[imagesource: Sky News]

Matthew McConaughey hails from Uvalde, Texas, where just last month, 19 students and two teachers were shot dead in school by Salvador Ramos.

The event has felt like the last straw for a lot of Americans, sparking an upsurge in hard-hitting campaigns and speeches calling for gun sanity and tighter regulations.

McConaughey is among them, having just delivered an emotional and powerful address at the White House to advocate for “responsible gun ownership”.

Choking back tears, the actor held up photos of some of the child victims, talking about them and their families with heartbreaking consideration.

He brought a slain girl’s shoes into the room to make one of his many points, at which point he lost his shit, slamming the lectern in what can only be interpreted as desperate frustration.

Here’s his speech, with that moment coming in at the 3:30 mark:

Sky News has more:

In the highly personal 22-minute speech to a silent White House press briefing room, the Hollywood star described how he and his wife Camilla had spent the past week with the grieving families and spoken at length about their loss – and the need for “making these lives matter”.

Referring to the recent Uvalde school shooting, McConaughey said he believed that the constitutional right to bear arms did not mean there could not also be effective gun control legislation:

This included, he said, more background checks, limiting the sale of certain high-powered weapons, introducing so-called ‘red flag’ laws that highlight people with mental health or extremist issues attempting to buy guns, and raising the minimum aged to purchase AR-15s like the one 18-year-old Ramos used, to 21 years.

“These are reasonable, practical, tactical regulations,” he said. “These regulations are not a step back, they are a step forward for a civil society and for the Second Amendment.”

While gun control laws remain terribly difficult to pass in a politically-divided America, congress has to eventually “take a sober, honest and humble look in the mirror.”

As that gut-wrenching school shooting video pleads, “No more thoughts and prayers. Only action will save our kids. Only real gun reform will restore America’s future.”

[source:skynews]