Cawthorn was caught cleaning his gun during a January 19, 2022 hearing on veterans suffering and dying from exposures to toxic chemicals. Jon Stewart was one of the witnesses. So was veteran Jen Burch. She told of six ER trips and spending thousands of dollars on medical care over seven years before her disability for toxic exposure was approved. During that time, she said, “That nodule that was in my lung doubled in size and now every year I have to go get screened to make sure it doesn’t turn into cancer.”

Either Cawthorn found the struggles of military vets boring or maybe, as 9/11 first responder John Feal said, he was “overcompensating for something that he lacks.”

From The Daily Beast:

Feal was one of at least two people at the Veterans’ Affairs meeting who noticed what Cawthorn was doing. Both were infuriated. But the general public couldn’t see it, because the two-hour virtual hearing was held over Zoom—which meant that those tuning in could only see the person speaking.

Cawthorn worked on his pistol out of sight for several minutes, two people told The Daily Beast, but it became plainly visible during the testimony of Jen Burch, a veteran who spent six years in the Air Force serving in Japan and Afghanistan.

Yet Cawthorn holds himself up as a big lover of the military. A 2020 campaign ad touts the service of his “grandfather, six generations back” in the Revolutionary War. It also says, “He planned on serving his country in the Navy, with a nomination to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis but all that changed in the spring of 2014 when tragedy struck.” The tragedy was a near-fatal car accident that left him paralyzed.

In reality Cawthorn had already been rejected by the Naval Academy before the car accident. As C&L’s Red Painter put it in her post about that and other very disturbing aspects of Cawthorn's history, Bone spurs 2.0.

Now we know Cawthorn can’t even be bothered to pay respectful attention to the problems of those who have really sacrificed for this country.

Imagine you showed up for a Zoom meeting and a colleague decided that was when he needed to clean his gun. Because that’s what happened today in a Congressional roundtable on toxic exposure. We’re better than this. pic.twitter.com/ePJGKdspfY

— Lindsay Church (@lkmchurch) January 20, 2022

You can watch the full hearing Cawthorn dissed above.