Despite the fact that 89 percent of the
voters in Texas support background checks on all gun purchases (including 91
percent of the state’s Republican voters), the GOP-controlled state
legislature, which represents only 7 to 8 percent of Texas voters, remains
firmly opposed to restrictive background checks, or any other common sense
controls over ownership of firearms.
You’re probably reading that statement
with ‘shock and awe,’ and wondering how such a convoluted situation exists.
Well, for starters, the Texas Republican party controls who in its ranks gets
on state ballots, and just as it was before the defection of Yellow-Dog
Democrats to the Republican party in protest against the Democratic party’s ‘liberal’
views on civil rights, Republican primary elections have taken the place of
Democratic primaries as the determinant of the direction of Texas politics. As
they used to say in Shelby County, where I grew up, when the Democratic primary
is held, the election is already decided, and while my county remains in the
hands of Democrats, the state is firmly under Republican control. And, not just
any Republicans, but those who stand to the right of Atilla the Hun in their
beliefs.
That, however, is just the macro-view from
a political perspective. At work in Texas is more than a century of social and
cultural conditioning that works against a more enlightened view of guns and
the havoc they can wreak upon society.
It’s no exaggeration to say that Texans
love guns. They revere guns along with football, pickup trucks, and barbecue,
with, I am convinced, guns and football vying for the top spot. The Second
Amendment is probably better read in Texas than the Bible, and it’s certainly
more closely adhered to.
I grew up around guns. My uncle, Buddy, my
mother’s older brother, wore a .45 caliber revolver until the day he died. I
was away in the army at the time, but I’m pretty sure that when he died ‘Old
Bess’ was on the nightstand beside his bead. My grandmother, a feisty,
pint-sized woman born in the late 1890s, was a crack shot with rifle and
pistol, and is the one who taught me to shoot with the .22 single shot rifle I
was given on my sixth birthday.
Growing up, hearing of a shooting was such
a common-place occurrence, it was never even discussed unless you knew the
shooter or his victim—which, even in my small county of less than 12,000 inhabitants,
was quite likely. As a four-year old, I still remember sitting on my tricycle
in our front yard, on a hill overlooking a honkytonk, and seeing a man settle
an argument over a domino game by going home, getting his .22 rifle—the town
was only about a mile square, so no one lived all that far from anyone else—and
coming back to get his revenge. Until I left home just before my seventeenth birthday
and joined the army, I seem to remember not a month going by that I didn’t hear
of another shooting somewhere within fifty miles of my tiny little hometown.
I spent twenty years in the army, going
home to visit or attend a funeral about every five years, and then joined the
U.S. Foreign Service, which meant the time between visits was even longer. I
only lived in Texas as an adult for nine months when the State Department
assigned me as diplomat-in-residence at the University of Houston’s main
campus. Now, I chose that because I was curious to see how Texas had changed, having
gone from the segregated place I grew up in—in my home town even the parking
places downtown were designated by race—to what I assumed would be a more
enlightened, friendly place to live. I even toyed briefly with the idea of buying
some lakefront property and living there when I eventually retired from
government service.
A few incidents in Houston, which was
known as the ‘murder capital of the world,’ when I was a young boy, scotched
that plan pretty dang fast.
The first was an incident in a restaurant
not far from the campus where I had my office in the Political Science
Department. Four men dining together in the restaurant got into an argument.
One pulled an automatic and shot one of the others. Even though the intended
victim was sitting across the table from him, he missed and the bullet struck
and killed a young mother several tables away. The next was when a resident of
one of Houston’s wards came home late one night and discovered a would-be burglar
concealed in a large planter on his front porch. He drew the pistol he was
wearing and shot the intruder dead. The police reaction to this? A police
spokesman on TV that night said, “It’s a good thing Mr. X had his gun with him.”
You see, in Texas, you’re allowed to shoot trespassers, because protection of
private property is a sacred right of Texans. There was an incident I read of
where a man shot and killed a lady of the evening he’d met through a ‘dating’
service, because she took his money but refused to provide the purchased ‘service.’
He was not charged on the grounds that a person is allowed to use deadly force
to retrieve ‘stolen’ property.
Do you get where I’m coming from?
Let me put in even better perspective.
Texas is no stranger to mass shootings, or high-profile murders. The most
notable is John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination in Dallas as his motorcade
traversed the city. A lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, who was later killed in
full view of TV cameras by Jack Ruby, should have been the impetus to take a
long, hard look at the gun laws, but it wasn’t. Nor was the August 1, 1966
shooting at the University of Texas in Austin that left 14 dead, or the October
26, 1991 shooting at a restaurant in Killeen that killed 23.
The list of mass shootings in Texas,
defined as incidents in which four or more people are killed or injured, is
long, and some people want something done. But nothing will be done because the
legislature is controlled by fringe right-wing nuts who resist change with
every fiber of their being.
You’d think that in a state born out of
revolution the people would rise up and throw the bums out. The political lash
up makes that difficult, and the social and cultural attitudes of Texans, even
those shocked by the violence and wanting some kind of rational control, also
works against real change.
Like I said at the beginning, Texans love
them some guns. Texas has more gun owners than any other U.S. state, with approximately
51 million registered firearms of all kinds. To put that into perspective, that’s
more guns than are owned by the entire population of the European Union. The
state of Texas has 20 percent of the legally registered guns in the United
States, or approximately two for every man, woman and child in the state.
Everyone in Texas doesn’t own a gun, but the gun owners control the politics, and
that makes all the difference.
So, if you’re waiting for Texas to be the
epicenter of movement toward universal background checks, red flag laws with
some teeth, or stricter rules about who can own a gun—right now, only felons
are barred from registering a firearm, and just about anything that shoots a
projectile, except a tank or an F-15, is eligible for registration, don’t hold
your breath.
Texas, my friends, is not just a state, it’s
a state of mind. When I was in high school, while students in the rest of the
U.S. were learning American history, I was required to do a course in the
history of Texas that focused a lot on the fact that it was once an independent
republic. We took U.S. history as well, but I seem to remember that more hours
were devoted to state history.
How bad is it, really? Texas has long allowed
carry, and now allows guns on college campuses. The state attorney general sued
one of the counties over a county regulation prohibiting guns in courthouses. Think
about those two situations for a minute. Not only is there the potential for
teachers to be armed, but students as well—at least at the college level. Makes
a professor think before assigning grades, or criticizing a student in class.
And, heaven help us if someone in a courtroom disagrees with a verdict. It hasn’t
happened yet, but I predict that it’s just a matter of time.
I no longer call Texas home, having
settled in Maryland over thirty years ago. But I’m still a Texan at heart—for the
most part. I was once a member of the NRA, until they became a political
lobbying group rather than a gun safety and hunting organization, and two tours
in Vietnam, where I saw up close and personal what assault rifles can do to the
human body, caused me to change my views on gun ownership. The Second
Amendment, as interpreted by the gun-nut fringe, is no longer my Bible. I not
only support restrictions on the acquisition of firearms, but an outright ban on
certain weapons, especially rapid fire and high-capacity weapons that are meant
for only one thing—killing. That alone is enough, I fear, to make me no longer
welcome in my home state.
I guess I no longer have that Texas state
of mind.
