Greg Abbott: THe Face of GOP Indifference to the Murder of Children

After the latest mass shooting to get national attention at a hospital facility in Tulsa, Oklahoma, one thing should be clear to Americans: there is virtually no place where one is truly safe thanks to America's insane gun laws.  The Tulsa shooter legally puchased his murder weapons, including an AR-15 automatic weapon and in addition to two doctors, a receptionist and patient lost their lives.  Past mass shootings - the majority of which have involved AR-15 weapons - show our public schools, office buildings, university classrooms, movie theaters, churches, and grocery stores are not safe venues from madmen who can purchase weapons of war more easily than adopting a pet from most animal shelters. No other advanced nation has this problem and some which had mass shootings (e.g., Australia and New Zealand) in the past acted quickly to change their gun laws to make weapons of war that kill and mutilate illegal for civilian purchasers.  Only in America are politicians - predominately Republicans - indifferent to the carnage even when the victims are young children as in New Town and Ulvade.  Rather than stop the carnage and death, these politicans pander to gun manufacturers and those with gunfetishes and worse.   Texas Governor Greg Abbott is the face of this Republican indifference and, in my view, total dereliction of duty.  A cloumn in the New York Times looks at Abbott.  Here are excerpts:

Are we to give Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas points for not attending the National Rifle Association convention in Houston last weekend? You know, the one that began just three days after an 18-year-old with an AR-15-style rifle slaughtered 19 children and two teachers in an elementary school less than 300 miles away?

Abbott canceled his scheduled appearance — but did speak to the gun-worshiping gathering remotely, with prerecorded remarks. This is known as hedging your bets. And this, in the Republican Party of 2022, is what passes for tact.

Ever since the Uvalde massacre, I’ve been watching Abbott and listening to him and looking for some small hint — for any evanescent glimmer — of misgiving about all that he has done on his watch and with his signature to glorify guns, to fetishize guns, to make sure that Texans can obtain guns easily and carry them proudly and be free, free, free!

But I can’t see it. He’s a portrait of his party’s pigheadedness. A poster boy for its intransigence.

Abbott hasn’t been as perversely tone-deaf as his party’s orange overlord, Donald Trump, who stuck to his plan to speak at the N.R.A. convention, marinated in the crowd’s adulation and — my favorite part — held forth on the topic of mental health. Because that’s Trump’s forte? Because he embodies it? There’s no kinship between rhetoric and reality when he takes the stage. And that estrangement characterizes much of the Republican Party today.

Certainly, it applies to Abbott. His most impassioned, pained moment after the elementary-school blood bath came on the same day as his Wizard-of-Oz convention appearance, when he declared at a news conference in Uvalde: “I am livid about what happened.”

Livid! But he wasn’t talking about the killings per se. About the pileup of tiny corpses. He was talking about the slow response of law enforcement officers on the scene that day, about his initial misimpression that they’d acted more heroically and about his out-of-the-gate praise of them along those lines.

“The information I was given turned out, in part, to be inaccurate, and I am absolutely livid about that,” he said. Yes, Governor Abbott, that’s the most infuriating aspect of — and salient takeaway from — this ordeal.

He has no right whatsoever to be livid. He forfeited it when, less than a year ago, he signed a law that gives Texans the green light to carry handguns without a license or training. He forfeited it when he signed a law that allows hotel guests in Texas to store their firearms in their rooms.

He forfeited it by signing law after law sending the message to Texans that what they should fear most isn’t all the killing done by guns but big, bad federal restrictions that might affect how quickly they can get their hands on more guns or how many places they can brandish those guns or how much caution they must muster around those guns.

He forfeited it when, less than two months ago, he cut more than $200 million from the Texas commission that oversees mental health services in the state, which, according to the 2022 State of Mental Health in America report, ranks fourth in the nation in terms of the prevalence of mental illness, but last in access to mental health care.

What Abbott didn’t speak about was reducing the glut — and regulating the types — of deadly firearms in a broken country that stands out, not so coincidentally, for both how many guns it contains and the number of people killed by them yearly.

I’m livid about that.

Abbott and other Republican leaders claimed to have heavy hearts. What they should have is haunted consciences.

Law abiding citizens should not have to worry that they or their loved ones might be gunned down simply so the gun industry can rack up profits and gun nuts can further indulge their sick fetish.  It is past time to ban assault weapons and put strict restriction on gun ownership.   The blood bath needs to stop.  Texans can begin the process by voting Abbott out of office.