Chelsea Handler Receives Backlash Over ‘Vile’ Tweet After Church Shooting

Chelsea Handler, shown above at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards September 12, will get a prime-time comedy show on NBC, reports said. Kevin Winter/Getty Images

Former TV show host Chelsea Handler made a politically charged tweet in the aftermath of the Texas church shooting that left 26 people dead.

“Innocent people go to church on Sunday to honor their God, and while doing so, get shot in killed. What country? America. Why? Republicans,” she wrote on Twitter on Sunday.

For that, she got major backlash.

“This is new low from the left. Sad time in our country and you decide to take a cheap shot. Please Pray for the victims and their families,” wrote Omar Navarro, a Republican candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in California’s 43rd district.

“The bodies aren’t even cold yet and you are politicizing them. You really have a dark heart,” one user wrote to her.

“You’re a hypocrite and part of the problem with your constant tweets of hate that separates the country,” another person told her.

“Does your career depend on you being a vile, callous person, or is that a personal choice?” another person wrote.

Thousands of other people on Twitter pilloried Handler for the post.

According to Fox News, Handler stopped her Netflix show to focus on political activism.

Law enforcement officials investigate a mass shooting at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas on Nov. 5, 2017. Nick Wagner/AMERICAN-STATESMAN via REUTERS

In the shooting, gunman Devin Patrick Kelley, 26, walked into the white-steepled First Baptist Church in rural Sutherland Springs carrying an assault rifle and wearing black tactical gear, then opened fire during a Sunday prayer service. He wounded at least 20 others, officials said, Reuters reported.

After he left the church, two local residents, at least one of whom was armed, chased him in their vehicles and exchanged gunfire, and Kelley crashed his car and shot himself to death, Wilson County Sheriff Joe Tackitt told CBS News in an interview on Monday morning.

 “At this time we believe that he had a self-inflicted gunshot wound,” Tackitt said. He later told CNN, “We know that his ex in-laws or in-laws came to church here from time to time ... They were not here (Sunday).”

Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott told CBS there was evidence that Kelley had mental health problems and that he had been denied a Texas gun permit.

“It’s clear this is a person who had violent tendencies, who had some challenges, and someone who was a powder keg, seeming waiting to go off,” Abbott said.

Abbott and other Republican leaders were quick to say that the attack did not influence their support of gun ownership by U.S. citizens—the right to bear arms protected under the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Reuters contributed to this report.