The G.O.P. War on Civil Virtue by Paul Krugman | New York Times | May 26, 2022

Texans deserve better than our current Texas Republican leadership, beginning with Gov. Greg Abbott, Attorney General Ken Paxton, and Senator Ted Cruz, and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. How the heck do they still get voted into office? Beats me.

This incredulity is the thrust of a May 29th opinion by the Editorial Board of the Austin American-Statesman titled, "After Uvalde, we must demand change," as well as this New York Times piece by Paul Krugman that calls out the GOP attack on civil virtue. To date, this gallery of reckless leadership has unilaterally decided that having fun with guns is more important than children's and teacher's lives. Worse yet, as Krugman states,

"if you take the proposals by Cruz, Patrick and others literally, they amount to a call for turning the land of the free into a giant armed camp." 

And arming teachers with guns is NOT a serious proposal as summed up well by this meme posted by Facebook group, Living Blue in Texas.

Short of Congress passing comprehensive gun legislation, our states can learn from Florida, as mentioned by the Statesman's Editorial Board:

"A Florida law enacted in 2018 after the Stoneman Douglas High School mass shooting imposed a three-day wait for gun purchases, raised the minimum legal age for buying guns from 18 to 21, and enacted stricter gun ownership measures for those with mental health problems."

Now is the time for "we the people" to "do something." And that something for right now can be reaching out to whoever represents you in office. 

You can visit this Texas Tribune who-represents-me website if you don't know. Also, Texas is holding an election on November 8, 2022 where you can vote for our state's next governor, attorney general, and so on. If you're a new voter, link here to start a new voter registration application.

-Angela Valenzuela

#Uvalde #UvaldeStrong #vote2022

The G.O.P. War on Civil Virtue

by Paul Krugman | New York Times | May 26, 2022

It’s hard to say which of the Republican responses to the latest mass shooting was most reprehensible. The reliably awful Senator Ted Cruz attracted considerable attention by insisting that the answer is to put armed guards in schools, never mind that Uvalde’s school system has its own police force and officers seem to have been on the scene soon after the shooter arrived.

And the Buffalo supermarket that was the location of a mass shooting just 10 days earlier also had an armed security guard, who was killed because his gun was no match for the shooter’s body armor.

But if you ask me, the worst and also most chilling response came from Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor of Texas. What we need to do, declared Patrick, is “harden these targets so no one can get in, ever, except maybe through one entrance.”

That restriction would have interesting consequences in the event of a fire. But in any case, think about Patrick’s language: In a nation that’s supposedly at peace, we should treat schools as “targets” that need to be “hardened.” What would that do to public education, which has for many generations been one of the defining experiences of growing up in America? Don’t worry, says a writer for The Federalist: Families can keep their kids safe by resorting to home-schooling.

Actually, if you take the proposals by Cruz, Patrick and others literally, they amount to a call for turning the land of the free into a giant armed camp. There are around 130,000 K-12 schools in America; there are close to 40,000 supermarkets; there are many other venues that might offer prey for mass killers. So protecting all these public spaces Republican-style would require creating a heavily armed, effectively military domestic defense force — heavily armed because it would face attackers with body armor and semiautomatic weapons — that would be at least as big as the Marine Corps.

Why would such a thing be necessary? Mass shootings are very rare outside the United States. Why are they so common here? Not, according to the U.S. right, because we’re a nation where a disturbed 18-year-old can easily buy military-grade weapons and body armor. No, says Patrick, it’s because “We’re a coarse society.”

I know it’s a hopeless effort to say this, but imagine the reaction if a prominent liberal politician were to declare that the reason the United States has a severe social problem that doesn’t exist elsewhere is that Americans are bad people. We’d never hear the end of it. But when a Republican says it, it barely makes a ripple.

And I guess I should say for the record that I personally don’t believe that Americans, as individuals, are worse than anyone else. If anything, what has always struck me when returning from trips abroad is that Americans are (or were) on average exceptionally nice and pleasant to interact with.

What distinguishes us is that it’s so easy for people who aren’t nice to arm themselves to the teeth.

OK, I think everyone realizes that none of what Republicans are saying about how to respond to mass shootings will translate into actual policy proposals. They’re barely even trying to make sense. Instead, they’re just making noise to drown out rational discussion until the latest atrocity fades from the news cycle. The truth is that conservatives consider mass shootings, and for that matter America’s astonishingly high overall rate of gun deaths, as an acceptable price for pursuing their ideology.

But what is that ideology? I’d argue that while talk about America’s unique gun culture isn’t exactly wrong, it’s too narrow. What we’re really looking at here is a broad assault on the very idea of civic duty — on the idea that people should follow certain rules, accept some restrictions on their behavior, to protect the lives of their fellow citizens.

In other words, we should think of vehement opposition to gun regulations as a phenomenon closely linked to vehement (and highly partisan) opposition to mask mandates and vaccination in the face of a deadly pandemic, vehement opposition to environmental rules like the ban on phosphates in detergent, and more.

Where does this hatred of the idea of civic duty come from? No doubt some of it, like almost everything in U.S. politics, is related to race.

One thing it doesn’t reflect, however, is our national tradition. When you hear talk of home-schooling, remember that the United States basically invented universal public education. Environmental protection used to be a nonpartisan issue: The Clean Air Act of 1970 passed the Senate without a single nay. And Hollywood mythology aside, most towns in the Old West had stricter limits on the carrying of firearms than Gov. Greg Abbott’s Texas.

As I suggested, I don’t fully understand where this aversion to the basic rules of a civilized society is coming from. What’s clear, however, is that the very people who shout most about “freedom” are doing their best to turn America into a “Hunger Games”-type dystopian nightmare, with checkpoints everywhere, loomed over by men with guns.

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Correction: 

May 27, 2022

An earlier version of this column misattributed the suggestion that families could keep their children safe by home-schooling them. It was made by a writer for the online publication The Federalist, not by the Federalist Society.

Paul Krugman has been an Opinion columnist since 2000 and is also a distinguished professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade and economic geography. @PaulKrugman

Giffords Invests Big to Flip Control & Secure a Majority in Texas State House Willing to take Action on Gun Safety

Thanks to the Giffords PAC for doing this. Check out the resources they provide:

• Factsheet: The State of Gun Violence in Texas

• Report: Gun Laws and Violence in Texas

• Interactive: Texas Gun Laws

We need more people in policy to address gun policy. This impacts us directly at UT and in all of colleges and universities statewide. I applaud my colleague, Dr. Pat Somers,​ for being a leading researcher and voice at our university on gun policy.

-Angela Valenzuela

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: October 28, 2020
CONTACT: Jason Phelps, jphelps@giffords.org

Giffords Invests Big to Flip Control & Secure a Majority in Texas State House Willing to take Action on Gun Safety  

Giffords supports the Texas House Democratic Committee with $300,000 while investing another $100,00 in candidates and efforts to turn out voters while proving gun safety is a winning issue in the Lonestar State

Washington, DC — Giffords PAC, the gun violence prevention organization founded by former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, has invested $300,000 to support the Texas House Democratic Committee’s effort to flip control of the chamber and achieve a gun safety majority. The initiative comes on top of another $100,000 to support candidates up and down the ballot, boost efforts to turn out voters, and fund polling with Latino Victory Project showing Latinx voters care about gun violence.  

“Despite the horrific mass shootings in El Paso and Midland-Odessa in 2019, the Texas legislature offered only thoughts and prayers, with zero action” said Peter Ambler, Giffords Executive Director. “Rather than prioritizing the safety of communities, Republicans in Texas have cowered at the feet of the gun lobby. Texas voters are ready for change. Giffords is proud to support gun safety champions up and down the ballot who have the courage to act.”

Texas currently earns an “F” on the Giffords Law Center Annual Gun Law Scorecard because of its failure to enact commonsense solutions such as requiring background checks on all gun sales, enacting an extreme risk protection order law, and strengthening laws that restrict access to firearms by domestic abusers.

After decisive wins in the Virginia State Legislative races a year ago, Giffords PAC turned its attention to states, including Texas, long seen as off-limits for gun safety. Now, thanks to changing demographics and long-term attitudinal shifts, candidates up and down the ballot are running and winning on promises to take action on gun safety. Especially in the vote-rich suburbs of Houston and Dallas, democratic state house candidates recognize that gun safety has become a key issue for swing voters. 

Examples of how house candidates are embracing gun safety can be seen here and here. One mailer, paid for by the Dallas County Democratic Party, attacks Republican incumbent Morgan Meyers for his unpopular, extreme stances on guns in schools and on college campuses. In contrast the other mailer, from Democractic incumbent Ana-Maria Ramos, promises to protect families by supporting universal background checks, banning high capacity magazines, and keeping guns out of the hands of domestic abusers. 

While focusing on breakthroughs in the state house, Giffords PAC also made backing MJ Hegar for Senate a priority, endorsing her ahead of the Democratic Senate primary. The group held a number of events for Hegar, including a discussion as part of the Senate Road to Background Checks Tour where she explained how she’d fight to protect Texans from gun violence in the Senate. Additional investments went to Workers Alliance and Corazón de la Frontera PAC for Get Out the Vote efforts geared toward turning out voters in communities of color. 

The effort in the Senate race builds on a successful campaign in 2018 by Giffords PAC to support gun safety champions running for Congress. In one of the defining campaigns of the cycle for Giffords PAC, they spent $1.1 million on a campaign against then-Congressman John Culberson. The ads showed Culberson siding with the NRA while Houston kids suffer through lockdowns and active shooter drills. 

Giffords released Public Policy Polling showing nearly 8 in 10 Texas voters support universal background checks. Over 60% of voters said that a candidate’s support for universal background checks laws made it more likely that they would vote for that candidate. Only 8% of those polled said they would more likely vote for the candidate who opposed background checks.  

Together with Latino Victory Project, Giffords also released new polling showing that 3 out of 4 Latinos in Texas support strong gun safety legislation. Giffords and Latino Victory Project also teamed up last year for a bus tour, ¡YA BASTA! Latinos Rise Against Gun Violence and Hate, beginning in El Paso and stopping in Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio.

Related Resources:

• Factsheet: The State of Gun Violence in Texas

• Report: Gun Laws and Violence in Texas

• Interactive: Texas Gun Laws

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Giffords PAC works to reduce gun violence and save lives by empowering voters with information and supporting candidates who will fight for safer gun laws.