Starting today, every schoolchild in Texas will have to ask “Mom, will I come home from school alive today?” Every child whose parent is a schoolteacher will have to ask “Mom, will you come home alive today?” In all my years of primary and secondary school, I never had to say these things, let alone even think them. Now because of the policies and continued inaction of the government of the state of Texas, we have to do so.
Uvalde is 60 miles from my hometown of Kerrville. It is the county seat of the next county over from Kerr County. My parents were teachers, my mother taught elementary school for 30 years and my father was a professor for 25 years. So, this one hits very close to home, literally.
Monday saw one of the worst massacres ever of a schoolhouse. 21 total dead, including 19 children under the age of 10, were killed at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde. Why were they murdered? We will never know the answer to that question. What we do know is that the perpetrator, Salvador Ramos, who turned 18 on May 16, bought not one but two AR-15 rifles and over 350 rounds of ammunition the day after his birthday. He shot his grandmother, posted on Facebook about it and then went out hunting.
What has been the response of Texas government officials? It starts with a prayer for the dead. Government Abbott says Texas is praying for you. I suppose he is also praying for no more school massacres under his gubernatorial watch but since that did not work for the Santa Fe High School in 2018, in which eight students and two teachers were killed, I doubt its effectiveness. Of course, his similar prayers did not work after the church massacres where 26 parishioners were massacred in the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs Texas in 2017. Nor did his prayers work after the shopping massacre in El Paso in 2019 where 23 people were killed and 26 more were injured when Patrick Crusius, a 21-year-old from Allen, Texas, allegedly opened fire with an AK-47-style assault weapon at the Walmart located near the Cielo Vista Mall on the east side of El Paso.
I guess attending school is now added to the list of going to church and shopping as things that can get you killed in Texas.
What has Governor Abbott done substantively after all of these massacres? Nothing, zero, zilch, nada; as in a big fat goose egg. His Democratic rival, Beto O’Rourke confronted Abbott at a Press Conference saying,“You are doing nothing. You are offering up nothing. You said this was not predictable. This was totally predictable when you choose not to do anything.” As O’Rourke was being escorted out of the Press Conference, he turned and confronted Abbott with ““This is on you until you choose to do something different,” O’Rourke said. “This will continue to happen. Somebody needs to stand up for the children of this state or they will be continue to be killed just like they were killed in Uvalde yesterday.””
What Abbot has said consistently is that it is not the fault of the gun manufacturers but that we need to better with the “mental health” of Texans. What Abbot has done about mental health in Texas? As reported by NBC News, “in April he slashed $211 million from the department that oversees mental health programs.” How bad is mental health care in Texas? “Texas ranked last out of all 50 states and the District of Columbia for overall access to mental health care, according to the 2021 State of Mental Health in America report.” Does that sound like someone who actually cares about the ‘mental health’ of Texans?
What else did Abbott do after the Uvalde massacre? Attended a fund-raiser. I guess raising money for a political campaign is more important than the mental health of Texans.
As for the idiotic Lt. Governor of Texas, the Honorable Dan Patrick, his response is best summed up by the attitude that the only thing that stops a bad guys with a gun is a good guy with a gun. Unfortunately, it does not work that way. Not only had the Uvalde School District substantially increased its security budget after the Santa Fe massacre, there were good guys with guns at the elementary school. The Houston Chronicle reported “that the school security officer outside was armed and that initial reports said he and Ramos exchanged gunfire.” Moreover, as “Ramos entered the school, two Uvalde police officers exchanged fire with him, and were wounded, according to Olivarez. Ramos went into a classroom and began to kill.”
The buffon Texas Attorney General, Ken Paxton, went in a different direction, saying there should only be one point of ingress into a school. Paxton has sadly forgotten the purpose of doors in schools, they are not only there to let students in; more importantly doors exist to let students out. Over 100 years ago, some 115 women burned to death at the Triangle Fire in NYC because the doors were locked shut to keep the workers safe. Can you imagine what would happen if there was a fire at an elementary school and all the doors except one were locked shut?
What does all this mean for Texas? It means that as the state with “more guns per capita than any other state,” Texas is “awash in weapons.” Lori Post, director of the Buehler Center for Health Policy and Economics at the Northwestern University School of Medicine, was quoted in the NBC News article stating, “After the tragic 2019 mass shooting in El Paso, the governor signed several bills to curb mass shootings; unfortunately, most of those bills involved arming the public to stop mass shooters.”
About the only thing you can say with certainty about Governor Abbott is that he is Keynoting the National Rifle Association (NRA) Convention in Houston this weekend.
