Soon after learning of yet another mass shooting, this time at an elementary school, Texas’s conservative leaders quickly provided their latest, oft-repeated rhetoric of “thoughts and prayers”, while doubling down on the need for more – not fewer – guns in schools.
An 18-year-old shooter killed 19 children and two adults on Tuesday in Uvalde, Texas, about an hour and a half’s drive west of San Antonio. And while such horrors happen across the US, Texas has a political culture of easing access to guns and fiercely opposing any efforts to limit the rights of its citizens to arm themselves with powerful weapons intended for use on battlefields.
Texas’s rightwing Republican governor, Greg Abbott, made his first statement after the shooting from Abilene, Texas, where he was scheduled to address recent wildfires in the region. After news of the shooting, he pivoted to a brief update from Uvalde, reading from a prepared statement.
“What happened in Uvalde is a horrific tragedy that cannot be tolerated in the state of Texas,” Abbott said, adding that the shooter “horrifically, incomprehensibly” killed more than a dozen students. Abbott also said the shooter, who was killed by law enforcement, had a handgun and possibly a rifle. A state representative told CNN the alleged shooter legally bought two powerful assault rifles just after turning 18.
Yet last year, Abbott signed into law several measures making it easier to own and carry guns in the state. One allows Texans over 21 years old to carry a handgun like the one the shooter may have used without first getting a background check.
At the time, the law was criticized by law enforcement officials, and a poll from the University of Texas and the Texas Tribune showed that about 60% of Texas voters did not want adults to be able to carry a gun without a license.
But Abbott, who has signed nearly two dozen laws providing more access to guns, said the measure “instilled freedom in the Lone Star State”.
Abbott is scheduled to appear at the National Rifle Association convention in Houston this weekend. The Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz, who called for more armed officers at schools after the shooting on Tuesday, will also speak at the convention.
Texas has always had some of the most relaxed gun laws in the nation. In the aftermath of other mass shootings – including at a church in Santa Fe, Texas, in 2018, and at a Walmart in El Paso and the Midland-Odessa area in 2019 – lawmakers in the state have reacted by loosening those regulations rather than restrict access to firearms.
After those shootings, for example, Abbott asked lawmakers to consider a “red flag” law to allow courts to remove guns from people who present a danger to themselves or others. He also floated an idea to expand background checks for some gun sales.
Instead, the legislature passed measures to give more teachers guns on campuses and the so-called “constitutional carry” law.
“It’s astounding to me,” state senator Roland Gutierrez, a Democrat from San Antonio whose district includes Uvalde, told the Texas Tribune. “We’re supposed to create things. We’re supposed to create legislation to keep people safe. By God, to keep children safe. And here we’ve done exactly the opposite.”
Texas Republicans followed a playbook in their response that’s similar to how the NRA has responded to school shootings for a generation, according to tapes released last year by NPR. After the 1999 Columbine shooting, the organization’s leaders developed a strategy to avoid politicizing the tragedies.
After the attack in Uvalde, some Texas lawmakers took the same route. Congressman Tony Gonzales, whose district includes Uvalde, told CBS on Wednesday morning that he didn’t want to discuss gun policy so soon after the worst school shooting in the state’s history.
“I’m happy to debate policy, but not today,” Gonzales said. “Right now we need love. We need compassion. We need people to come together as we heal.”
Meanwhile, Cruz said on Tuesday that the answer as he saw it was to provide more guns at schools, a popular idea among conservative leaders in the state in the aftermath of campus shootings. Yet armed police failed to stop the massacre in Uvalde after engaging the alleged shooter before he entered the school.
“We know from past experience that the most effective tool for keeping kids safe is armed law enforcement on the campus,” Cruz told MSNBC. “Inevitably, when there’s a murder of this kind, you see politicians try to politicize it. You see Democrats and a lot of folks in the media whose immediate solution is to try to restrict the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens. That doesn’t work.”
Other state leaders have considered those measures before. Responses to mass shootings have focused on arming teachers or adding more officers, or closing entries to schools to make them less accessible.
“We have to harden these targets so that no one can get in ever except through one entrance,” Texas’s lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, told the Fox News host Tucker Carlson. “Maybe that would help. Maybe that would stop someone.”
The logic those Republican leaders float is that the only way to solve the epidemic of American mass shootings is with more access to firearms in hope of stopping rogue gunmen. The state attorney general, Ken Paxton, who is facing felony fraud charges and won a GOP primary runoff hours after the shooting in Uvalde, repeated that rhetoric on the far-right network Newsmax on Tuesday.
“People that are shooting people, that are killing kids, they’re not following murder laws. They’re not going to follow gun laws,” Paxton told the network. “I’d much rather have law-abiding citizens armed, trained so they can respond when something like this happens because it’s not going to be the last time.”
Nationally, Joe Biden has called on the US Congress to pass stricter gun legislation after the shooting in Uvalde. But in Texas, where conservative Republicans have tight control of the state legislature, political insiders don’t expect much change no matter the scale of the tragedy.
