paso (referring to the Texas mass shooting at a Walmart in 2019). The time to stop the next shooting is right now, and you are doing nothing. You are offering us nothing. You said this was not predictable — this is totally predictable when you choose not to do anything.”

The response of those on the stage was surprise and indignant anger. Dan Patrick yelled, “You’re out of line and an embarrassment!” Cruz said, “Sit down and don’t play this stunt.” Mayor McLaughlin shouted at O’Rourke that he was a “sick son of a b…. that would come to a deal like this to make a political issue”.

Subsequent commentators, especially Republicans, were similarly outraged. Monica Crowley, of FOX News, accused O’Rourke of political grandstanding; “The murder of children is a singular evil. Beto O’Rourke saw it as an opportunity to score political points.”

A columnist for the Idaho State Journal wrote, “If hell exists, I’m reasonably sure that there’s a special place in it for the likes of Beto O’Rourke, who used the Uvalde mass shooting to curry favor with the left….”

The assumption of these critics is that O’Rourke’s actions were self-serving, inappropriate and morally reprehensible; that the event he interrupted was one of somber reflection upon the dead children and teachers of Uvalde; that it was a non-political event totally dedicated to honoring those whose deaths had shocked and saddened Texans and all Americans, and that O’Rourke had used it as an opportunity to get T.V. time in furtherance of his political campaign for governor.

But this narrative and judgment are themselves politically motivated, as well as impossible to substantiate without mind-reading, and there is an alternative account that is entirely plausible, in fact, far more likely to be true.

By the time the press conference occurred, O’Rourke had been to Uvalde and talked to many of the parents of the victims of the shooting. He knew first-hand of their suffering, and of not merely their grief, but their anger at what had transpired. As we now know, parents gathered at the school had pleaded with the police to attack the gunman and stop the killing, but they had refused to do so for more than an hour. Lives could have been saved, perhaps, had they not failed to take action as soon as the situation became clear.

The press conference called by the governor was just that, a press conference. It was not a memorial service for those who died, it was a report to the press and the citizenry about what had transpired and, as it turned out, it was an inaccurate account at that. In case you wish to review it, a video of the event is available at youtu.be/2TGoreFWJH8.

The governor spoke first, took note of the sorrow caused by the shooting, and seemed to feel genuine anguish in doing so. But that isn’t all he did. He also provided an account of events on the day of the shooting and took time to praise all of the public officials, including the various branches of law enforcement, that had responded to the event.

The governor described the shooter as a “demented person,” though he also said that he had “no known mental health history.” Additionally, Abbott reported that he had, just before the news briefing, asked a collection of local officials the question: “What is the problem here?” and they had responded, “We have a problem with mental illness in this community.” The governor went on to give details regarding mental health services that would be available for those who suffered losses in the shooting, at which point he ended his remarks and yielded the microphone to the lieutenant governor. It was then that Beto O’Rourke approached the stage.

What, then, is a plausible guess as to what motivated O’Rourke to confront the governor after hearing his remarks? My conjecture is that it was primarily anger. O’Rourke would have been struck by the fact that Abbott proposed no measure whatsoever that could have prevented such an attack, except treatment for mental disorders, and the killer never sought mental health care, nor probably would ever have been forced to receive it. Moreover, as O’Rourke said later, the governor had failed to fund mental health care in the state adequately and refused to expand Medicaid.

More to the point, O’Rourke, and everyone else at the press conference, knew of other preventative measures that had been talked about in Texas and elsewhere for years. O’Rourke himself had talked about them when he ran against Ted Cruz for senator in 2018. He was notorious among Texans for recommending the passage of a law to prohibit anyone from purchasing guns designed specifically to kill people, like the AR-15 that the Uvalde shooter had used — guns for which large magazines were available; that fire quickly and repeatedly; and that propel bullets with great force, such that they do far more damage within the human body than any other gun would produce.

As for the supposition of his critics that O’Rourke was seizing an opportunity to bolster his campaign for governor, that’s highly questionable. O’Rourke knew perfectly well that reminding Texans of his previous stand on preventing mass shootings — especially his intent to forbid the purchase of AR-15-type weapons — would backfire, and, indeed, the consensus of knowledgeable commentators in Texas was that O’Rourke’s performance at the press conference had damaged his chances of beating Abbott rather than improved them.

Anger, justifiable anger, is what impelled O’Rourke’s action. Hell is not the appropriate place for Beto, it’s the governor’s office.

Leonard Hitchcock of Pocatello is an alumnus of the University of Iowa and did graduate work at Claremont Graduate University and the University of California, San Diego. He taught philosophy in California and Arizona for 15 years. In 1985, after earning a library degree, he was hired by Idaho State University. He retired from ISU’s Oboler Library in 2006.