School shooting may not change Texas gun laws
GOP is unchallenged at the state level
AUSTIN — Texas has more than 1.2 million licensed handgun owners who can openly carry their weapons in public. The state hosted the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting two weeks ago. And until Monday, the governor’s re-election website was raffling off a shotgun.
Guns are so hard-wired into Texas culture that last week’s deadly rampage at Santa Fe High School is considered unlikely to result in any significant restrictions on access to weapons in the Lone Star State.
Republican Gov. Greg Abbott reacted to the killings of eight students and two teachers by calling for a series of roundtable discussions on school safety, starting Tuesday in Austin. He said last week that he wants to find ways to keep guns away from those who pose an “immediate danger to others.”
But the state’s 20-year dominance by the Republican Party all but guarantees the meetings will be dominated by calls to boost school security and “harden” campuses — an idea backed by the NRA — instead of demands for gun restrictions, said Cal Jillson, political science professor at Southern Methodist University.
That’s in sharp contrast to the response to the Feb. 14 shooting rampage at a high school in Parkland, Fla., that left 17 dead. Three weeks after the bloodbath, Florida politicians defied the NRA and passed a gun control package after a lobbying campaign led by student survivors of the attack.
“The difference in Texas is the Republican Party is in complete control. It is unchallenged at the state level,” Jillson said. “Even the young people from Santa Fe are not full-throated advocates of gun control to keep the children safe.”
In fact, at a church service Sunday, Santa Fe High student Monica Bracknell, who survived the shooting, told the governor the attack should not be turned into a battle over gun control.
“People are making this into a political issue,” she said. “This is not a political issue. It’s not a gun law issue.”
Similarly, Callie Wylie, a 16-year-old Santa Fe High student who dropped off flowers Monday at a memorial for the shooting victims, said the violence is not a “gun problem.”
“Obviously things need to change. Something needs to happen. This has happened way too much,” Wylie said. “But I don’t think at this time people need to be pushing politics on us and telling us, ‘Oh, this is gun control.’”
Sentiments like those could give Abbott political cover if his roundtable discussions don’t lead to major changes.
Dimitrios Pagourtzis, 17, is jailed on murder charges in Friday’s attack. Authorities said the Santa Fe High student opened fire with his father’s shotgun and .38-caliber handgun.
Gun control advocates around the country have long pressed for such measures as expanded background checks, and a ban on assault rifles and high-capacity magazines, but such measures would probably have had no effect on the Santa Fe High shooting.
Abbott has said he wants the roundtable discussions to include lawmakers, educators, students, parents, gun rights advocates and survivors of the November church shooting in Sutherland Springs, Texas, that killed two dozen people.
Today’s meeting will include officials from school districts that arm some teachers or contract with local police for security. The governor’s office said most of the meeting will be held in private.
Galveston County Sheriff Henry Trochesset said Monday police were able to “engage” the shooter in four minutes after they were called. He said the shooter was contained, with minimal gunfire from law enforcement officers, until his arrest, to the art classroom where his bloody rampage was focused. That allowed the rest of the school to be evacuated safely.
How much time elapsed from the moment gunfire erupted until the last victim was shot remains unclear, however. Santa Fe High School had an active shooter plan and two armed security guards on campus.