Feature

CURRENT EVENTS

Are Texans horrifi ed enough by the Uvalde school massacre to demand change?

BY SANFORD NOWLIN

Editor’s Note: The following is Current Events, a column of opinion and analysis.

We’re still struggling to understand what drove an 18-year-old gunman to make the inexplicable decision to enter a Uvalde elementary school on Monday and spill the blood of innocents.

But we do know this: politicians are already scrambling to assure us the shooter’s ability to purchase fi rearms bore no responsibility. Mere hours after the carnage, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas — recipient of a 100% rating from the National Rifl e Association (NRA) — sounded a warning against “politicizing” its horror.

“You know, inevitably, when there is a murder of this kind you see politicians try to politicize it,” he said with the cameras running. “You see Democrats and a lot of folks in the media whose solution is to try to restrict the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens. That doesn’t work.”

By now we know what to expect. Politicos will explain that arming teachers or designing safer campuses, not limiting access to guns, is how we prevent future incidents. They’ll tell us the Second Amendment prevents lawmakers from pu ing any limits on access to weapons such as those the shooter used to massacre 19 children and two adults.

Never mind that every other democratic country has passed laws that limit who can access the deadliest kinds of fi rearms. The citizens of those countries are no less loving of their personal liberties than Americans. The gun owners aren’t deprived of their ability to hunt or protect their families.

And contrary to the arguments of Second Amendment absolutists, every other right enshrined in the U.S. Constitution has reasonable limits. The First Amendment protects free speech, but it doesn’t protect the right to scream “Fire!” in a crowded theater nor to reveal troop movements to the enemy during wartime.

We’re also likely to hear politicians declare that “good guys with guns” ensured the bloodshed in Uvalde wasn’t far worse. Never mind, of course, that the good guys in this case were trained peace offi cers, not wannabes empowered by Texas’ permitless carry law signed into law last year by Gov. Greg Abbo .

The bo om line is this: no ma er how horrifying and incomprehensible the mass slaying at Robb Elementary School is to Texas voters, there’s li le to suggest the state’s Republican majority will do anything of consequence to keep fi rearms out of the hands of those who would turn them into instruments of mass carnage.

At press time, Cruz proclaimed that he would move forward with his planned speech at the NRA’s national convention in Houston this weekend, mere days after the carnage. Abbo backed out so he could appear in Uvalde Friday, but he made sure the organization knows where he stands by sending prerecorded remarks to its gathering.

It’s a fair bet both men shook their heads at the senseless loss of life in South Texas, delivered now-familiar “thoughts and prayers” bromides, then doubled down on their promise to prevent any restriction on the ownership of fi rearms.

Abbo and Cruz couch their defi ance as courage, the steely resolve to stand fi rm on gun rights. However, it’s far from courage. It’s cowardice.

How else does one explain Texas lawmakers’ willingness to loosen restrictions on fi rearms in the face of the El Paso, Sunderland Springs and Santa Fe High School mass shootings? Counting the Uvalde massacre, those incidents and others have claimed the lives of 108 people in Texas since 2009.

Active shooter cases in the United States increased 50% from 2020 to 2021, according to FBI crime statistics, and the country has already experienced 198 mass shootings between January and May of this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Of those so far this year, 27 have been in schools, according to a National Public Radio analysis.

“We are now in this country, when it comes to mass shootings and active shootings, at an epidemic level,” St. Thomas University professor and criminologist Debbie Goodman told the Current. “It is absolutely time to address this from the focus of safety and security.”

Goodman said limiting access to guns is one part of the solution. At the very minimum, stronger background checks could keep some troubled individuals from accessing the kind of weaponry and body armor obtained by the Uvalde shooter.

Yet, in the wake of this epidemic, Abbo , Cruz and their ilk have shown their lack of appetite for even those kinds of common-sense reforms.

They’d rather ignore the safety of their constituents than face the prospect of losing support of the NRA and the Texas State Rifl e Association. While those organizations spread around plenty of campaign cash, it’s the loss of their votes elected offi cials fear more.

“Their infl uence goes beyond fi nancial contributions,” Ed Scruggs, the vice chair of gun-control group Texas Gun Sense, told the Texas Tribune in 2018. “They are woven within the fabric of the majority party in every facet. They’ve cultivated their contacts for decades, so they don’t really need to spend a lot of money.”

For all their bluster about standing up for gun rights, Abbo and Cruz are cowards to ignore the crisis at hand. As they and other Republicans pander to the farthest fringes of the party, they fear being unable to tout their sterling NRA rating, being called out in a fl yer campaign, or worse, facing a primary candidate with more gun clout.

It’s up to Texans whether they’re willing to keep electing craven political opportunists who ignore a growing crisis that has no apparent end in sight.

In an interview this week with The Atlantic, Brown University Dean Megan Ranney — a physician with public-health expertise in gun safety — likened the lax regulation on fi rearms to the lack of safety in vehicles for much of the last century. It took citizens, consumer groups and politicians demanding that Detroit do be er.

“This is not an impossible problem. This is not hopeless,” Ranney said of the mass shooting epidemic. “But it requires a commitment to do more than just talk about it in the wake of a mass shooting. It requires a commitment to address it every single day.”

If Texans are ready to make that commitment, they can start by demanding the politicians that represent them to stop with the empty words, break their fealty to the NRA and work on real solutions to the snowballing catastrophe that puts us all at risk.

Joseph Guillen

Joseph Guillen

Lack of Understanding

If lawmakers won’t limit deadly fi rearms in the wake of the Uvalde shooting, they should at least fund research into the causes of such violence

BY MIKE MCMAHAN

When asked about gun laws in the wake of Tuesday’s massacre at Uvalde’s Robb Elementary School, Georgia senatorial candidate Herschel Walker had an illuminating response: “What I like to — what I like to do is see it and everything and stuff .”

That “illuminating” description may sound like a joke, but it’s not intended as one. If Walker, the Republican nominee, wants to “see” what enabled the deaths of 21 people, 19 of them children, the best way would be to examine peer-reviewed research on gun violence, right? That’s the gold standard.

Except federal funding for gun violence research was frozen in 1996 by the Dickey Amendment, a Republican-championed bill that banned the federal government from “advocating” for gun control.

That terrible piece of legislation was somewhat alleviated after 2018’s Parkland, Florida high school shooting, when then-President Donald Trump — of all people — signed a bill allowing research to be excluded from “advocacy” restrictions. In fi scal year 2021, Congress allocated $12.5 million to fund research on gun violence and upped the total to $25 million this year.

That restoration of funding is a fi rst step. But when one considers the billions poured into other federal priorities, like the Pentagon or Social Security, it’s a pi ance. Hell, it’s even a pi ance compared to the amount the government funnels into other types of research.

To the lament of scholars, this decades-long funding gap has led to a lag in understanding the root causes of gun violence. And we all know that understanding won’t come without a substantial increase in federal dollars. The resulting research would likely include an examination of mental health issues and how they can lead to mass shootings — something that would address a key GOP talking point following these incidents.

Kaizen is a Japanese philosophy of constant and gradual improvement. We would be wise to adopt that approach to the U.S. epidemic of mass shootings and make small but immediate changes. Why not focus on research and understand more about its causes? If there’s a defi cit of researchers and data, let’s correct that quickly.

One commonality in mass shootings is the use of assault rifl es. There’s a solid argument to be made for banning the weapons, but the congressional support doesn’t exist. At least not yet. It’s delusional to believe this ban will happen until there’s a major swing in power in Washington.

The Alcoholics Anonymous mantra is so ubiquitous it’s become a cliché: “The fi rst step is admi ing you have a problem.” Republican leaders must admit we, as a nation, have a problem. Mass killings are being enabled by easy access to fi rearms created for the sole purpose of causing massive human casualties.

If we cannot begin to rein in those weapons, then we should at least fund research that addresses the root causes of this epidemic of violence. We should ask Republican leaders if, in the wake of this tragedy, they are willing to support a massive increase in funding for gun-violence research. There’s an obvious follow-up that goes without saying, but let’s say it anyway. “If no, why not?”

Republicans know there’s problem. After all, they banned guns from Trump’s appearance at the National Rifl e Association convention in Houston last weekend.

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