After its
latest mass shootings, Texas leads the way – in loosening gun laws
US gun
control
Four of 10
deadliest massacres in the modern US occurred in the state but its governor has
stuck to the NRA playbook
Ed
Pilkington
@edpilkington
Fri 6 Sep
2019 07.00 BSTLast modified on Fri 6 Sep 2019 07.06 BST
Hours after
Texas suffered its latest mass shooting, when a gunman drove through Odessa on
Saturday shooting randomly from an assault-style rifle and killing seven
people, the state’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, declared that he’d had
enough.
“I have
been to too many of these events as governor,” he said. “I am tired of the
dying in Texas. Too many Texans have lost their lives. The status quo in Texas
is unacceptable and action is needed.”
His sense
of urgency was all too understandable. Texas has been the scene of four of the
10 most deadly mass shootings in modern US history, including the Walmart
massacre in El Paso last month in which a white supremacist murdered 22 people.
Abbott’s
call to action was surprising given the unique position he holds within the US
gun debate. Under his leadership, Texas Republicans have forged a template for
the rightwing response to mass shootings that has been emulated across the
country and found a willing accomplice in Donald Trump on the national stage.
That
template was fully on display on Sunday, the day after the Odessa shooting. As
he was proclaiming that he’d had enough, nine new laws were coming into force –
all of them signed by Abbott, all of them loosening gun controls.
El Paso
Special Agent in Charge Emmerson Buie, Fire Chief Mario D’ Agostino, Texas
Governor Greg Abbott, Mayor Dee Margo and Police Chief Greg Allen speak during
a press briefing, following a mass fatal shooting, at the El Paso Regional
Communications Center in El Paso, Texas, on August 3, 2019. - A gunman armed
with an assault rifle killed 20 people Saturday when he opened fire on shoppers
at a packed Walmart store in the latest mass shooting in the United States.
The new
laws allow more armed marshals to patrol Texas schools. They permit citizens
without a license to carry handguns in the middle of disaster zones, and they
give the green light to licensed weapons being stored inside cars in school
parking lots.
Another new
rule clears the way for licensed handguns to be carried inside churches and
other places of worship. The law comes into effect almost two years after the
massacre at Sutherland Springs where 27 worshippers were gunned down as they
prayed inside their Baptist church.
Abbott’s
template for dealing with mass shootings hails directly from the National Rifle
Association (NRA), the pro-gun lobby that wields outsized influence over
Republican politicians by funding their campaigns and grading their performances
(the NRA gives Abbott an A+). One of the NRA’s key slogans is: “The only way to
stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
Where
action is to be taken, it is focused entirely on intercepting and punishing
shooters. Since the Odessa rampage Abbott has proposed fast-tracking executions
of mass shooters.
On Thursday
he introduced eight executive orders designed to improve detection of
suspicious activity by potential attackers. In all these moves, however, one
thing has been conspicuously lacking – any attempt to tackle the root of the
problem: easy access to powerful weapons that can kill large numbers within
seconds.
Critics of
this approach argue that the idea that the answer to gun violence is to
encourage more guns is perverse and a threat to public safety. “Until we see
our leadership stand up to the NRA and implement basic solutions, we are going
to have additional loss of life,” said Victoria Neave, a Democrat who represents
Dallas in the Texas house (she gets a D grade from the NRA).
Neave wrote
to Abbott last month in the wake of the El Paso tragedy calling on him to
convene a special session of the Texas legislature to “pass real reform that
can save the lives of our fellow Texans”. She hasn’t received a reply.
Demonstrators
open-carry rifles while holding flags during a pro-gun rally on the sidelines
of the National Rifle Association annual meeting in Dallas, Texas, on 5 May
2018.
One of the
reforms that Neave and fellow Democrats want to see is the closure of a
loophole in the system of background checks that regulates gun sales. As things
stand in Texas, anyone can buy any number of deadly weapons – including
AR-15-style rifles of the sort used in Odessa as well as an unlimited amount of
ammunition in high-capacity clips – through the internet, at a gun show or even
from a stranger on the street, no questions asked.
Closing
that loophole is one of the most basic demands of gun control advocates. They want
every gun sale to be subject to federal background checks under the eye of the
FBI to ensure deadly weapons do not fall into the wrong hands.
That is not
an academic desire. The gunman in Saturday’s killing spree in Odessa had a
criminal record as well as a history of mental illness, and had already failed
a background check once. Yet he appears to have acquired his semi-automatic
rifle legally from a private seller who was permitted under state law to make
the exchange without any inspection.
“We are in
an extreme crisis situation,” Neave said. “Until we close those loopholes we
are going to have more tragic events like Odessa.”
True to his
glowing NRA ranking, Abbott has consistently rebuffed efforts to introduce
standard gun controls in his state. There are no “red flag laws” in Texas that
would allow the temporary confiscation of weapons from a person who poses a
threat to themselves or others.
People hold
candles at the end of the prayer vigil at the University of Texas of the
Permian Basin (UTPB) for the victims of a mass shooting, September 1, 2019 in
Odessa, Texas.
Online gun
sales are doing a raging business. A survey by Everytown for Gun Safety found
that in 2018 there were more than 60,000 postings offering firearms for sale in
Texas with no background checks required, more than 4,000 of which were of the
semi-automatic style often used by mass shooters.
You can go
on to the online salesroom Armslist.com and quickly find a dealer in Texas to
sell you a military-looking semi-automatic rifle with extended clip for under
$1,000. The firearms are listed as on sale through a “private party” and thus
are exempt from all scrutiny.
Within
months of taking office as governor in January 2015, Abbott stated his
ambition: dramatically to increase gun ownership in the state. “I’m
embarrassed,” he wrote in a tweet in 2015, noting that new gun purchases were
running at a higher level in California. “Let’s pick up the pace Texans. @NRA”,
he wrote.
Texans duly
obliged, with the number of active gun licenses shooting up from about 215,000
in 2000 to more than 1 million in 2018. There are now almost 1.4 million people
with active firearms licenses in Texas.
As the
number of guns has escalated, so too has gun violence. As the Giffords Law
Center has pointed out, data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control shows
that the gun murder rate in Texas has increased every year since 2014.
The annual
death toll from firearms in the state now stands at more than 3,500 people. “In
Texas we have seen the state not only refuse to pass safer gun laws, they’ve
actually done the opposite – they’ve made gun laws even weaker and put Texans’
lives at risk,” said Peter Ambler, executive director of Giffords, the advocacy
group led by the former US congresswoman and shooting survivor Gabby Giffords.
It’s not
just the sheer number of guns swirling around that is the result of the
Republican-NRA response to mass shootings. Abbott has also spearheaded a
relentless drive towards loosening restrictions on where and how you can carry
your weapons.
In June
2015, Abbott signed into law a provision that allows license holders to carry
handguns openly in a holster in most public places (it was already legal to
openly carry rifles). On the same day he exposed the campuses of all public
universities and colleges to the concealed carry of licensed handguns.
To add
insult to injury, the date on which that campus law kicked in was 1 August 2016
– 50 years to the day after a student-turned-gunman opened fire from the campus
tower of the University of Texas at Austin, killing 17 people. The massacre
went down as the first mass shooting in modern America.
Jennifer
Glass, a liberal arts professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said she
now walks through campus knowing anyone could be armed. “It’s anybody, anytime.
People you see by the creeks, people you see late at night. We’ve had to
acclimatize ourselves to the fact that any situation could be dangerous.”
A Texas
flag flies at half mast during a prayer services at the La Vernia High School
Football stadium to grieve the 26 victims killed at the First Baptist Church of
Sutherland Springs on November 7, 2017 in La Vernia, Texas.
Glass was
one of three professors who challenged the campus carry law on grounds that it
violated their terms of employment and free speech rights. The case was
dismissed last year, but she believes the stand they made was important.
“As a
university we are supposed to be committed to open dialogue,” she said. “But
how can you openly discuss issues that have generated violence in the past –
like abortion or race – knowing that some people in the lecture hall are
packing loaded weapons?”
Abbott and
his Republican allies are playing a dangerous game by sticking so stubbornly to
the purist NRA-approved template while more and more Texans die. Recent opinion
polls have found that 72% of Texans now support a red-flag law, while 49% think
gun laws should be more strict compared with only 17% who want to see them
loosened.
Glass
believes that the Republicans are running against the desires of most Texans.
“A minority of people who are armed to the teeth are imposing their views on
the rest of us. They tell us the only way to protect ourselves from a lunatic
with a firearm is to carry a gun, but we don’t want that – that’s why we have
the police.”
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