Saturday, August 17, 2019

Texas: Not just a State, but a State of Mind



On August 3, 2019, when a lone gunman entered a Walmart in El Paso, Texas and began shooting with an assault weapon, eventually killing 22 and wounding scores of others, in his own words, ‘to stop the Mexican invasion of Texas,’ it sent shock waves around the world. Some of my friends, traumatized by this horrendous event, reached out to me, a native Texan, wanting to know if this was the event that would finally propel politicians in the Lone Star State to change their policies on ownership and possession of guns. I thought about it for a long time, and finally, I’m here to tell you, ‘it ain’t gonna happen in our lifetimes.

      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.

Featured Post

Vida Designs - A New Place to Get My Photographs

If you like fine photography and fashion, you can now get them both in one place. Voices - Vida now hosts an online shop of custom-designed...