Republican leaders should take Moms Demand Action seriously

It’s time for Republican leaders of Texas to start taking Moms Demand Action seriously.

Past time, really.

On Sunday, several hundred Houstonians gathered in Hermann Park for a “Recess Rally” organized by the group to suggest that members of the United States Senate cut their summer vacations short and get to work tackling America’s epidemic of gun violence.

Local leaders including Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo and Mayor Sylvester Turner joined parents and student activists in calling for universal background checks and red flag laws—both of which, according to polls, an overwhelming majority of Americans support.

In fact, the former could be achieved by a measure, HR 8, which passed the United States House earlier this year with bipartisan support.

Anna Carpenter, a volunteer with the Houston chapter of Moms Demand, told me that she would like to see Republican U.S. Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz come out in favor of that legislation, which is languishing on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s desk.

“On Friday we went up to Cruz’s office and left him a hand-written note,” Carpenter added.

Similar rallies were held all across the country last weekend, against a grim backdrop.

The month began with a trio of mass shootings, in Gilroy, Calif.; Dayton, Ohio; and El Paso. And over the weekend, three more were reportedly foiled.

Law enforcement officials in Florida, Connecticut, and Ohio announced that they had arrested young men who each had threatened such attacks.

One of those men, in a series of texts to his ex-girlfriend, expressed the kind of reasoning that explains why so many Americans have been galvanized to take action against gun violence.

“A school is a weak target,” the young man wrote.

Gun violence is an epidemic in the United States.

And while a majority of gun-related deaths are suicides, not homicides or mass shooting attacks, there’s a particular horror to the mass shootings that have taken place at schools since the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo.

Few parents are insensitive to the psychological impact of these atrocities — or resigned to accepting school shootings as something we simply can’t prevent.

And students, for similar reasons, have been spurred to speak out.

“Congressmen, congresswomen — they have children as well,” said Milan Narayan, a member of Bellaire High School’s chapter of Students Demand Action, who spoke at Sunday’s rally in part because he felt that those leaders might be moved by the testimony of young Americans.

Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America began as a Facebook group.

It was founded by Shannon Watts, an Indiana mother of five, the day after the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., which claimed the lives of 20 children and six adults.

Since then, the group has grown into a nationwide movement, with chapters in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

In Texas, the organization has thousands of active volunteers from all walks of life. Carpenter, for example, is a former teacher and mother of two who said she immigrated to the United States from Mexico due to the latter country’s gun violence.

She was drawn to Moms Demand Action in part because of the group’s civil approach to the public debate.

Rather then grandstanding or making a lot of noise, the volunteers focus their efforts on advocacy at the legislative branch.

That’s an approach that hasn’t proven particularly effective at the Texas Legislature, unfortunately.

“In the past sessions, we’ve really been on defense,” said Molly Bursey of New Braunfels, who helped start the organization’s central Texas chapter.

But she, like most of the Moms Demand volunteers I’ve met over the years, hasn’t lost hope.

“It’s something we call ‘losing forward’ — you lose, but you gain more and more and more momentum,” Bursey said.

“In fact, most Texans agree with us and not those fringe groups,” she added.

She’s right, and the women and men who’ve devoted their time and energy to this organization over the years should be angry.

An overwhelming majority of Americans — and Texans — are in favor of reforms such as universal background checks and red flag laws.

And volunteers with Moms Demand, wearing red T-shirts, have been a visible and well-organized presence at the Capitol since the Texas Legislature’s 2015 session.

But those volunteers have barely received lip service from Republican leaders such as Gov. Greg Abbott and Lieutenant Gov. Dan Patrick, both of whom are seemingly reluctant to antagonize the state’s hard-line Second Amendment advocates.

Abbott, for example, has announced plans to convene a series of roundtables in response to the El Paso shooting but has already nixed the idea of a special session focused on gun violence, despite calls for one from a number of Democrats.

The Moms Demand volunteers are clearly aligned with the majority of Texas voters, though the activists who hope to bring permitless carry to Texas are not.

That doesn’t mean the Moms Demand volunteers are right, but it does mean leaders of this state should show them a bit more respect.

Cornyn and Cruz, for example, may have reservations about H.R. 8, the Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2019 — or about universal background checks as a concept.

And many Republicans have qualms about whether red-flag laws can be implemented without raising concerns about due process.

But an overwhelming majority of voters support such reforms, and in 2020 they may well express their frustration at the ballot box.