South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
In grief, Uvalde residents reassess gun control laws
Where firearms are ubiquitous, some see sense in change
UVALDE, Texas — Living in a rural Texas town where rifles are a regular prize at school raffles, Desirae Garza never thought much about gun laws. That changed after her 10-year-old niece, Amerie Jo, was fatally shot inside Robb Elementary School.
“You can’t purchase a beer, and yet you can buy an AR-15,” Garza said of the 18-year-old gunman who authorities say legally bought two semi-automatic rifles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition days before killing 19 children and two teachers. “It’s too easy.”
But inside another Uvalde home, Amerie Jo’s father, Alfred Garza, had a sharply different view. He said he was considering buying a holster to strap on the handgun he now leaves in his home or truck.
“Carrying it on my person is not a bad idea after all this,” he said.
An anguished soulsearching over Texas’ gun culture and permissive gun laws is unfolding across the latest community to be shattered by a shooter’s rampage.
Uvalde, a largely Mexican American city of 15,200 near the southern border, is far different from Parkland, Florida, or Newtown, Connecticut, which became centers of grassroots gun control activism after school shootings there.
Gun ownership is threaded into life here in a county that has elected conservative Democrats and twice supported former President Donald Trump. Several relatives of victims count themselves among Texas’ more than 1 million gun owners.
In Uvalde, the debate has unfolded not through protests and marches, as it did after Parkland, but in quieter discussions inside people’s living rooms and at vigils, in some cases exposing rifts within grieving families. The grandfather of one boy killed Tuesday said he always keeps a gun under the seat of his truck to protect his family; the boy’s grandmother now wants to limit gun access.
Gov. Greg Abbott and other Republicans have dismissed calls for tightening access to guns in the wake of the Uvalde shooting. They have instead called for improving school security and mental health counseling.
But public opinion surveys and interviews with victims’ families and Uvalde residents suggest that many Texans are more open to gun control measures and would support expanding background checks and raising the age requirement to buy assault-style rifles to 21 from 18.
Trey Laborde, a local rancher, said he despises President Joe Biden, thinks the 2020 election was stolen and recoils at calls to take away people’s guns. He believes “all these teachers should be armed.”
But he also wants more limits on gun access.
“I don’t think that anybody should be able to buy a gun unless they’re 25,” Laborde said. He was recently given an assault rifle as a gift by his father-inlaw but said, “I don’t think they should be sold.” He added, “Nobody hunts with those types of rifles.”
Public support for some gun control measures has held steady throughout recent years of opinion polls as Texas was rocked by deadly mass shootings at a Walmart in El Paso and in the streets of Odessa.
In a February poll by the University of Texas/Texas Politics Project, 43% of Texans said they supported stricter gun laws, while just 16% wanted looser rules. In earlier polls, majorities supported universal background checks and were against allowing gun owners to carry handguns in public without a license or training.
Vincent Salazar, 66, whose granddaughter Layla was killed in the Uvalde attack, said he had kept guns in his house for 30 years for protection. But as he grieved the girl who won three blue ribbons at Robb Elementary’s field day, he said he wanted lawmakers to at least raise the age for selling long guns such as the black AR-15-style rifle used in his granddaughter’s killing.
“This freedom to carry, what did it do?” Salazar asked. “It killed.”
Kendall White, who guides groups on hunting trips, helped cook on Friday at a barbecue fundraiser for relatives of victims of the attack.
White said he would never give up the right to “legally go out and harvest an animal and bring it home to my kids.”
White believes people are the problem. “Guns don’t kill nobody, period,” he said.
But the recent mass shootings have weighed on White, 45, and this one, in his hometown, left him gutted.
He said he wants some things to change.“He should never have been able to get that gun,” White said, referring to the gunman. “We should raise the age limit. We should do stronger background checks.” There is room, he said, “for some compromises” on gun laws.