The Washington PostDemocracy Dies in Darkness

Opinion Abbott vows change after a school shooting. We’ve heard that before.

Associate editor and columnist|
May 29, 2022 at 7:00 a.m. EDT
A video recording of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott plays during the National Rifle Association annual convention in Houston on Friday. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
6 min

Ten days after the Feb. 14, 2018, mass shooting that left 14 students and three staff members dead at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) happened to be in Washington for an annual governors meeting and, like everyone else in the country, was trying to find some cause for hope.

“The shooting of kids in school — I just think that oftentimes in life there’s some event that is a catalyst to change, and I think this will be a catalyst to change,” Abbott told my colleague Dan Balz and me. “I really do feel that there will be changes and improvements in the way we address this issue going forward.”

If only.

Three months before the governor spoke with us that day, in Abbott’s own state, a gunman with a AR-15-style rifle had gone into a Baptist church during Sunday worship in the rural town of Sutherland Springs and fired 700 rounds in 11 minutes, killing 26 people. Still three months in the future was the day that eight students and two teachers would be killed by gunfire at Santa Fe High School near Houston. The alleged shooter, a 17-year-old reported to have used a shotgun and pistol legally owned by his father, was later found mentally incompetent to stand trial.

Now, following the horrific slaughter last week of 19 children and two teachers in yet another Texas town, Abbott once again speaks of lessons learned and changes coming. “Do we expect laws to come out of this devastating crime?” he said Friday, three days after the carnage at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde. “The answer is absolutely yes.”

But it is hard to believe that much will be different this time, especially in my home state of Texas. Officials are talking about the things they usually do: “hardening” schools, improving mental-health care, more vigorous law enforcement. All of that would help, but it’s not enough.

Abbott noted the Uvalde school shooter had a “mental health challenge” and added, “We as a state, we as a society, need to do a better job with mental health.” He said the same during our interview in 2018, declaring: “It’s time to tackle the tough solution and that is mental health.” But four years later, with Abbott in his eighth year as governor, Texas ranks behind all 50 states and the District of Columbia in access to mental health services, according to the advocacy group Mental Health America.

As for “hardening” schools through such measures as restricting the number of entranceways and installing bulletproof doors and glass — a case often made by those who want to deflect the conversation away from tighter gun laws — Texas has already done that. Or at least, it has claimed to, with a 2019 school safety law that allocated $100 million to those purposes. As the Texas Tribune noted, the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District received a $69,000 grant through that law to enhance the physical security of its schools.

The Tribune, quoting an expert, noted “the majority of public schools in the United States already implement the security measures most often promoted by public officials, including locked doors to the outside and in classrooms, active-shooter plans and security cameras.” Even so, there were lapses in Uvalde — an exit door propped open by a teacher, law enforcement’s failure to quickly rush the classroom where the gunman was — that showed how security protocols and systems can be undermined by human error.

It is also fair to question how committed Texas really is to these ideas, which arise as talking points every time a shooting tragedy occurs. The Lone Star State has long ranked near the bottom of the nation when it comes to how much it spends on public schools, and it is no more generous when it comes to the dollars it would take to turn them into the kind of fortresses that many conservatives claim they should be. Kevin Brown, executive director of the Texas Association of School Administrators, told me the state allotment of funds for school security is a mere $9.72 per student annually. And in recent years, Texas voters have become increasingly resistant to bond measures, which would be needed to fund extensive physical improvements to school buildings.

All but off the table, politically speaking, is doing much of anything about guns. After the Santa Fe school shootings, Abbott asked the Texas legislature to “study the possibility” of a “red flag” law allowing courts to order the seizure of guns from people deemed an imminent threat. When state lawmakers balked at even looking at the possibility, Abbott backed down.

More difficult still would be making it harder for an 18-year-old in Texas to buy assault rifles — as the Uvalde shooter did just days after his birthday.

After the 2018 Parkland massacre, a place once known as the “Gunshine State” quickly enacted new firearms restrictions, including raising the age at which one may be purchased to 21. But Abbott said that Texas is different from Florida. The future governor was given his first .22-caliber rifle when he was 12 or 13, he recalled, and grew up in an area where high-schoolers typically drove around with gun racks in their pickup trucks. “It’s part of the culture in Texas. Kids get shotguns as gifts at Christmastime to go hunting or for their birthday or whatever,” he said. “I don’t see that changing in Texas.”

Having grown up myself in a gun-owning extended family in Texas, I don’t either — at least, no time soon. As children, my own sons shot at targets under the careful eye of my uncle. But there is a vast difference between the rite-of-passage experience in which a youngster gets his own rifle to go deer hunting with his granddad and the purchase of a weapon of war by a troubled teen. Surely there must come a day when even Texans can recognize that.

The country will inevitably move on as Uvalde fades from the daily news, until there is another Uvalde or Parkland or Sutherland Springs. Then, we will once again hear politicians promising how, this time, things will change. The truth is, there will never be a single cure to the sickness of gun violence in this country. Which is why it is long past time for leaders such as Abbott to stop repeating the same tired tropes and start taking action on multiple fronts at once.