Texas Democrats should stick to their guns on firearm safety
Once upon a time, Democrats running for statewide office in Texas were reluctant to get crossways with Second Amendment enthusiasts in this historically gun-friendly state.
There’s also been a widespread assumption among political observers that former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke damaged his statewide prospects in Texas — perhaps irretrievably — when he took issue with assault weapons during his brief bid for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.
“Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47,” O’Rourke said in a September 2019 debate, hosted by Texas Southern University.
Whether you agree or disagree with that proposal, there’s something quite refreshing about the El Pasoan’s refusal to backpedal or flip-flop on gun safety since entering the 2022 gubernatorial race.
O’Rourke has said that he still supports a mandatory buyback program for assault weapons — a position he came to after an August 2019 massacre at an El Paso Walmart that killed 23, followed just weeks later by another mass shooting, in Midland-Odessa, that left eight dead including the shooter. Both were carried out by gunmen wielding semi-automatic rifles.
And on Monday, at a rally in Amarillo, O’Rourke went after Gov. Greg Abbott directly over the issue of permitless carry. Under a new law signed by the governor earlier this year, Texans no longer need a license — or a background check or any sort of training — to carry a handgun in public.
“Whatever he might say, this governor really does not trust law enforcement,” the Democrat told a crowd of several hundred people.
The Texas sheriffs and police chiefs who opposed the permitless carry bill had, he noted, testified that over the past five years they denied some 37,000 applications for licenses to carry a handgun, after deeming the applicants too great a threat to
their communities. That’s to say nothing of the people who didn’t bother to apply, because they knew they couldn’t pass the background check, he added.
“Well, now,” O’Rourke continued, “… violent criminals — at a time of rising violent crime — are in no way checked through that license-to-carry program.”
If elected, he said, he’ll seek to repeal the permitless carry law — a lofty goal, given that Republicans are likely to retain control of the Legislature. But it’s also a clear-sighted statement of purpose.
Republicans, needless to say, have taken notice — and even more strikingly, they appear to be playing defense.
“Robert Francis O’Rourke wants to disarm Texans like this woman,” Abbott tweeted Monday evening, adding a link to a Fox News story about a Harris County woman who shot and killed a man during the course of an alleged attempted robbery.
“Criminals don’t care what the law is; they will carry guns anyway,” the Republican governor added.
Criminals don’t care what the law is. Indeed. That’s a profound insight, and one that should definitely serve as the basis for sound policymaking.
One wonders why we have any laws at all, much less a state penal code that includes thousands of the darn things.
One also wonders whether Abbott — a former state attorney general and Texas Supreme Court justice — is under the impression that his constituents are goldfish, and therefore unable to remember his own previous pronouncements on the subject of crime prevention.
Asked about his support of a new state law banning abortions after six weeks with no exceptions for victims of rape and incest, Abbott delivered this platitude: “Rape is a crime, and Texas will work tirelessly to make sure we eliminate all rapists from the streets of Texas by aggressively going out and arresting them and prosecuting them and getting them off the streets. So goal No. 1 in the state of Texas is to eliminate rape.”
Basically, Abbott is for law and order and the rights of crime victims except when he isn’t.
The conversation O’Rourke is insisting on, and compelling Abbott to engage with, is one that many Texans have long been hoping for.
This is, as noted, a generally gun-friendly state. But in recent years, Republicans have passed a number of far-right priorities, including permitless carry, that are opposed by a majority of Texans, according to public polls.
Meanwhile, almost all gun-safety proposals filed in recent legislative sessions have fizzled ignominiously, even as gun violence continues to end lives and traumatize communities.
On Sunday, for example, a gunman opened fire on a crowd of mourners who had gathered in Baytown for a vigil. One young mother of a special needs child was killed and 13 others were injured.
The vigil was in memory of another recent murder victim. While there’s not necessarily a direct line between state laws and such terrors, it would be absurd to assume they have no connection whatsoever.
Or consider the tragedy last month in Lubbock, in which Chad Read, a 54year-old father of three, was shot to death by his ex-wife’s boyfriend, Kyle Carruth, after arriving at her house to pick up his son for a court-ordered visit. Carruth has not been charged in connection with the killing, which his defense lawyer has called “a justifiable homicide.”
The attorney general’s office is investigating. But in the meantime, video of the episode, released by Read’s widow, depicts a bleak reality. An altercation that could have ended in angry words instead ended in death, because one man had ready access to a deadly weapon and no qualms about using it, even though he had no need to do so.
We may be used to this grim status quo, but it’s more radical than anything O’Rourke is proposing. Many forget that President Bill Clinton signed an assault weapons ban into law in 1994, though it lapsed a decade later. And while polls show O’Rourke trailing Abbott, the crowds turning out for the former congressman in places like Amarillo and Lubbock explain why the governor seems a bit uneasy.
“We trust law enforcement; we want to see greater public safety; and we want to make sure that we protect the Second Amendment as well as protecting the lives of the people in our lives,” O’Rourke said at the Amarillo event. “We can do that; we are Texans.”
It’s bracing to hear such candor — and confidence — from a statewide candidate.