Al Gore likens climate change to school shooting

The former US vice president compares ‘climate deniers’ to cops who stood by as children were killed at a Texas school

Former US Vice President Al Gore has taken his climate-change rhetoric to new heights, likening “deniers” to the police officers who failed to take down a school shooter who murdered 19 children and two teachers in May in Uvalde, Texas.

“Climate deniers are really in some ways similar to all of those almost 400 law enforcement officers in Uvalde, Texas, who were waiting outside an unlocked door while the children were being massacred,” Gore said on Sunday in an NBC News interview. “They heard the screams, they heard the gunshots, and nobody stepped forward.” 

The police response to the Uvalde massacre was plagued by a “void of leadership,” contributing to the high death toll, according to a state report released last week. Nineteen officers waited in a hallway for more than an hour outside the adjoining classrooms where an 18-year-old gunman continued to fire his weapon and students called 911 begging for help.

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Gore, who lost the 2000 presidential election to Republican George W. Bush, said Americans must unify to respond to the climate crisis. “Confronted with this global emergency, what we’re doing with our inaction and failing to walk through the door and stop the killing is not typical of what we are capable of as human beings,” he said.

The former running mate of President Bill Clinton said extreme weather events “are really beginning to change minds.” In comparison, the Uvalde massacre helped drive a renewed push for restrictions on firearm ownership, leading to the first passage of significant gun control legislation by Congress in nearly 30 years.

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Gore, 74, has amassed an estimated $300 million fortune since leaving elected office, largely through his Generation Investment Management, while becoming a leading voice of climate-change activism. He has made some dramatic claims about the climate threat, such as predicting that the northern polar ice cap would likely be gone by 2013 and that the world would reach a “point of no return” by 2016 if drastic measures weren’t taken.

His 2006 documentary ‘Inconvenient Truth,’ which grossed $50 million at the box office, depicted much of Florida sinking beneath rising waters and saying there would be no more snow on Africa’s Mount Kilimanjaro within a decade.