Four years ago, the city council governing Allen, Texas, was asked to approve construction of a large gun range in the town. Only one member of the council, Lauren Doherty, voted against it.
Doherty said that vote cost her seat on the municipal body when she ran for re-election two years later.
“My vote – and my voice – were one of the reasons that I had an opponent” who ultimately won the race, Doherty said on Sunday.
She recalled her electoral defeat a day after a mass murderer shot eight people to death in her hometown before he was killed himself by a police officer.
Doherty said that unfortunately was just another day in America, where as of Monday morning there had been more than 200 mass shootings and 20 mass killings so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
The archive defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more victims are either killed or wounded and a mass killing as one in which four or more victims are slain.
“It’s all been said,” Doherty remarked. “Nothing I say is anything new for anyone. I’m sick of trying to react instead of prevent.”
Thirty years ago, Allen had fewer than 22,000 residents. Today, it’s home to nearly 107,000 people, part of a huge economic boom in the region. It’s an affluent suburb of Dallas, with lots of tech jobs, shopping centers and entertainment.
The town is most well known in Texas for its championship high school football team, which produced Arizona Cardinals quarterback Kyler Murray. Residents approved a bond package in 2009 that included a $60m high school football stadium with 18,000 seats – but the Allen Eagles football squad isn’t the only championship team in town.
Allen high school is also home to a state and national championship rifle team, which practices at several area gun ranges and begins training target shooters when they are in sixth grade.
The team blossoms in a politically conservative culture where guns are deeply ingrained. In towns like Allen, guns are handed down from generation to generation and are as much a part of an individual’s identity as any other cultural touchstone.
Saturday wasn’t the first time Allen has made headlines for a mass shooting. In 2019, just a month after the city council’s gun range vote, a young man with racist, white supremacist beliefs drove from his home in Allen to El Paso – nearly 700 miles (1,100km) away – and shot 23 strangers dead at a Walmart store.
“We’ve had mass shooters from here – we’ve had a mass shooting here,” Doherty said. “Allen will just be one in a long list. We’re not special here.”
Speaking up against Doherty’s vote on the gun range was enough to propel a man who challenged her re-election campaign to victory in 2021. Although the current council is solidly conservative, Doherty said she believes her community has become more evenly split politically.
For instance, in 2020, Allen voted for Joe Biden in the presidential election that he won over Donald Trump.
Doherty has taken a step back from politics since being voted out of office, working instead as a professional organizer and angel investor. Most recently, she said, she’s working with a company that creates software to help first responders during mass shootings. In the US, they happen frequently enough to need such a product.
Doherty said she doesn’t expect anything to change. If nothing changed after 19 students and two teachers were shot dead at a school in Uvalde, Texas, last year, the latest mass killing won’t change anything.
No meaningful, national gun control came either from the El Paso killings or the 2012 shooting deaths of 26 people at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut.
“A lot of people are numb to it – it’s normalized, which is horrible,” Doherty said. “It’s like living in a war zone. You just have to go about your day.”
