Baseball field shooting shakes American symbol of fair play

"I think clearly he had a lot of hate and rage building up, and he chose to attempt a mass murder", DeSantis said. "I got in the auto and left and found out that my Republican colleagues were targeted by an active shooter".

DeSantis, of Ponte Vedra Beach, said he and Duncan had no idea that Hodgkinson was bent on a shooting rampage that would critically wound their colleague U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana and wound four others before he was shot dead by law enforcement at the scene. "I do well with the glove at third base but not well enough to stop bullets", DeSantis quipped, "that's just the reality".

In a Facebook post, Duncan said he left before the shooting, but believes he saw the shooter. I didn't think that that was the safest place to stay, and I worked my way out of the dugout to a safer place. The others wounded were a police officer, a congressional aide and a lobbyist.

Representative Al Green stated he had been the target of several threats, especially since announcing his intention to attempt to launch impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump.

"We have fun", said a visibly upset Davis.

In that Alexandria park, GOP members of Congress were getting ready for one of the great Washington traditions that remains: a baseball game, to be played tonight, against their Democratic counterparts in Nationals Park.

Hodgkinson, who volunteered for U.S. Sen. Scalise was next to him at shortstop and Duncan was playing second.

Tenney, who voted for the ACHA, said she has received threatening messages and emails in the past, but called the most recent one "particularly disheartening following this morning's tragic events", per Politico.

"He was relatively nondescript, not particularly well dressed", DeSantis recalled shortly after the shooting occurred.

"We kind of know how this feels", said McSally, who served in the Air Force and deployed to Iraq and Kuwait. He said that the encounter was odd enough to bring it to authorities' attention. "Because if this is the direction we're going in as a country, we're not going to be able to have a democracy. We represent 700,000 people in SC, and that's what we're going to keep doing", Duncan said. "Asking whether it was Republicans or Democrats out there". "We obviously were just trying to beat some traffic, never thought that you'd ever have any incident like this, but had we just chose to stay a little longer, I mean who knows what would have happened".