Abbott faces backlash after Texas mass shooting
What happened
After a four-day manhunt, police this week captured the man suspected of killing a neighboring family who had simply asked him to stop shooting off his rifle late at night. The attack on the family of Honduran origin in Cleveland, Texas, was the latest in a series of unprovoked deadly shootings across the country. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, responded to the crime by referring to the victims in a tweet as “illegal immigrants,” drawing widespread criticism. After it emerged that at least one of the victims was a permanent U.S. resident, Abbott’s office apologized. “We regret if the information was incorrect and detracted from the important goal of finding and arresting the criminal,” Abbott’s spokesperson Renae Eze said. “Any loss of life is a tragedy.” The Texas Democratic Party said Abbott had used “the execution-style murder of five innocent souls to fearmonger about migrants.”
The suspect, Francisco Oropesa, 38, was an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who had been deported four times since 2009. He was arrested in Cut and Shoot, Texas, about 17 miles from Cleveland, along with several people accused of helping to hide him. Police said that shortly after Oropesa’s neighbor Wilson Garcia asked him to shoot his gun elsewhere so as not to wake the baby, Oropesa entered Garcia’s home and killed five family members with an AR-15–style gun. The first victim was Garcia’s wife, 25, followed by his son, 9, and three other relatives, two of them women who died shielding a baby and a toddler. Garcia said he called police five times during the 10 minutes the man was killing his family.
What the columnists said
Have we reached the point “where shootings like these are so routine, so numbingly dreadful, that even our so-called leaders can’t summon basic decency?” asked the Houston Chronicle in an editorial. It is relevant that the suspect was undocumented. Yet Abbott didn’t “keep the focus of his statement on the legitimate issue of stopping violent criminals who cross the border illegally.” Instead, he dehumanized the victims “with a phrase that’s among the most polarizing in the country.”
That Abbott would seek to capitalize on the tragedy is not surprising, said Amanda Marcotte in Salon. Republicans have long relied on a toxic combination of “racism and fear” to motivate their base—in fact, the party actually benefits from the terror that mass shootings sow. By conjuring up the specter of “illegal immigrants,” Abbott is selling a story about “dark-skinned foreigners” who are somehow bringing violence to our shores. We’re meant to understand that “the real problem is racial diversity,” not guns.
Yet it’s only in a land saturated with military-style weaponry that “a garden-variety neighborhood dispute” can end in carnage, said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. In countries with “reasonable laws about firearms,” an argument between neighbors might cause at worst a fistfight. We used to have such laws—for example, from 1994 to 2004, when assault-style rifles were banned—and “huge majorities of Americans” want those restrictions restored. How much more “needless killing” must we endure?