Another week, and another mass shooting in Texas. This time the body count is eight at a mall outside Dallas. Last week it was eight outside Houston.
So what do the brilliant minds in the Texas legislature plan to do about this carnage? Stop talking about it.
HOUSTON — After months of pleading for more gun control measures, a Democrat who represents Uvalde, Texas, where 19 children died in a mass shooting, was told by the Republican leader of the State Senate to stop bringing up gun legislation or be barred from speaking at all.
In the State House, Republican members talked and joked among themselves as another Democrat, Representative Jarvis Johnson of Houston, rose to discuss gun control. “This is not a joke — this is real,” he shouted from the lectern at his colleagues on Friday. “Children every day are dying.”
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Among some Texans, the drumbeat of mass murder has fueled rising frustration and a slight openness to more gun regulation in a state where even Democrats proudly discuss their firearms. But the violence has done little to reshape the political realities in the State Capitol, where Republicans control both legislative chambers and all statewide offices.
In the past two years, as the state has been shaken by more than a dozen mass killings of four or more people, Texas has increased access to firearms, doing away with its permit requirements to carry handguns and lowering the age when adults can carry handguns to 18 from 21.
On Sunday, Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, attended a vigil for the victims of the shooting at the shopping center, Allen Premium Outlets, but said earlier that there would be no new effort by his administration to limit access to firearms — because it would not work.
“We’ve seen an increased number of shootings in states with easy gun laws as well as shootings in states with very strict gun laws,” Mr. Abbott said in an interview on Fox News. He said Texas was responding to the “dramatic increase in the amount of anger” across the United States by going to “its root cause, which is addressing the mental health problems behind it.”
It seems that the logic here, as in other hard-core Republican-controlled states, is that it is imperative that the government use whatever means necessary to stop drag queens from reading books aloud in libraries, to stop teachers from talking about gay people, to stop women from controlling their reproductive choices, and to stop large corporations from speaking out about laws they disagree with, but NOTHING can be done about guns and the massacres they cause because “it will not work.”
In fact, the Republicans at the behest of the gun lobby, have done everything they can to ensure that the laws won’t work. This is also in spite of the fact that the majority of people of all parties — left, right, and center — support such things as background checks, age limits, strict permitting laws, red flag laws, and a ban on assault rifles along with the nearly 100-year-old bans on machine guns.
There is something that can be done. These people can be voted out of office. If the majority of the voters truly want the laws to be changed, then they should put their money — and their votes — where their mouths are and get rid of these ammosexuals. It is literally a matter of life and death.