Santa Fe unlikely to be a center for gun control activism
The heavily GOP town is focusing on arming schools, mental health
Cheryl Darling sat behind the counter of Easy Cash Pawn & Jewelry off of Texas 6 about three miles south of Santa Fe High School, a rack of rifles and handguns on display for sale to her right.
She reminisced about a time when no one thought twice about
showing off Winchester rifles on gun racks in the back window of their pickup trucks.
“Everybody had gun racks. Everybody had a rifle,” Darling said. “We’d come back from Christmas holidays, and we’d say, ‘Oh, look at my new .270 (Winchester rifle).’ Nobody ever thought about shooting anybody. We got into fights all the time, but it’s just a different mindset today I think, you know? Because we were all armed and nobody thought once about shooting their classmate.”
The closest thing to gun control
back then was when a teenage Darling and her boyfriend were denied entry to a nearby drive-in theater on Interstate 45 because he had a gun on the rack in his truck.
“I remember him being so furious about it, ‘No way, I’m not going to leave my gun here,’ ” Darling recalled with a chuckle. “At the time it was kind of shocking. … Now it just seems normal. It was just a different time.”
In the wake of the May 18 mass shooting at Santa Fe High School, in which 17-year-old Dimitrios Pa-
gourtzis is accused of killing 10 people and injuring 13, American gun culture is once again under the microscope. But the fervent gun control activism that emerged after a similar mass shooting in February at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., has largely bypassed Santa Fe, a community of about 13,000 in Galveston County.
While the surviving Parkland students have become national icons of the gun control movement, pleading publicly with state and federal elected officials to enact an assault weapons band and other legislation, many in the Santa Fe community are dismissive of gun control efforts in the aftermath of the shooting.
The solutions they offered are in keeping with a community that values its Second Amendment rights and proud tradition of gun ownership.
“Personally, I think taking rights away from people isn’t helping the good guy, it’s helping the bad guy,” said Kyle Smith, a mechanic who joined his wife, Stephanie Guss, and his 7-year old daughter at a local playground recently off of Texas 6 in Santa Fe. “I personally believe if a teacher wants to conceal-carry or (we) put more school cops out there, then I believe that would probably help more than to try and take guns from people.”
Though Smith and Guss said they are sympathetic to Parkland students’ desire for change, they said shooters like Pagourtzis and Nikolas Cruz in Parkland would have benefited from a stronger focus by their parents on mental health — a sentiment echoed by many Texas politicians.
“If you think something is wrong with your child, he might be bullied or kind of segregated, talk to your child,” Guss said. “Ask them what’s going on. ‘Do you want me to get you help?’ ‘Do you want to go talk to somebody?’ ”
‘Not about’ laws in place
Santa Fe High School junior Lauren Severin doesn’t have a strong position on gun control. But she doesn’t want the death of eight classmates and two teachers to be politicized, as she saw after the Florida shooting.
“My biggest fear is that our school is going to become what happened with the Parkland shooting,” she said. “The best thing that we can do is just be there for each other. It really is about humanity, at this point. It’s not about what laws are in place or anything like that.”
Some in Santa Fe turned to activism in the wake of the shooting, however, with social media posts about gun control. The 16-year-old said the posts have unnecessarily divided a reeling community where students recognize each other in the hallways. She wants the conversation to focus on mental health.
“Gun laws or no gun laws,” she said, “those thoughts aren’t going to be taken out of people’s minds, the people who do that.”
Other differences set the Parkland and Santa Fe incidents apart as well. Galveston County is a heavily Republican area in deep red Texas, while Broward County in Florida is not. And the type of weapon that authorities say was used — not an AR-15 rifle as in Florida but the more common shotgun and pistol — mean policy solutions can be more divisive. “A large number of Santa Fe area residents look at the tragedy, and they don’t immediately associate it with insufficient gun control,” said Rice University political scientist Mark Jones. “And what kind of gun control would have stopped it? … Realistically in the U.S., we’re not going to ban shotguns and pistols, let alone in the Lone Star State.”
Jay Kumar Aiyer, a Texas Southern University political science professor, said the level of activism from Santa Fe students has been markedly quieter than from Parkland.
“We just can’t — we cannot — minimize the impact of the activism from the Parkland students themselves,” he said. “You just don’t have that here.”
Taking guns from citizens
Greg Bell, who owns the R&G Guns in Alvin about nine miles northwest of Santa Fe, said that beefing up gun laws in Texas will only punish law-abiding citizens.
The sign on the wall of his store, “Gun control is not about guns, it’s about control,” makes clear his views on the Second Amendment, which guarantees the right of Americans to keep and bear arms.
“There’s only one reason to take guns away from citizens — that’s to rule them,” Bell said. “It’s about the government having power.”
Bell said that he believes metal detectors and reinforced fencing around public schools would be more than enough to deter a future mass shooting incident.
“I understand [the students’] fear. But laws aren’t going to change a criminal’s behavior,” he said.
Others believe the root cause of mass shooting incidents is more philosophical than practical. Ernest Roberts owns a T-shirt print shop called “Patriot T’s,” right on the border of Santa Fe and La Marque. His shop, off FM 1764, is hard to miss, with big American, Texas, Confederate and Thin Blue Line flags planted at the entrance of the shop’s driveway.
Roberts, a former Army sergeant, believes that millennials suffer from lack of a moral compass.
“Honestly, from my point of view, we’re turning Godless,” Roberts said. “They do what feels good instead of what’s right.”
Roberts said that public education is partly to blame for teaching a largely secular curriculum and that more private or home schooling would be a welcome remedy. He also believes that public schools should have metal detectors and more armed guards.
“A public school system should have at least the same type of entry points that our airports do, that our banks do,” he said. “Our natural resource, and the only one we have, is our children.”
United in grief
Some children in Santa Fe are determined to not sit back and watch another American city share in Santa Fe’s and Parkland’s tragic experiences.
Brianna Huston is a sophomore at Santa Fe High School. Her family’s home is less than half a mile away from the school, and her best friend, Sarah Salazar, was among those injured during the shooting.
Huston’s family owns guns, and she has been out hunting before and enjoyed it. Huston also doesn’t understand why any American would want to own a gun used primarily by the military, nor can she comprehend why background checks for gun purchases aren’t more stringent.
Huston said she and some of her classmates were involved in a local March for Our Lives event after the shooting in Parkland and are committed to making their voices heard in the aftermath of the shooting in Santa Fe.
“Change needs to happen now because it’s going to take years down the road,” Huston said. “I may be dead by the time action is taken, but I’d rather take action now just to save generations down the road from the same thing happening.”
Four other Santa Fe students joined Friday with students from March for Our Lives Houston — which was formed in response to the Parkland shooting — to push for a bipartisan response for mental health services, better campus security and gun safety laws. The students stressed they were not trying to take away anyone’s guns.
“Inaction is not an option,” student Megan MGuire, a 17-year-old junior at Santa Fe High School, said Friday. “We must do something, and we must get it right. School safety is a complex issue.”
But plenty of Santa Fe residents are satisfied with the status quo.
Darling, the pawn broker from Santa Fe, says that “tools and guns are our big business” and insists that the background check procedure for purchasing guns at her shop are more than strong enough and done in compliance with federal regulations.
Yet Darling is still stunned that her hometown, with its proud tradition of responsible gun ownership, has joined the communities united by the grief of a mass shooting.
“We’re just so familiar with guns, I can’t even imagine it happening here, I guess. I’m really not sure why,” Darling said. “Now we’re part of that group, which is unfortunate.”