A woman testifying for Moms Demand Action has been called on the carpet for misleading the Texas Senate for implying by omission that the tragic killing of her husband by her son resulted from the use of a firearm. In reality, her son killed his father with a pipe wrench and a knife. The fact that her son owned what she called “an arsenal” had no bearing on the murder.
Open Carry Texas (OCT) has produced a short video which contrasts the woman’s testimony at the Capitol with newspaper and television reports about the murder, and her son’s trial.
Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, an anti-gun group funded by Michael Bloomberg, descended on the Texas Capitol on Monday, May 18th, to testify against H.B. 910, the open carry bill.
Leslie Ervin testified before the Texas Senate State Affairs Committee that day. She was wearing a Moms Demand Action t-shirt at the time. Her entire testimony can be seen on the official Texas Senate video. Her testimony begins at about the 33 minute mark in the video.
Ervin told the Senators who sit on the Committee that her paranoid schizophrenic son Lex had attempted to purchase guns from a local gun store on his 18th birthday. She said she was happy when McBride’s Gun Shop in Austin called her and told her that her son appeared unstable and they would not sell him any guns. She said she was happy because she “thought this was the way the system worked.”
She said she then called the Austin Police Department (APD), which told her that her son has a right to buy firearms.
Ervin then told the Senate State Affairs Committee that her son went to Big Box Stores and bought “an arsenal of guns.” She called the store, but said “there was nothing I could do to stop them.” She testified that the store told her it was her son’s right to purchase firearms, and without a court order she could do nothing to prevent it.
After delivering this testimony, Ervin immediately told the Senate Committee that on September 18, 2013, her son killed her husband. She did not inform the committee that her son killed her husband with a metal pipe wrench and a knife.
The reasonable and natural inference from her story was that her son murdered her husband with a firearm. Ervin never clarified that her husband was killed by other means.
She even went on to re-emphasize her misrepresentation by saying “… if they were not there to subdue him, before my husband died, who knows what would he would have done with that arsenal of guns. I want gun access to be stopped. And, I think there needs to be changes made so that a lot of innocent lives can be saved.”
Reports from the Austin American Statesman newspaper and Fox7 Austin television news confirm that a pipe wrench and knife were used, and these news reports are included in the video produced by OCT.
Ervin’s son was tried and found not guilty by reason of insanity.
C.J. Grisham told Breitbart Texas that he could not let this false and misleading testimony go unchallenged, so he produced the video.
In his video, Grisham states, “Bloomberg-funded Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in American have absolutely no shame.”
He charges that Ervin “used the tragic death of her husband at the hands of her mentally unstable son in an effort to sway the committee not to pass gun rights legislation.”
“It is appalling that a Bloomberg-funded gun control organization would condone its members fabricating details related to a true tragedy in order to further a political agenda,” the Open Carry Texas founder told Breitbart Texas. “We welcome the debate on gun rights versus control, but it would be beneficial to either side that such discussion be based on facts and not emotional fiction.”
Breitbart Texas covered the testimony given by other women who testified on May 18th at the Capitol in a story entitled “Moms Demand Action: Bloomberg’s ‘Stepford Robots” in Texas (with video).” This article also included a video published by OCT president and founder, C.J. Grisham.
The video in this article shows women from Moms Demand Action dutifully reading the same script over, and over, and over again. The videotape was taken from Texas legislative video archives.
The Open Carry Texas founder called the day at the Capitol with this political action group “a circus.”
Terry Holcomb, Executive Director of Texas Carry, another Second Amendment group, refers to the women as the “Bloomberg cult.”
He called the women who testified at the Texas Senate Committee “sock puppets.”
Holcomb told Breitbart Texas, “It’s sad, really. They are conditioned not to think for themselves. They have become so irrelevant that they are given a script by the Bloomberg heads and told to just read it.”
“They had a printed form with a fill-in-the-blank for their name.” Richard Briscoe, Legislative Director for OCT, told Breitbart Texas. “I had to contain my laughter when I could see that they had actually handwritten-in their name.”
The Breitbart Texas article also includes a video by Lone Star Gun Rights. The group filmed Moms Demand Action leaders giving college students scripts and telling them to wear their college t-shirts when testifying against campus carry.
The group has been accused of “not just being Mommies,” but rather a highly organized political operation.
Lana Shadwick is a contributing writer and legal analyst for Breitbart Texas. Follow her on Twitter @LanaShadwick2
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