What do Texas’ candidates for governor plan to do about guns, mass shootings?
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Uvalde, Texas, elementary school shooting
A gunman killed at least 20 people — 19 students and a teacher — at an elementary school in Uvalde on Tuesday and also killed his grandmother, according to Texas officials. The gunman is dead as well.
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Democrat Beto O’Rourke had a clear message for Texas Gov. Gov. Greg Abbott during a news conference Wednesday at Uvalde High School: “It’s on you until you choose to do something.”
Abbott sat on the stage, flanked by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who leads the state senate, and House Speaker Dade Phelan. The day before, just a couple miles away at Robb Elementary School, 19 children and two teachers were killed in a mass shooting by an 18-year-old gunman who used an AR-style rifle.
O’Rourke, a Democrat who faces Abbott for governor in the November general election, knows the pains of mass shootings all to well after a gunman killed 23 people in 2019 at a Walmart in his hometown of El Paso. O’Rourke was campaigning for president at the time.
“The moment to stop Uvalde was right after Sandy Hook. After Santa Fe High. After El Paso,” O’Rourke wrote on Twitter on Tuesday. “Instead, Abbott made it easier to carry guns in public. The moment to stop the next slaughter is right now.”
In subsequent posts he laid blame on Abbott and lawmakers.
“These massacres aren’t natural disasters, acts of God, or random,” O’Rourke said. ”They are totally predictable, direct consequences of the choices made by Greg Abbott and the majority of those in the legislature.”
A number of mass shootings have been carried out during Abbott’s tenure as governor, including at a church in Sutherland Springs, a Santa Fe High School and in the Midland-Odessa area.
Abbott created tasks forces — The Texas Safety Commission and the Domestic Terrorism Task Force — following the El Paso shooting and issued several executive orders to improve law enforcement training and the reporting of suspicious activity. A Texas Safety Action Report included a recommendation to make background checks more accessible for private gun sales (Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick had expressed support for stranger-to-stranger background checks for gun sales) but no such proposal passed during the 2021 session.
In 2019, after Abbott held roundtables and issued a school safety plan in response to the 2018 Santa Fe shooting, lawmakers passed laws to bolster school safety, school marshals and mental health resources.
But in the past two legislative sessions under Abbott’s leadership, the state has also relaxed gun laws, including the passage of permitless carry, a law that allows people to carry a handgun without a license.
Gov. Greg Abbott touts 2019 response
Hours after Tuesday’s shooting, Abbott issued a statement mourning the loss of lives and offering state resources. He did not mention potential policy solutions to prevent mass shootings.
“Texans across the state are grieving for the victims of this senseless crime and for the community of Uvalde,” Abbott said in the Tuesday statement. “Cecilia and I mourn this horrific loss and we urge all Texans to come together to show our unwavering support to all who are suffering.”
At the Wednesday news conference, he noted the school safety legislation passed after the shooting at Santa Fe High School and stressed the need for mental health resources.
“We consider that what we did in 2019 to be one of the most profound legislative sessions not just in Texas, but we’ve seen in any state, in addressing school shootings,” Abbott said. “That said, to be clear, our work is not done. Our work must continue, and we will continue to discuss with legislators about all the potential avenues and pathways that we can take to make sure that schools will be even safer going forward.”
Abbott’s campaign declined to comment when asked for an interview with the governor to discuss potential responses to mass shootings, including potential legislation related to gun safety and access. O’Rourke’s campaign did not make him immediately available when an interview was requested Wednesday morning.
On Abbott’s campaign website, he vows to defend the Second Amendment, touting laws he signed to allow for “campus carry” and “open carry.”
“As an avid hunter and member of the Texas State Rifle Association and National Rifle Association, Greg Abbott will continue to fight any federal government overreach that aims to disrupt the 2nd Amendment rights of law-abiding Texans.”
During the news conference, Abbott brushed off the idea of tougher gun laws.
“People who think that, ‘We’ll maybe we can just implement tougher gun laws is going to solve it,’ — Chicago and LA and New York disprove this thesis,” he said, later adding “our job is to come up with a real solution that we can implement.”
Abbott , who earlier in the news conference said the gunman had “no known mental health history,” linked mass shootings to the “substantially changed” status of mental health in communities.
“We as a state, we as a society, need to a better job with mental health,” Abbott said. “Anybody who shoots somebody else has a mental health challenge. Period. We as a government need to find a way to target that mental health challenge and do something about it.”
Beto calls on Abbott to skip NRA convention
The shooting in Uvalde came just days before the National Rifle Association’s convention in Houston. The NRA previously announced Abbott, former President Donald Trump and Texas Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz are scheduled to speak on Friday.
Cornyn’s office said the NRA was informed before the shooting that he wasn’t able to talk due to an unexpected change in his schedule. Cruz’s office did not immediately return an email seeking comment. Abbott’s office has also not said whether he’ll still speak at the convention.
During the news conference, Abbott said he’s living “movement to moment.”
“My heart, my head and my body are in Uvalde right now,” he said.
O’Rourke has called on Abbott to skip the event.
“Governor Abbott, if you have any decency, you will immediately withdraw from this weekend’s NRA convention and urge them to hold it anywhere but Texas,” he said in a Tuesday tweet.
Beto O’Rourke’s plans for Texas gun laws
O’Rourke’s website lays out a plan for gun safety. He expresses support for “commonsense” policies like background checks for private gun sales, red-flag laws, safe gun storage laws and stronger domestic violence reporting, linking each proposal to mass shootings that may have been prevented.
“We can protect the Second Amendment while protecting Texans from gun violence,” the website reads.
O’Rourke told reporters on Wednesday that Abbott has ignored policies like safe-storage gun laws and prohibiting AR-15-style rifle sales, according to KUT, Austin’s NPR station.
“Those are … solutions that have been brought up by the people of Texas, each one of those has broad bipartisan support,” O’Rourke said, according to the news outlet. “Right now we could get that done if we had a governor who cared more about the people of Texas than he does his own political career or his fealty to the NRA.”
O’Rourke has been criticized for comments he made while campaigning for president related to access to assault-style rifles. During a Democratic debate he said “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47” while defending a plan for the mandatory buyback of such guns.
O’Rourke appeared to walk back those remarks in an interview with reporters at a Feburary event in Tyler.
“I’m not interested in taking anything from anyone,” he said, according to KLTV. “What I want to make sure that we do is defend the Second Amendment. I want to make sure that we protect our fellow Texans far better than we’re doing right now. And that we listen to law enforcement, which Greg Abbott refused to do, turned his back on when he signed that permitless carry bill that endangers the lives of law enforcement.”
What can voters expect on the campaign trail?
How will the gun debate play out on the campaign trail?
“We know that the attention span of average voters on these kinds of issues are short-lived, and therefore, it’s going to be a subtext, but it’s not going to be, I think, the primary issue that decides how people are going to vote this year,” said TCU political science professor Jim Riddlesperger.
But the issue of guns is a complex one in Texas, Riddlesperger said.
“The right to own guns is sacrosanct in Texas,” he said.
However, at the same time, many Texans aren’t opposed to small, well defined limitations on guns, he said.
Polling from February by the Texas Politics Project at UT-Austin found that 43% of those surveyed favored more strict gun laws and 34% wanted laws to remain as they are now. Among Republicans, 57% wanted gun laws left alone and 74% of Democrats wanted stricter laws.
Polling from Oct. 2019 found that 68% of those surveyed strongly or somewhat supported red flag laws, which generally allow a family member or law enforcement to petition a court for the temporary removal of a gun from a person deemed dangerous to themselves or others. A June 2021 poll found that 71% of those surveyed somewhat or strongly supported background checks on all gun purchases.
“It’s an issue on which Beto O’Rourke could frame a response that would be popular, but generally speaking Texans are going to remain committed to the rights of individuals to own guns and proposals that would make any real limitation on that, I think would be disadvantageous in a gubernatorial election for O’Rourke,” Riddlesperger said.
For Abbott, there’s a record of response to mass shootings to look back on.
“You can look there, and you see what he says,” Riddlesperger said, adding Abbott has “expressed an openness to do something, to take some meaningful action.”
“And I suspect he’ll say that again, but I doubt that, that will turn into any specific proposals,” Riddlesperger said.
One thing is for certain, Riddlesperger said: “I can assure you that what’s going on in both of those campaigns right now is that they’re trying to figure out ways to frame their messaging in ways that it will express empathy for the victims of this horrifying act, on the one hand, and not alienate large numbers of voters on the other.”
This story was originally published May 25, 2022 at 2:03 PM.
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