Matthew McConaughey has penned a “call to action” after a gunman killed 19 children and two adults at an elementary school in his hometown of Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday.
“Once again, we have proven that we are failing to be responsible for the rights our freedoms grants us,” the actor wrote in a statement on Twitter late Tuesday.
Calling on “every American” to “take a longer and deeper look in the mirror” before asking what it is “we truly value,” McConaughey said it’s not enough to simply “exhale once again, make excuses, and accept these tragic realities as the status quo.”
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“As Americans, Texans, mothers and fathers, it’s time we re-evaluate, and renegotiate our wants from our needs. We have to rearrange our values and find a common ground above this devastating American reality that has tragically become our children’s issue,” he said.
He went on to rail against the “epidemic” of gun violence, which he said was one “we can control.”
“We must do better. Action must be taken so that no parent has to experience what parents in Uvalde and the others before them have endured,” he wrote.
Though the actor did not explicitly call for stricter gun regulation in his statement, he previously participated in a March for Our Lives rally in Austin, in the wake of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in 2018 that killed 17 people.
At that time, he stressed that while he supported the rights of law-abiding gun owners, it was a “no-brainer” to ban assault weapons for civilians, close loopholes in background checks for would-be firearm owners, and restrict the capacity of magazines.
