Greg Abbot is wrong about gun control

 

Memorial at the site of the Allen, Tx shooting

Fair warning: this will be political, because I am angry—angry beyond words at Greg Abbott who is johnny-on-the-spot with praise for police and offers of all state support systems after a mass shooting but does nothing to prevent them, angry at the people who are growing numb, shrug their shoulders and say nothing will be done. I cannot believe that we have to live this way, afraid to go to the mall, to a ball game, to a birthday party, for heaven’s sake.

I’m not sure how Abbott has convinced himself guns are not the problem—oh, wait, I know. It’s the campaign money he gets from gun manufacturers and the NRA. After the shooting in Allen this weekend, he was way too quick to say there would be no review of gun laws but a focus on mental health. In a Sunday Fox News interview (yep, take the easy ones, Greg) he explained that the state has been grappling with this for a year now. Grappling has done them no good, because nothing has gotten better since Uvalde.

Mass shootings in Texas began, remember or not, in 1966 with the UT Tower shootings. Here’s a list of those since:

Daingerfield Baptist Church, 1980

Grand Prairie, 1980 (I don’t remember this one)

Luby’s Cafeteria, 1991 (boy do I remember that one)

Fort Worth Wedgwood Baptist Church, 1999 (I was at a meeting in my church wondering about all the sirens)

Fort Hood, 2009 and 2014

Ambush of Dallas police at a protest, 2016

Sutherland Springs Church, 2017

Santa Fe High School, 2018

El Paso WalMart, 2019

Midlan-Odessa shopping enter, 2019

Uvalde, 2022

Cleveland, Texas 2023

Allen shopping mall, 2023

Notice how the frequency increased after 2016? Perhaps because of loosened gun restrictions in the state? Greg Abbott has been governor since 2015. I am not saying, of course, that Abbott caused the shootings, but I am saying someone might look at the connection between loosened gun control and the frequency of shootings: more people had easier access to guns. IF I were Abbott and had that on my record, I would be quick to want to solve it and clear my good name.

Abbott claims focus on mental health is the answer, albeit a long-term answer. My first question is what he means by mental health, which is a catch-all nothing phrase, useful as a sop to the voting pubic. The variety of mental problems in any population is mind boggling. How does he plan to detect them? What programs will he institute? What kind of timeframe does he project? Biggest question of all: if he’s been grappling with mental health in the Texas populace for a year, why did he cut funding for those programs by over $200,000 last year so that Texas is the state with the lowest funding for mental health problems in the country. Greg is talking out of both sides of his mouth.

As for time, we don’t want to wait years for mental health programs to create a healthy population where no citizen wants to kill their neighbors. That’s not going to happen.

I’m willing, even eager to say that most mass shooters have mental health problems. To me, no one in their right mind could gun down countless people, including children, with those merciless weapons. But detecting them before the act is another thing: mental health is a huge net with lots of holes in it. Why and how did the Allen shooter get a weapon, when he had a record of extremism clearly documented online?

In almost all mass shootings, it becomes clear after the event that the shooter should never have had a gun. Texas does have background checks (my mistake, because I thought it didn’t)—a check so superficial that a store clerk completes it while the buyer stands at the counter and waits. And you do have to register with a federal database, probably for ATF. And if you order online, the weapon does not go to you but to a federally licensed store where, presumably, a check is done. Checks at gun shows are to say the least problematic.

It seems obvious that guns in the hands of the wrong people are the problem. An effective solution: ban assault weapons and immediately stop their production by manufacturers. A tall order, but it can be done. It was under Clinton and could be again, although there are millions more assault weapons in the hands of individuals now.

What to do about the weapons already out there? A buyback program would only be minimally effective, but how about a registration program that involved new background checks and heavy fines for failure to comply?

Background checks must be thorough and intense, with a long enough waiting period for a deep check to be done. By contrast I read somewhere that you can now rent an assault weapon for an hour or so—to vent your frustrations, I guess. There are minimal  restrictions.

One small step toward sanity: a bill to raise the purchase age for assault weapons from eighteen to twenty-one was passed out of committee today and will now go to the full Texas House for consideration. It might have stopped the Uvalde shooter but few others.

There is absolutely no reason for any civilian, eighteen, twenty-one, or eighty-five, to own an assault weapon designed to kill as many as possible as quickly as possible. Those weapons are killing our friends and neighbors, our children. It doesn’t have to be that way.