Joe Straus represented San Antonio in the Texas Legislature for fourteen years. He was Speaker of the House from 2009 to 2019.

He wrote in the Texas Monthly about the necessity of the state’s political leaders taking action against the crisis of gun violence. He believes that there is political will to take action. He believes that Texans want to see gun control. Let us hope.

This tragic moment in Texas—when fear is overcoming students, parents, and educators, and when so many Texans are feeling hopeless about the state’s efforts to stop the next mass shooting—demands the leadership and the political courage to finally consider any solutions that will help prevent gun violence in our schools and elsewhere. 

All week, Texans’ grief over the loss of precious young lives in Uvalde has been compounded by anger and frustration that the state has not been able to stop another shooting tragedy. It’s not, I suspect, that Texans expect their government to provide absolute certainty that another mass shooting will not occur. Rather, Texans just want to see that this state is making its best efforts, regardless of political calculations.

It’s true that Texas has taken steps since the shooting at Santa Fe High School in 2018 to prevent such tragedies. The state invested hundreds of millions of dollars in threat-assessment training for educators, mental health training, additional counselors at campuses, and school infrastructure upgrades including alarm systems and metal detectors. While Texas has not historically been known for prioritizing mental health care, the state has made real progress in the past six years by investing in better care for more Texans, with one point of emphasis being early intervention for troubled children and teenagers.

However, there remains an unwillingness to give serious consideration to gun reforms that command broad-based, bipartisan support among Texans and other Americans. For example, June 2021 polling from the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin showed that 71 percent of Texans supported background checks on all gun purchases. The project’s polling in October 2019 showed majority support for a nationwide ban on semiautomatic weapons. Many hunters and other law-abiding gun owners understand the need for restrictions as well. Sure, these provisions are less popular among the 3.3 percent of Texans who determine the outcome of Republican primaries, which basically have been proxies for the general election for the past 27 years. At some point, however, isn’t there a greater cause than assuaging primary voters? Those in public office have a duty to represent all of their constituents.

This may be the rare time when Texas would be wise to follow the lead of Florida. Since 2018, a “red flag” law in that state has been used nearly six thousand times to remove weapons from those who are deemed to be threats. Despite some encouraging talk about a red flag bill after the Santa Fe tragedy in 2018, the idea has not gained serious traction here. But it should be at the top of the list of ideas our elected leaders consider as part of a long-overdue look at meaningful gun safety. Texas should also take a long look at whether someone as young as eighteen should be allowed to purchase the types of exceptionally lethal weapons that the Uvalde shooter bought—and the requirements that ought to be met before such a purchase can be made. Is it good policy to make it harder for an eighteen-year-old to buy a beer, or get a driver’s license, than to acquire a military weapon and outgun law enforcement? 

Finally, given what we have learned about the fatal mistakes made by law enforcement during the shooting, the state should undertake a comprehensive review of the speed and effectiveness of law enforcement responses during mass shootings, so that we can clarify accountability and learn from mistakes.

Even in Washington, efforts have begun to find bipartisan compromise on gun legislation. I don’t know what will come of it, but I’m encouraged to see that our U.S. senator John Cornyn will be one of the leaders of those bipartisan talks.

As I argued after the 2019 shooting in El Paso, Texas can change the status quo if our elected leaders engage in a good-faith debate over gun safety. Now, like then, it is time for our legislators and our governor to listen to the fears and the concerns of Texans, as well as the views of experts who can provide serious, sober analysis of what will work, without the taint of politics. We are back at the same point where we were in 2019, but we don’t have to make the same choices. This moment calls for leaders willing to put politics aside and objectively consider every idea that might help prevent future tragedies—and they should start during a special legislative session this summer, before parents send their children back to school in August.

It’s been said that legislators act only when facing a crisis. Well, the epidemic of gun violence is a crisis by any measure. It’s past time to treat it like one.

Joe Straus represented San Antonio in the Texas House of Representatives for fourteen years, serving as Speaker of the House from 2009 to 2019.

The overwhelming majority of Americans, including gun owners, are sick of gun violence. They support gun control of various kinds. After the massacre of 20 elementary school children and six educators at the Sandy Hook school in Newtown, Connecticut, people thought that Congress would act to ban assault weapons or to demand restrictions on guns. But nothing happened. After the massacre at the Majory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, people thought that Congress would act to stem the slaughter. But nothing happened.

Now a sort of public apathy has descended, even after the massacre of ten shoppers at the Tops grocery store in Buffalo, even after the slaughter of fourth-grade children and their teachers in Uvalde, Texas.

Nothing will happen, the public believes, because the Republican Party is owned by the National Rifle Association, which contributes about $70 million per election cycle to its allies.

Nothing will happen, they say, because there are 400 million+ guns already in circulation, and no amount of gun control will eliminate them.

But there is a solution. It is breathtakingly simple. It depends on the boldness of one person.

That one person actually could be any one of about fifty people with the resources to carry out the plan.

But for the sake of argument, let me arbitrarily choose just one of them: McKenzie Scott. (It might just as well be Michael Bloomberg or some other billionaire.)

Ms. Scott, you are a person who has shown by your frequent gifts to worthy organizations that you care about the future of our nation. You care about people. You care about justice and kindness and vulnerable people. You say you want to keep giving your money away until it is all gone.

Here is a worthy enterprise.

First, replace the NRA as the most important donor to the Republican Party. But only on the condition that those who take your money agree to strong and comprehensive gun control. Offer millions of dollars to every Republican member of Congress who agrees to vote to ban the purchase and criminalize the sale of military weapons to civilians. If the NRA controls fifty Republican senators with only $70 million, surely you could spend $500 million and buy most of their votes, which would save thousands of lives every year. A good deal for America at a bargain price for you. Even $1 billion a year might break the NRA stranglehold on the Republicans in Congress. You don’t need to win the votes of 50 Republican senators. Fifteen would be enough to break a filibuster.

Second, start a national buyback program for the most dangerous weapons: AR15s, Bushmasters, automatic and semi-automatic weapons and any other military-grade weapons. Be generous. Buy them for 10 times the purchase price. Buy other types of weapons, other than hunting rifles and single-shot pistols. Buy up as many of the 400 million guns in private possession as possible. Destroy them.

Third, use your vast resources to fund gun control lobbyists in every state that does not have gun control and make the same offer to pro-gun state legislators that you do to members of Congress. Buy their votes.

If this sounds cynical, who cares?

McKenzie Scott (or Michael Bloomberg) could spend a billion or two and dramatically reduce gun violence, simply by buying the votes of Republicans and buying back unusually lethal weapons. Their assets have a way of growing no matter how much they spend. When you have $40-65 billion, spending a billion or so to eliminate America’s gun culture is a bargain.

Any one of these billionaires could lift the curse of gun violence from our land, with the expenditure of one or two of their many billions.

This would be a great gift to America.

If this plan doesn’t work, then here is an alternative: organize nationally for a complete and total ban on the sale or possession of assault weapons, and any guns other than hunting rifles and single-shot handguns. Civilians should not be able to purchase military-grade weapons. We had a ban on the purchase or sale of assault weapons from 1994 to 2004. It included many exemptions. It did not buy back the weapons already purchased. We should do it again with far more ambitious goals.

My first choice: ban and criminalize the purchase, sale, or manufacture of assault weapons. Let the hunters keep their single-shot guns. No one should own a military grade weapon but the military. The Founders did not write the Second Amendment to protect killers but to protect a well-organized militia.

No more massacres in schools, churches, synagogues, mosques, shopping centers, music festivals or anywhere else.

Steven Singer is a teacher in Pennsylvania. He blogs at Gadfly on the Wall.

He writes:

I drove my daughter to school today.

She thanked me for the ride, I wished her a good day, and she toddled off to the middle school doors.

Her khaki pants needed ironing, her pony tail was coming loose and she hefted her backpack onto her shoulder like a sack of potatoes.

All I could do was smile wistfully.

Parents and guardians know that feeling – a little piece of your heart walking away from you.

Imagine what the parents of the 19 children who were killed yesterday at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, might have felt.

I wonder if the parents of the two adults killed in the shooting gave a thought to their grown children during what may have seemed like just another busy day at the end of the academic year.

We’re all so preoccupied. We tend to forget that every goodbye could be our last.

This marks the 27th school shooting with injuries or deaths so far in 2022.

It comes just 10 days after a shooting at a Tops supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y., where 10 people were killed.

There’s hardly enough time anymore to mourn one disaster before the next one hits.

One would think we would have done something about these tragedies by now.

After all, they aren’t unpredictable. They aren’t inevitable. They’re man-made.

There have been 119 school shootings since 2018, according to Education Week, a publication that has been tracking such events for the last four years.

This only includes incidents that happen on K-12 school property or on a school bus or during a school sponsored event when classes are in session.

If we broaden our definition, there is much more gun violence in our communities every day.

According to The Gun Violence Archive, an independent data collection organization, there have been 212 mass shootings so far this year.

There were 693 mass shootings last year, 611 the year before and 417 the year before that.

Why don’t we do anything about this?

In Scotland 26 years ago, a gunman killed 16 kids and a teacher in Dunblane Primary School. The United Kingdom (UK) responded by enacting tight gun control legislation. There hasn’t been a school shooting in the UK since.

After 51 worshippers were killed in mass shootings at Christchurch and Canterbury in New Zealand in 2019, the government outlawed most military style semiautomatic weapons, assault rifles like AK15’s, and initiated a buyback program. There hasn’t been a mass shooting there since.

In Australia, following a 1996 mass shooting in which 35 people were killed in Tasmania, Australian states and territories banned several types of firearms and bought back hundreds of thousands of banned weapons from their owners. Gun homicides, suicides, and mass shootings are now much less common in the country.

This is not hard.

The rest of the world has cracked the code. Just not us.

Not the U.S.

PLEASE OPEN THE LINK AND READ THE REST OF THIS COMPELLING ARTICLE.

Mercedes Schneider reports that the National Rifle Association, which owns the Republican Party, issued a pathetic statement about something that happened somewhere that caused some real problems that cannot be mentioned. The NRA feels bad that this terrible thing happened. Since they plan to hold their annual meeting in Houston in a few days, it is embarrassing that this awful bad thing happened someplace not too far away to nameless people.