Thank you to The Brownsville Herald for your recent strong editorial statement calling on Gov. Abbott to convene a special session of the Texas legislature to pass urgent legislation that will be effective in addressing the gun violence crisis in Texas (May 29). I fully agree with your call for action, although I’m afraid of what the legislature might actually do.
Texas clearly has a serious problem with gun violence. As the editorial points out, there have been mass killings in Texas nearly every year since 2016. Not just mass shootings, mind you — there have been lots more of those — but mass killings involving semi-automatic, military-style weapons specifically designed to kill human beings.
Greg Abbott and the Republicans have been great at addressing various imaginary crises — a “crisis” of voter fraud that doesn’t exist, a “crisis” of transgender people using the bathroom that matches their gender identity that is no crisis, the “crisis” of illegal border crossings. In all of these cases, their “solutions” have ended up costing the state and its taxpayers money and made us a laughing-stock of the nation.
But when it comes to real crises, they either show no interest or make things worse. For example, there is a healthcare crisis in Texas, where a third of the population — mostly poor people — has no health insurance. For purely political reasons the state, which has one of the lowest Medicaid eligibility ceilings in the country, has refused to expand access to the program so people can get the healthcare they need. In a state that has nearly completely banned abortion, it’s worth noting that we have one of the highest rates of maternal mortality in the country (far more women die in childbirth than they do from safe and legal abortions — although that will change as we will probably soon see a big increase in the number of unsafe illegal abortions).
There’s a climate crisis in Texas, too, as we’ve seen more extreme weather the past few years. But rather than address the crisis by helping fossil-fuel dependent communities transition to other forms of economic activity, or even addressing the very real problem of methane leakage in abandoned wells, the state GOP just shoves its head further in the sand (or caliche, as the case may be).
But I’m afraid of what the legislature would do if actually convened to pass gun laws. The last time they had an opportunity to address the crisis of gun violence, they passed laws weakening restrictions on guns. Perhaps this time around they’ll require teachers to be armed (just think: classroom shoot-outs), or we’ll have heavily-armed police on every corner and in every store in “high-risk” communities (translation: low-income minority neighborhoods). Honestly, the Texas legislature tends to just make things worse.
Abbott and the GOP claim to want to foster a “culture of life.” With the record of mass killings in this state, you can see just how hollow that claim really is. Given their track record, I’m not sure they can be trusted to do anything positive.
Mark J. Kaswan lives in Brownsville.
