This blog on Texas education contains posts on higher education, as well as preK-12 policy accountability, testing, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, race, class, and gender issues at both the state and national level. It also represents my digital footprint, of life and career, as a community-engaged scholar in Texas.
Seems crazy to post this, but it's a sign of the times. These days, with our lax pro-gun laws and culture, I found this helpful. While intended for active-shooter situations in buildings, we must remember to stay alert, as any place is vulnerable. For legibility, I recommend you going to the Washington Post website.
The 2021 projections for gunfire violence and death are alarming, as noted here within:
"Researchers note a number of factors they say are driving the upswing, including the unprecedented surge in gun sales. In 2020, a year of pandemic, protests and elections, people purchased more than 23 million guns, a 66% increase over 2019 sales, according to a Post analysis of federal data on gun background checks.
In January and February of 2021, people bought more guns than they did during either month of any previous year in which such purchases were recorded. In January alone, about 2.5 million guns were sold, the third-highest one-month total, behind only June and July of 2020."
It's shocking to consider that in the first five months of this year, gun violence has already taken the lives of more than 8,100 people in the U.S., equalling around 54 lives lost per day (Source: https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/).
With so many arms in circulation, the logic is simple. It's clear to me that we must reject all violence while simultaneously addressing the underlying causes related to joblessness, underemployment, and frankly, fear of the "other," like immigrants, people of color, asylum seekers, and the poor. How else to understand the intensification of violence amid "widespread uprisings for racial justice," as noted herein—especially considering that these protests were overwhelmingly peaceful?
We must also also vote these kinds of so-called leaders out of office. Their policy priorities spell ever accelerating destruction of human lives and suffering that no one should wish on anyone else. Theirs is not a vision of a multiracial, multiethnic democracy, but rather a politics of fear, gun ownership, and violence, such that America is needlessly at war with itself.
The shootings have come at a relentless pace. Gun violence this year has cut through celebrations and funerals, places of work and houses of worship. It has taken lives at a grocery store and in a fast-food drive-through lane.
And most of all, it has unfolded on city streets and in family homes, away from the cameras and far from the national spotlight.
By almost every measure, 2021 has already been a terrible year for gun violence. And many fear it will get worse. Last weekend alone, more than 120 people died in shootings, according to the Gun Violence Archive, with three especially dangerous incidents in Austin, Texas; Chicago; and Savannah, Ga., killing two and injuring at least 30.
Through the first five months of 2021, gunfire killed more than 8,100 people in the United States, about 54 lives lost per day, according to a Washington Post analysis of data from the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit research organization. That’s 14 more deaths per day than the average toll during the same period of the previous six years.
This year, the number of casualties, along with the overall number of shootings that have killed or injured at least one person, exceeds those of the first five months of 2020, which finished as the deadliest year of gun violence in at least two decades.
Experts have attributed the increase to a variety of new and long-standing issues – including entrenched inequality, soaring gun ownership, and fraying relations between police and the communities they serve – all intensified during the coronavirus pandemic and widespread uprisings for racial justice. The violence, its causes and its solutions have sparked wide-ranging and fierce policy debates.
The Post’s analysis found an increase in shootings during summers, especially last year, echoing a trend that law enforcement officials and gun violence researchers have warned about for years. With the weather warming, school letting out and virus-related restrictions falling away, leaders are worrying about a deadlier season than usual.
“I’m scared to death of the summer, I’ll be real honest,” said Mark Bryant, the Gun Violence Archive’s founder. “I expect this to be a record year.”
Gunfire deaths began to rise in April 2020, when covid-19 shut down much of the country, in-person schooling was paused and more than 20 million people lost their jobs. Gun violence – like the coronavirus – takes an unequal toll on communities of color. So as the pandemic took hold, it was one crisis on top of another.
“What we have is compounded trauma,” said Shani Buggs, an assistant professor with the University of California at Davis’s Violence Prevention Research Program. “The pandemic exacerbated all of the inequities we had in our country – along racial lines, health lines, social lines, economic lines. All of the drivers of gun violence pre-pandemic were just worsened last year.”
In most places, violent-crime rates remain well below what they were in the 1980s and early 1990s, a period that gave way to “the great American crime decline.” But last year, in some of the country’s largest cities, homicides increased by a total of 30% when compared with 2019.
In July 2020, shooting deaths reached a peak of roughly 58 per day and continued, nearly unabated, around that level until early 2021.
Now, the numbers are rising again.
In the nation’s capital, 2020 set a recent record for homicides – mostly from gun violence – and their number is rising again, even with the annual summer crime prevention initiative well underway. Seventy-nine people were killed in the District of Columbia during the first five months of 2021, a 23% increase over the previous year.
At a recent vigil for Kassius-Kohn Glay, a 16-year-old standout high school student who was fatally shot last month, his parents said they were conscious of the danger their son, a young Black man, would face in his Northwest Washington neighborhood. Last year, Glay saw his best friend die in a shooting.
“I don’t want this to happen no more,” Glay’s mother, Juanita Culbreth, said at the memorial. “To the last breath of my body, I’m going to be sure. I’m going to keep on advocating for y’all.”
After a string of deadly shootings in Miami, the city’s police chief, Art Acevedo, went on national television to warn about the coming months.
“Unless we all start speaking up, speaking out and demanding our elected officials take action, we’re going to see a lot more bloodshed,” Acevedo, who also heads the Major Cities Chiefs Association, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
A week after Acevedo’s TV appearance, a shooting at a Miami graduation party killed three and wounded five.
Shootings have also increased in cities from Los Angeles to Chicago to Columbus, Ohio. In Philadelphia, officials are preparing for what could be the deadliest year in the city’s history. The mayor is holding regular updates on gun violence, reminiscent of weekly coronavirus briefings.
But the rise in gun violence is not just a big-city phenomenon. The number of gunfire deaths has also increased in suburban and rural areas, though the overall numbers are lower because of smaller populations.
Researchers note a number of factors they say are driving the upswing, including the unprecedented surge in gun sales. In 2020, a year of pandemic, protests and elections, people purchased more than 23 million guns, a 66% increase over 2019 sales, according to a Post analysis of federal data on gun background checks.
In January and February of 2021, people bought more guns than they did during either month of any previous year in which such purchases were recorded. In January alone, about 2.5 million guns were sold, the third-highest one-month total, behind only June and July of 2020.
Before 2020, gun-sales spikes coincided with elections and mass shootings, such as the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in late 2012. Last year, the numbers climbed during pandemic-induced shutdowns and again in the summer, with millions protesting a Minneapolis police officer’s murder of George Floyd.
Controlling for population, the analysis found that the higher the jump in gun sales between 2019 and 2020, the higher the jump in gun violence that resulted in at least one death.
Michigan and Nevada were among the states with the largest per capita increase in gun sales and gun-related deaths, while Washington and Oklahoma saw their rates of gun violence stay relatively flat.
A large body of research shows that gun availability increases the relative risk of fatal shootings, and Buggs co-authored a study last year that found an association between firearm purchases that spring and a statistically significant increase in firearm violence. Early data indicates a large slice of 2020 gun buyers – about a fifth – purchased their first-ever firearm.
That flood of new gun owners, plus a possible lack of in-person firearm-safety training because of coronavirus shutdowns, is a worrying combination for Cassandra Crifasi, the deputy director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy.
“All of these people who bought guns in the context of fear around the pandemic and the unrest and uprising in relation to the murder of George Floyd, what do they do with those guns now?” she said.
The Post found that the number of fatal shootings the Gun Violence Archive classified as some type of accident increased by more than 40% from 2019 to 2020. The number of deadly incidents involving children – who may get guns from adults who do not store them properly – also rose by 45%, though a share of that is attributable to other types of shootings. Researchers have noted worrying signs that gun-related suicides, intimate-partner violence and family violence are also on the rise.
The past 14 months have presented “a perfect storm,” Crifasi said. Along with the mass influx of guns, the pandemic fueled a recession that overwhelmingly affected low-wage and minority workers and would keep Black women and men out of jobs longer than other Americans. Then a police officer killed Floyd in Minneapolis, leading to an erosion of public confidence in law enforcement. The protests after Floyd’s murder yielded more images of police brutality. An increase in violence was underway, but it continued to rise, experts noted, just as it did after police killings in Ferguson, Mo., and Chicago in 2014.
The pandemic and protests also thinned officer ranks, sickening them or sending them to manage unrest. Researcher and former U.S. district judge Paul Cassell has charted in some cities a decline in street and vehicle stops, termed “proactive policing.”
Through it all, young people were especially vulnerable, with activities that normally provide structure and support – in-person school, sports, social work and community-level violence-prevention programs – not operating.
California-based Advance Peace is one of those organizations.
Julius Thibodeaux Jr., the strategy program manager for the nonprofit’s Sacramento chapter, calls gun violence “the forgotten pandemic.” And the work he and his team do to fight it depends on human-to-human contact. It can’t be done remotely.
Before covid-19, Sacramento was on a 28-month run of no juvenile homicides. But the pandemic temporarily shuttered the program, which works with those most at risk of being involved in gun violence – as perpetrators or victims. The regular life-skills classes and one-on-one counseling were put on hold, outings to places such as Universal Studios and sports games were canceled, and just hanging out, having a conversation over a meal, became more difficult. All those interactions help build a foundation that prevents violence, Thibodeaux said.
“The pandemic really limited us in doing the very things that make the program successful,” he said. “I don’t think people know what it means to take a young person out of the environment where they’re impacted by trauma on a daily basis, to exhale, to take a look around and not feel threatened by their very environment.”
Thibodeaux has seen more anger in his city since the onset of the pandemic, more people looking to settle arguments with deadly weapons, more despair. Homicides in Sacramento rose by 26% from 2019 to 2020, and four young people were killed, including a 9-year-old girl, police reported.
Check out this excellent, critical piece by Texas Tribune's Ross Ramsey on gun violence and politics in Texas. We are not safe with a governor who despite five, high-profile shooting incidents in his state, he has precious little to offer in response because of his own anti-immigrant rhetoric that's contributing to the problem. Ramsey is correct to call out the governor's words as "nativist" because like Trump's anti-immigrant politics, policies, and rhetoric, they stir up the base and encourage actions and policies that are punitive and harmful to communities that are already traumatized and vulnerable, escaping violence and poverty in their own countries. In addition, they do so at the egregiously, if terribly anguishing, high cost of surrendering their children to our country just to save their literal lives. Who among us can even come close to imagining such a circumstance? This is one where handing over one's child to the U.S. government for a trauma-filled, uncertain future is an option worth pursuing?! We can only conclude that for these families, their circumstances are that terrible and their options, limited. This failure of leadership is terribly sad and tragic to witness and from a policy perspective, is not sustainable. -Angela Valenzuela
Gov. Greg Abbott has talked a lot about mass shootings; there have been five high-profile incidents in the state since he became governor. Jesus Rosales for the Texas Tribune.
Editor's note: If you'd like an email notice whenever we publish Ross Ramsey's column, click here.
“We know that words alone are inadequate. Words must be met with action.” — Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, after a gunman in West Texas shot 32 people, killing seven of them.
The governor, like other elected officials, is always courteously prompt with words of comfort after natural disasters like hurricanes and floods and tornados, and unnatural disasters, like the shootings in Odessa, El Paso, Sutherland Springs, Santa Fe and Dallas. He answered Santa Fe and Sutherland Springs — shootings in a high school and in a church — with roundtable conversations that produced some ideas for legislation earlier this year. That round of lawmaking did not include stricter laws for gun sales, possession or use.
And he had already started another sequence of roundtables after the shooting in El Paso when the latest shooting took place. Now the House and Senate have formed a joint committee on “mass violence prevention and community safety” to make recommendations to the Legislature, much as the governor’s roundtables have done.
It’s hard to keep up, especially in cases — Odessa appears to be an example — where state lawmakers whistled past a well-known loophole in the law requiring background checks. The Odessa shooter couldn’t buy the gun he used from a dealer because of a failed background check. He could buy one, and did, from a private party — a situation the law doesn’t cover and one that has been debated for years, in Texas and elsewhere.
We have words, all over again, with action, maybe, to follow. Optimists would be well served to ignore recent history.
But the words deserve more attention. Elected officials should either go with “words matter” or shut up — because if words don’t matter, why speak?
Skip the usual griping about thoughts and prayers. It’s good to think and pray about these things, along with anything else that keeps these public safety issues front and center.
Consider the other words — the ones meant for political consumption instead of comfort. The governor, for instance, sent a provocative fundraising letter to supporters just over a month ago, conjuring the sorts of ideas about immigration and immigrants you’d expect from any nativist. And he landed that letter in El Paso, content enough with the content to stick it in the mailboxes of voters who are either of Latino descent or who are Anglos living in a city where Hispanics make up 80% of the population.
Just after Abbott's fundraising plea landed, a white supremacist from Allen drove 650 miles to the Walmart where he shot 46 people, killing 22. That was hardly the governor’s fault, but it made Abbott’s letter awkward, to say the least. It pushed him all the way from "Send it!" before the shooting, to a passive apology — "mistakes were made" — after the shooting. Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and others tweaked their words, with some encouragement from their colleagues in El Paso, to point out the shooter’s white nationalist motivations.
But Abbott’s letter was out of line before the shooting, just as surely as it is now. It's an indication — not the first, not the last — that the insulting, demeaning, trolling cultures of politics and social media are now marbled into the everyday language of civics.
The high officials who are supposed to represent the people who voted for them, and also the people who didn't, can't help talking to their side of the room about what they see as the problems on the other side of the room.If a governor is talking to potential supporters that way in public, imagine the private conversations. Maybe his roundtables should include some debate about how leaders should act, about toning down the racist and nativist talk, about trying to include everybody.
The governor’s fundraising letter was a big mistake. Pressed by El Paso lawmakers, he said he “emphasized the importance of making sure that rhetoric will not be used in any dangerous way.” He was right to apologize. He did an awful thing, using his high office to raise the political temperature of an already charged debate about race and immigration. And it wasn’t because of the shooting that it was a mistake, either. His words were awful before anyone ever lifted a gun, and it's a damn shame that it took a mass murder to make those words news. This was news all along. And it'll be news the next time.
Texas is reeling from gun violence—with 7 people killed and 22 others injured, including a 17-month-old baby girl, by a white male who went on a rampage with an AR-type assault rifle.This is terribly saddening and enraging when you consider that Texas' gun laws—despite all the previous killings—are going in the opposite direction of where they need to be going and that you can read about here. As you can read about here, many in Texas are rightfully outraged about this. The Giffords Law Center just put out this press release today in the wake of yesterday's Midland-Odessa shooting. It's not like we do not have options. We totally do, including requiring universal background checks, red flag laws, and safe storage laws and others that can surely achieve bi-partisan support.
My thoughts and prayers go out to all those affected. And many thanks to the Giffords Law Center for their potentially life-saving work if our lawmakers will only do something about this. What could be more urgent? -Angela Valenzuela
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:September 1, 2019 CONTACT:Jason Phelps,jphelps@giffords.org
Statement from Texas Gun Owners for Safety After the Latest Shooting
in Texas
Washington, DC — Seven people are dead and 22 injured after a shooting that spanned multiple locations in Midland and Odessa. The shooting occurred just four weeks after a gunman killed 22 people in a mass shooting in El Paso.
Statements from members of Texas Gun Owners for Safety:
“Twelve days ago a group of Texas Gun Owners for Safety gathered with former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords in Austin to address our concerns about escalating gun violence,” saidJane Mumey. “We made a commitment to our state and each other to work towards common sense gun regulations that preserve 2nd Amendment rights. Yesterday, we saw another mass shooting unfold. The state of Texas is facing a public health and safety crisis. We will not let this event pass without action from our members. We ask the public to contact their legislators and ask them to immediately support universal background checks and safe storage legislation.”
“Once again our state has been terrorized by gun violence,” saidDavid Dunn. “This isn't what responsible gun ownership looks like, and we must make changes. Texas can immediately take steps to make us all safer and that should happen tomorrow.”
Texas Gun Owners for Safetywas launched at a recent roundtable in Austin, Texas when a coalition of Texas hunters, sport shooters, and collectors came together to declare they will advocate for commonsense gun violence prevention laws and promote safe and responsible gun ownership. Members of the new group also shared their personal stories about getting involved and why they believe in both the Second Amendment and stronger gun laws.
During the inaugural meeting, the Texas Gun Owners for Safety discussed their mission, priorities, and the policies they will support and call on lawmakers to pass at the state and federal level. Giffords has helped launch similar groups this year inMinnesotaandColoradoto help amplify the voices of the many gun owners who support commonsense laws such as background checks for every gun sale.
Giffords Law Center recently unveiled a new report highlighting the devastation wrought by gun violence in the state.Gun Laws and Violence in Texasdetails why Texas has become a place where someone is killed by a gun every three hours and provides a detailed blueprint on what laws the state could pass to save lives. Without action, this crisis is only expected to get worse. As the report notes, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that the state’s gun murder death rate has increased every year since 2014.
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Giffordsis a nonprofit organization dedicated to saving lives from gun violence. Founded by former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and her husband, Navy combat veteran and retired NASA astronaut Captain Mark Kelly, Giffords inspires the courage of people from all walks of life to make America safer.
I found this to be a really helpful piece, particularly in light of what very often feels like the slow pace of change in our social policies and in our practices, as a whole. I myself find that public policy requires an enormous amount of patience coupled with continuing hard work. I do like the view expressed herein that the pursuit of social change is an investment in our communities and in our future. What merits mention is that the very process of pursuing positive social change is actually never without an equally positive impact of, in this case, educating our communities on the combined issues of gun violence, policy, politics, and the role of individual, organizational, and collective agency and power in a democracy. So individually, we may not harvest the victory we seek even if collectively, we ultimately do. After all, the seeds of change that these youth activists represent are the essential building blocks to victory. It matters, for example, that the students successfully framed gun-control legislation as a "school safety issue," rather than a Second Amendment one. To decouple these is an advance. Social movements matter. They always do. Things will change. They already are. In the meantime, we educate and sow peace and healing in our troubled world. SÃ se puede! Yes we can! -Angela Valenzuela #SurvivorsEmpowered#NotOneMore
Demonstrators, many of them high school students, fill Pennsylvania Avenue during the March for Our Lives rally in support of gun control in Washington last March.
For Philly native Rachel Steinig, a core March for Our Lives activist, returning to the University of Pennsylvania for her sophomore year highlighted a stark contrast between her life on the protest frontlines and the orderly campus. There just weren't many supports there for student organizing or activism, said Steinig.
So in January, nine months after student walkouts rippled through American schools, the 19-year-old and a handful of her classmates decided to fill the void themselves, and launched the UPenn chapter of March for Our Lives.
In a few weeks, the chapter had amassed an email list of some 250 students, visited the Philadelphia office of Sen. Pat Toomey to lobby for a federal proposal to close gun background-check loopholes, and contacted long-established Philadelphia gun-violence groups, to ask how it can help.
As the anniversary of the tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School arrives, the efforts of groups like this one represent one of several possible answers to this question: What is the future of the extraordinary youth activism #neveragain unleashed in 2018?
I remember when I was around 4 years old finding my grandfather's gun. I remember feeling excited about it, taking it out of its case, and going to show my little sister who was about a year old at the time. Thankfully, my grandfather caught us and took it away from me and hid it so that I never came across it again in his home. I shudder to think of what could have happened. And I shudder to contemplate the lives that these young people must lead who accidentally shot or killed siblings and loved ones because of their parents' negligence.
A sense of proportion is necessary. Toddlers and home shootings and deaths are a much more serious problem than terrorists. We desperately need greater gun control in this country to save us from ourselves. -Angela Valenzuela
Gun deaths – intentional, accidental and self-inflicted – dwarf those related to terror. The talk is of secure borders but within the US many live in a state of fear
‘An American is at least twice as likely to be shot dead by a toddler than killed by a terrorist.’ Photograph: Gilles Mingasson/Getty Images
Shortly before leaving America for Britain, after 12 years as a correspondent, the relative of one of my son’s friends politely declined my invitation to visit us in London.
“I don’t think I could go to Europe,” she said. “It doesn’t seem safe.”
Try as I might I could not suppress a laugh. My wife and children are African American. I am British. We were living in Chicago.
“The odds of you being shot dead here are far greater than of you being killed in a terrorist attack over there.”
When the president uses his executive powers to ban more than 200 million people from entering America, ostensibly in the interests of security, and then, in the same week, the House of Representatives relaxes background checks for gun ownership, one is compelled to question the sense of proportionality when it comes to security. Whom do they intend to keep safe? By what means? And at what price to liberty?
Let us leave aside for the moment the fact that since 9/11 not a single American has been killed in a terrorist attack by a citizen from the countries on this list. The reality is that an American is at least twice as likely to be shot dead by a toddler than killed by a terrorist. In 2014 88 Americans were shot dead, on average, every day: 58 killed themselves while 30 were murdered. In that same year 18 Americans were killed by terrorist attacks in the US. Put more starkly: more Americans were killed by firearms roughly every five hours than were killed by terrorists in an entire year. It is unlikely that scrapping a rule requiring extended background checks for gun purchases by some social security recipients suffering from mental illness will improve the situation.
(To hide behind the mantra “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is an act of fallacious sophistry. Toasters don’t make toast, people make toast. True. But toasters exist to make toast: guns exist to kill people.)
One need not downplay the importance of terrorism here. Terrorism is not only murderous. In its ability to spread anxiety and undermine democratic engagement with violence it is also deeply reactionary. Rather than galvanising people around a cause it divides them in the crudest manner possible – on the basis of fear. That’s as true when America kills innocent civilians. But the fear most Americans experience daily isn’t imported – it’s home grown. That’s true across the board, but particularly true for some minorities. Every day seven children and teens are shot dead in the US. Firearms are the biggest killer of young black people and the second biggest killer of all children, after traffic accidents. When the new US education secretary, Betsy DeVos, suggests schools might need guns to protect themselves from grizzly bears, she’s clearly not capable of gauging the real threat to American children.
While researching my book about all the young people who were killed on one random day – 23 November 2013 – every single parent of a black teenager who lost a child that day that I interviewed said they assumed this might happen to their kid. “I didn’t think it would be him,” said one mother. “I thought it would be his brother.” “You wouldn’t be doing your job as a father if you didn’t,” said another.
Doriane Miller is a primary-care physician who practises on Chicago’s South Side, where one teen was killed that day. Dr Miller noticed a significant number of young black patients arriving with psychosomatic symptoms – many also had tattoos bearing the names and dates of loved ones who had been lost to gun violence. When she tried to talk to them about it they shut down.
“There was that sense that this is the way it is in my life and in my community,” she said. “There is a learned hopelessness around this. And so you suck it up, you man up, and you move on.”
Many of the areas where these young people live, and die, look like war zones – empty lots, half-demolished houses, depleted infrastructure, militarised policing, potholed roads, boarded-up houses, abandoned churches. But more importantly, they are experienced as such. People (mostly young men) disappear – either to prison or to the grave – leaving a huge gender imbalance. Times are hard, and the informal economy is rife, meaning there are spivs everywhere making an ostentatious display of their wealth. The one major difference is that whereas wars often cement communities as people band together against a “common enemy,” in these areas the enemy is everywhere and, potentially, anyone.
These, too, are Americans. They too deserve security. Indeed it is a nonsense to talk about securing the borders from the outside world if many of those who live within those selfsame borders continue to live in a state of constant fear.
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Many of those who insist that, when it comes to terror, one must balance individual rights against collective security, become curiously silent when it comes to adapting their interpretation of the right to bear arms to the issue of public safety.
In 2002 I interviewed the late Maya Angelou about her views on the 9/11 terror attacks. “Living in a state of terror was new to many white people in America,” she told me. “But black people have been living in a state of terror in this country for more than 400 years.”
If the current administration applied just half the zeal to making sure all people in the country feel included and safe as they do to making sure some outside of it feel excluded and anxious, the impact on Americans’ sense of security would be repaid exponentially.
After a judge blocked the Muslim ban over the weekend Trump said that if there was another terrorist attack America should blame him. Between me writing this article and you reading it the chances are another child will be shot dead. Whom, I wonder, should we blame for that?
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