Gov. Greg Abbott Has a Lot of Nerve
"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!
Granted, he hasn’t made the sorts of defiant, strident pro-gun statements that Senator Ted Cruz of Texas has, but then Cruz is the prince of provocation. It’s his brand. He’s proud of it.
And 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.
Unbowed by that distinction, Abbott spoke after the massacre about the importance of dealing with mental illness.
Other Republican leaders spoke about arming teachers and essentially turning schools into fortresses — which, I’m sure, would be wonderfully conducive to learning.
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. What they do have is a lot of nerve. . ."
For the Love of Sentences........................................................
Maybe prose can make a difference? I’ll start with a few of the best passages about the Uvalde horror.
Here’s Bret Stephens in The Times: “The United States seems to have a not-so-secret death cult that believes that the angry god known as the Second Amendment must be periodically propitiated through ritual child sacrifice.” (Thanks to Scott Howie of Glenview, Ill., and Randy Komisarek of Tucson, Ariz., among others, for nominating this.)
Also in The Times, Maureen Dowd: “We’ve become a country of cowards, so terrified of the unholy power of gun worship that no sacrifice of young blood is too great to appease it.” (Sylvie Kimche, Manhattan, and Marc Etter, Detroit)
. . ...........................................................................If America were not afraid to know itself, we could more readily accept that gun-rights advocates are enthralled with violent sorrow. .....................................................................................................................................
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