Governor unveils school safety plan
He seeks more police, armed guards
Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas on Wednesday proposed spending more than $100 million to hire more police and armed guards for school campuses and to expand programs to identify students at risk of engaging in mass violence.
The plan comes two weeks after a student armed with a sawed-off shotgun and a revolver killed 10 people at a high school outside Houston.
Abbott also recommended stepping up security at schools by limiting the number of entrances and exits and installing alarms specifically designated to warn of active shooters.
“You have to know who is coming into the school, and you have to know who is leaving it,” Abbott said.
But his school safety plan contained only modest changes to gun laws: He proposed requiring parents to keep firearms locked away from children under the age of 18, a tightening of current law that requires such controls for families with children younger than 17. He also proposed improvements to the system for reporting felony convictions and mental health adjudications, both of which trigger prohibitions on gun possession under federal law.
And he asked state legislators to “consider the merits” of passing a red flag law that would allow police, family members or a school employee to petition a judge to temporarily take guns away from someone deemed a threat to themselves or others.
“I will never allow Second Amendment rights to be infringed, but I will always promote responsible gun ownership, which includes keeping guns safe and keeping them out of the hands of criminals,” Abbott said.
The proposals were spurred by the massacre in Santa Fe, Texas, on May 18 that left 10 students and teachers dead and 13 others wounded.
According to authorities, a student at the school, Dimitrios Pagourtzis, walked into the school wearing a trenchcoat and began shooting students with a gun owned by his father.
He later confessed, authorities said, telling investigators that he spared students he liked so “he could have his story told.” Since Pagourtzis was 17 at the time of the shooting, his parents apparently cannot be prosecuted under state law for allowing him access to their firearms, as could have happened had he been one year younger.
It was no surprise that the proposals presented Wednesday by Abbott, who is running for re-election this year, were heavily skewed toward hardening schools and bolstering campus security and mental health programs, while failing to endorse any significant new restrictions on gun ownership or sales.
Abbott is a staunch gun rights advocate who has urged Texans to buy more guns. And he is governor in a state where polling indicates that far more Republicans — the party that controls every major political office in Texas — blame mass shootings on failures of the mental health system than they do on the failure to pass more gun laws.
A series of roundtables on school safety organized by Abbott after the Santa Fe shooting were seen by many as stacked against any significant tightening of gun laws.
The Texas Democratic Party blasted Abbott’s proposals, saying he “failed to directly address the gun violence that is plaguing our country.”
“Nothing in Abbott’s plans address the reality that it is too easy for a weapon to end up in the hands of someone wanting to cause harm,” the party’s chairman, Gilberto Hinojosa, said in a statement. “Texans refuse to accept a reality where going to worship or sending their children to school is dangerous.”
Critics have said the roundtables on gun violence convened by the governor excluded most influential gun control and teachers’ organizations and created little opportunity for a meaningful exchange on gun regulations.
The movement to boost gun controls became a key political issue after a shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., in February, leading the Republican governor, Rick Scott, a longtime National Rifle Association supporter who faces a tough contest for a Senate seat this year, to back new restrictions.
But some experts say such a movement will have a harder time gaining similar traction in Texas. While gun control advocates consider Florida a permissive, pro-gun state, Texas is even more permissive, allowing gun owners to openly carry their handguns.