Tennessee, Texas protect kids from ‘porn,’ not guns

Across the courtyard there was an Earth goddess painted by Don Rimx, her body made of sticks, her limbs splinted, her hair green, her face scowling. She wasn’t like anyone you’ve ever seen on an American middle school wall, and at the same time there was a deep resemblance to the inner selves of countless children who have gleaned from the world that the adult world will not protect them, that they will have to save themselves and each other. — Jeff Sharlet, “The Undertow: Scenes From A Slow Civil War” (Norton, 2023)

Journalist Jeff Sharlet, author of several books about our fractured nation, reports in his latest that he encountered the unsettling mural on a middle school wall in inner-city Miami. What the image conveyed about our children, though, is not confined to one school or one part of the country. The image is apt in Colorado, in Connecticut, in California, in Florida, in Michigan, in Wisconsin, in Illinois, in Texas.

And now it’s apt in Tennessee, where three 9-year-olds and three adults died when a shooter blasted the lock off a door at a private elementary school in Nashville, church-related Covenant School, and started firing at human beings.

We have not, we will not, protect them. The list of states above — several, such as Texas, with multiple massshooting incidents — is not comprehensive.

It’s spring. The grass and leaves are green, the bluebonnets riotous. It’s spring, and we’re approaching the first anniversary of the Uvalde rampage. A teenager armed with an assault-style weapon invades an elementary school and massacres 19 children and two of their teachers. In our mind’s eye, we still see it.

We did not protect them. A new school equipped with the latest security measures does not protect them. A gun-obsessed nation cannot protect them.

Kimberly Garcia lost her 10-year-old daughter Amerie Jo Garza on that day in May. “Our kids aren’t safe. Schools aren’t safe,” she tweeted, hearing news of Nashville. “My daughter wasn’t safe, her life was taken from her. My son isn’t safe and it keeps me up all night. How am I supposed to be OK with leaving him at school? There’s no way.”

In another tweet, she asked, “When is enough going to be enough?” When, indeed. Garcia and other Uvalde parents and family members have been in Austin off and on during the past several months, imploring lawmakers to act. After all, Gov. Greg Abbott came to their little town soon after the shooting. He assured them he would take steps to protect the children.

He has not. He will not. And neither will lawmakers meeting in Austin right now.

“We are tired,” Garcia’s advocacy group, Lives Robbed, tweeted in response to the Nashville horror. “We know that, for the families of the victims at Covenant, this hell is just beginning. We are with you. This is why we fight for change.”

With all due respect to the Uvalde folks, they are naive. They don’t realize — well, maybe they do by now — that their elected representatives already are hard at work protecting Texas children in a manner that has nothing to do with stopping the bullets and bloodshed in our classrooms.

State Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, is pushing not one bill, but two, to make sure that our children are not exposed to men dressed like women. Drag shows, they’re called. Maybe they’re big in small East Texas towns like the one he’s from.

State Rep. Nate Shatzline, a Fort Worth Republican “ready to fight for Faith, Family, & Freedom,” is carrying a similar bill in the House, despite a youthful escapade of his own in a black sequined dress. Uvalde parents have to realize that he and Hughes are busy. Busy protecting children, but only in a way they believe will protect their political careers.

State Sen. Jared Patterson, R-Frisco, is busy, too. Like a North Texas cottongrower, he’s itching to plow through school libraries, hoeing out weeds of “porn.” We learned last week during a

House Public Education Committee hearing that even the celebrated cowboy novel “Lonesome Dove” might not be safe from his weeding.

Patterson admitted that he hasn’t read the classic by Texas native Larry McMurtry, but he assured his listeners that if it’s sexually explicit, it doesn’t belong in a public-school library. Like an errant growth of Johnson grass, he’d yank it out.

McMurtry’s heroes, Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call, are coarse and crude, for sure; whether they’re sexually explicit is open to arguing about — for those who’ve read the novel, that is. There’s no arguing that it’s a big book, a heavy book. If a kid got hit with a flung copy of “Lonesome Dove,” it would hurt. It would not hurt as much as a bullet fired from an AR-15, a bullet pulverizing every organ it touches as it plows through a child’s slight body.

But how can we blame Patterson and his Republican cohorts for ignoring anguished Uvalde parents? When you’re banning books, censoring school curricula, tormenting transgender children and suppressing ideas that might challenge comfortable assumptions, you’re busy. You don’t have time to fret about death.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, our children these days are more likely to be shot to death than to die in a car accident. Statistics are unavailable for children dying after witnessing a drag show.

We have not, we will not, protect them from guns, even though we know what to do (or, at least, what to try). Universal background checks, red flag laws, a “cooling off ” period after a gun purchase, safe storage, magazine limits, raising the age of purchase — some combination of efforts just might save lives.

It won’t be happening in Texas anytime soon. It won’t be happening in Tennessee, which vies with the Lone Star State for having the most permissive gun laws in the country. A Tennessee lawmaker told CNN a few hours after the shooting, “I don’t see any real role we can do other than mess things up . ... As a Christian, you’ve got to change people’s hearts.” A Texan couldn’t have said it better. In 2018, after a 19-year-old opened fire on students and staff at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., murdering 17 people and injuring 17 others, students took it upon themselves to launch something of a children’s crusade. Founding an advocacy group called Never Again MSD, they made speeches, raised money and lobbied lawmakers in Tallahassee. A month after the massacre, thenGov. Rick Scott signed a bill allowing law enforcement to request an “extreme risk protection order.” The legislation also provided additional funding for armed school resource officers and allowed school districts to arm teachers.

Maybe the efforts of the Parkland young people, still continuing, are a reminder — a sober reminder in journalist Sharlet’s words — that “the adult world will not protect them, that they will have to save themselves and each other.”

Caitlyne Gonzales seemed to understand this as she spoke on the steps of the Texas Capitol to a gun reform rally in February. The Uvalde survivor broke into tears as she described the shooting. Then she collected herself and said, “I shouldn’t have to be here but I am because my friends don’t have a voice no more. Greg Abbott has done nothing to protect me or my friends.”

In Austin and in Nashville, the adult world can’t be bothered. The adult world is busy with more important matters.

Officials are busy with banning drag shows, books and targeting trans children.