Texas Disproves Its Own Myth

Texas Disproves Its Own Myth

Myth: “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.”

Again and again and again. It’s easy to buy just about any firearm in Texas… even special ammunition designed to penetrate body armor. Uvalde wasn’t remotely enough. The May 6th mass shooting in Allen, Texas – killing 8 and the shooter, wounding 9 others – ended serendipitously when a police officer at the outlet mall was there for an unrelated call… and boldly took out the perpetrator. As Texans stroll about anywhere with AR-15s strapped to their backs while others have holstered pistols, there’s not damned thing a cop can do to stop, ask questions of intent or try and prevent the gun usage. Perhaps one of those AR-15 carriers will be the one to fire one of those special bullets to take out the cop who can only watch and hope otherwise.

“Texas has some of the country’s most permissive gun laws, priding itself on being a state with more than 1 million gun owners despite its recent history of mass shootings. Many authorities in Texas say they have seen an increase in spur-of-the-moment gunfire since September 2021, when the state began to allow most adults to carry a handgun without a license.

“[The May 6th outlet mall] shooting was the deadliest in Texas since the massacre of 19 students and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde in May 2022. Only the Monterey Park, Calif., mass shooting in January, in which a gunman killed 11 people in a ballroom, has killed more people in a single shooting in the U.S. this year…

“There have been 199 shootings of at least four people this year in the U.S., according to the Gun Violence Archive, a database. And a particularly deadly spate of large-scale shootings has unfolded in recent days. Last weekend outside Houston, a gunman shot to death five people after neighbors had asked him to stop shooting in his yard.” New York Times, May 7th. The CDC reminds us that guns are the leading cause of death among children, statistic that only came into being after so many red states and so many rightwing courts prevented the implementation of any real form of gun control. And while the Supreme Court has not halted the California ban on the sale of semiautomatic assault rifles, it will not permit the state from outright bans of these lethal weapons of choice for mass killers.

For hundreds of years since its founding, the United States had no ubiquitous right for just about any adult to own a firearm. The momentum started in the 1970s, after the Vietnam War reduced military requirements for a wartime level of weapons. Gunmakers were facing bankruptcy. And civilians who owned guns and maintained them well did not need to replace them. Hard steel, well maintained, lasts! Up until that time, the National Rifle Association and its ilk were primarily focused on gun safety and teaching people how to use and store their firearms properly. But the gunmakers needed more… they need a social groundswell that made gun ownership as American as apple pie. They needed that “well regulated militia” section of the Second Amendment to go away, to make gun ownership sacrosanct. They convinced the NRA to open a “for-profit” lobbying branch to change social attitudes about guns. And they funneled a lot of money into that novel NRA function.

From the shootouts in the wild, wild west to the Tommy gun Chicago gangsters during Prohibition, you’d think Americans would have learned. We even had an assault weapon ban from 1994 to 2004 when a sunset clause on the statute ended that restriction. But the NRA was wildly successful, tanking any GOP candidate’s chances of winning office if he or she remotely mentioned “gun control.” In 2008, Supreme Court Justice Antonia Scalia applied the bizarre “originalist theory of constitutional interpretation” – you could only look to what life was like when a constitutional provision was enacted and not apply the rule to the modern world – to find that Second Amendment, passed in a time of flintlocks and muskets, was intended to allow a universal right for adult Americans to own guns free of government limitations. Heller vs District of Columbia. He completely misinterpreted the status of gun owners in the UK (from which, he claimed, the historical precedent was made), which so many UK lawyers immediately pointed out.

Since Heller, conservative justices across the country have shot down even the most reasonable efforts to stop the carnage that only escalates with every lax judicial ruling. Many tell you that cutting down on guns is not the answer; focus instead on the killers. The real world provides a very different answer. Australia mirrored the American wild west love of guns, yet…“On Sunday 28 April 1996 a security guard, Ian Kingston, stood in the doorway of the Broad Arrow cafe at the historic site of Port Arthur in southern Tasmania. He stared at the body of a man lying on the floor, then looked up into the barrel of a semi-automatic rifle. He dived back out the door as Martin Bryant pulled the trigger. Bryant killed 12 people in 15 seconds.

“On the gravel path outside the cafe Kingston tried to herd people who thought the gunshots were part of a historical re-enactment up the garden and out of range. He knew he couldn’t go back inside. ‘You don’t get a second chance with a gun like that,’ Kingston says.

“Bryant moved towards the gift shop in the next 75 seconds, killing another eight people. In little over half an hour the death toll would be 35, with 23 wounded. It became the worst single-person mass shooting in Australia’s history; and is still the third worst recorded worldwide…

“Twelve days after the Port Arthur massacre, the Australian prime minister, John Howard, announced a sweeping package of gun reforms in a country where firearms had long been considered an essential prop in the national mythology of life in the bush… ‘At that stage the gun lobby was the ruling lobby in Australia,’ says Philip Alpers, associate professor at the University of Sydney. ‘What happened at Port Arthur is that they were outpaced, outflanked and outwitted by a man who had the power to move in 12 remarkable days.’” The Guardian UK, 3/14/16. Gun reform was passed. Guns, particularly assault rifles, were pulled off the streets and out of public circulation. The number of civilian gun homicides plunged almost immediately.

Most other red states have tripped all over themselves to mirror Texas gun laws. Permitless concealed weapons, open carry, “stand your ground,” a home is your “castle,” no restrictions on assault weapons, etc. have resulted in unprecedented numbers of mass shootings in recent years. Potential tourists to this country are staying away in droves out of fear of our gun culture. We’re the only nation that is not at war with this level of legal gun ownership and this level of mass shootings.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I am looking at the utter hypocrisy of Texas’ claims to be a “right to life state” that has one of the largest numbers of capital punishment executions and the widest ownership of assault weapons used in mass shootings, with so many children killed.