The national debate on gun control reignited Friday, when a 17-year-old opened fire at Santa Fe High School, killing at least 10 people and leaving another 10 wounded.
In the aftermath, Republican leaders placed blame on a slew of factors: unarmed teachers, far too many doors to guard in schools, and a lack of mental health services.
“We may have to look at the design of our schools moving forward,” Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said at a press conference Friday, adding that schools have far too many entrances and exits to safeguard. “We’re gonna have to be creative.”
Democrats, on the other hand, advocated for swift action on guns, including universal background checks and funding federal research on gun violence.
“What if we required universal background checks to ensure that firearms only get into the hands of those who won’t harm themselves or someone else,” Democrat Beto O’Rourke, an El Paso congressman running against U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz this fall, wrote in a Medium post. “Close all loopholes and exceptions. Every single gun purchase has a background check.”
San Antonio City Councilman Cruz Shaw (D2) on Friday wrote, “At the municipal level of government, we are extremely limited in what we can do locally to address violence – especially without action from the state and federal levels of government. What we can do as a community is continue to pressure members of Congress to call for action on common-sense gun safety legislation.”
Texas is as gun-friendly a state as they come. But how do voters feel about gun control, according to recent polls?
Like most issues, folks are divided.
The latest University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll, released in October, found that Texans are split on whether people carrying more guns will make for a safer environment. And as with many issues, the biggest divide was along party lines.
More than 60 percent of surveyed Republicans said they believed the country would be safer if more people carried guns. Only 5 percent of Democrats said they felt the same way.
“Republicans and Democrats tend to look at the same tragedy from very different perspectives,” Mark Jones, a Rice University political scientist, said Monday. “Democrats look at Santa Fe and their most popular answer tends to be that gun control is the correct response to keep this from happening in the future. Whereas Republicans don’t see it that way. They don’t believe gun control would have any impact or is even germane.”
Texans are also split on who, or what, to blame for mass shootings. Of those surveyed, most (24 percent) said the primary cause is a failure of the mental health system, which was closely followed by current gun laws. Thirteen percent of respondents focused much of their ire on extreme views on the internet, while 10 percent blamed various forms of media (i.e. the spread of “extremist points of views” on the internet and “media attention given to perpetrators of mass shootings”).
Increased access to mental health services seems to be one solution both Republicans and Democrats turn to in the wake of such tragedies. After Friday’s shooting, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott touted a 4-year-old project run by the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center as a potential statewide model to reduce gun violence. The program works to identify junior high and high school students most at risk for committing violence in schools and intervene before it happens.
Another thing Texans seem to agree on? Overall, more than half of registered voters surveyed said gun control laws should be more strict. Only 13 percent of surveyed Texans said existing laws should be less strict than they are now, and 31 percent would prefer to leave current gun laws unchanged.
Democrats, however, are more likely to want to toughen current gun laws. While just about half of surveyed Republicans opt to leave them as they are now.
There’s also a racial divide: Black and Hispanic voters in Texas overwhelmingly said they preferred stricter gun control laws. Only 43 percent of white voters agreed.
You see this racial divide nationally as well. A national survey by the Pew Research Center found that nearly half of blacks and 29 percent of Hispanics found gun violence to be a “very big problem” in their local communities. Just 11 percent of white respondents said the same thing.
The results of the latest UT/TT poll showcases a slight shift on who voters blamed for mass shootings just two year prior. In November 2015, the majority of surveyed Texans also blamed mental health issues and gun laws on mass shootings. Respondents also pointed to unstable families, however.
“In the wake of mass shootings, what you see in elected officials is often a reflection of what their own voters think,” Joshua Blank, the manager of polling and research of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, said Monday. “In the wake of these mass shootings, what you see is partisans talking mostly to their voters and, in turn, also reinforcing what voters already think about the causes of these problems.”
Forty-one percent of Texans surveyed in November 2015 said they believed gun laws should be more strict, compared to 18 percent who said they should be less strict. Overall, this is a small uptick from a February 2015 UT/TT Poll, where 36 percent of respondents said they wanted stricter gun control laws and 22 percent wanted those laws made less strict.
So what’s accounting for the trend of public opinion in Texas?
“The main driver in changing gun attitudes is the increasing frequency of mass shootings both in Texas and elsewhere. With each one of these shootings, what you tend to see is a major uptick in attitudes in favor of greater gun restrictions,” Blank said. “With each additional tragedy, there tends to be more people who further embrace the possibility of more gun restrictions.”
The bottom line: Texans are split on whether more people carrying guns will make for a safer environment. But there’s an increasing number of people who think existing gun laws should be more strict.
Sample size: 1200. Skew: Not mentioned! Cabrones, we aren’t falling for “polls” anymore. Polls had Clinton at 92% likely to win the election!
Not sure I believe these polls entirely. Every Hispanic and Black I know own guns. And they are not republicans in general, and not Trump supporters for sure.
Did they only poll California translpants?
Transguide signs all over town show that 1,138 people died on Texas roads last year. Guess we need to pass a law against using roads, or cars, or driving?
..or liberal democrats?
That tired old argument is a straw man. Vehicles exist for the sole purpose of providing transportation, while guns were invented to kill.
…providing food or protection, serving vital functions just like shelter or transportation.
I suppose after 9/11 we should have banned airplanes and steel skyscrapers?
Or after several incidents involving people being run down by vans in public we should ban anything larger than a scooter? Or walking in public squares where there could be vans?
Or perhaps after 423,096 abortions so far in the USA 2018 alone we should maybe end the practice? Nah, that one is okay.
Maybe since Heart Disease has already killed 238,030 in the USA 2018 alone so far we could stop selling salt, fat, and sugar.
While were at it Obesity has claimed roughly 119,000 lives in the USA this year and the majority of Bexar county adults and over a 1/3 of children, we should ban being overweight? Maybe we should legally force these people to walk to work.
Or perhaps after enough drunk drivers have killed innocents we should ban alcohol? We could call it, prohibition! Maybe we should make it illegal to drink and drive, that should stop the issue!
Yours is an exhausted argument and it is exhausting to see it repeated constantly like it would solve anything.
As if it wouldn’t immediately just skyrocket crime and the black market demand for arms, just as alcohol did a century ago and the war on drugs perpetuates today. Look at 5 DNT listed states in Mexico and tell me I’m wrong.
Let the ever peaceful Chiraq be your guide on policy.
Or maybe you could just look at how very deeply the Military Industrial Complex reaches into the fabric of our society and then just realize that no matter how much you complain it’s all a worthless dream.
What it all comes down to isn’t the airplanes, the vans, the buildings, the cholesterol, the salt, the bullets, the bombs, the guns, the alcohol…its the people making decisions behind them, and until that problem is addressed, I will have to keep arguing people like you.
None of your examples were created nor exist for the sole purpose to kill.
West, so simple minded and the core of the problem. The point is it doesn’t matter if an item was created to kill or not. It’s the mind controlling the item and it’s ability to process common sense and decency.
How about this. They were invented to protect. If it were not for my handgun, I would have been another victim in a string of rapes and murders in Memphis, TN (1998). If it were not for my handgun, I would not have been able to thwart a robber in Nashville, TN (2006). I would have been carjacked in El Paso, TN (2014). I never once killed anyone. It was a visual deterrent.
Texans split along party lines on gun control. I’m gobsmacked.
Turn the stats around and what do you have? 71 percent of Hispanics say gun violence is not a big problem.
Cruz Smith (I have the misfortune of being in his district) is predictable. On any question his response will be as far left and totalitarian as imaginable.
We have seen in recent years horrible acts of murder commited by students and minors who have obtained weopons from parents or guardians who have left firearms/weapons readily accessible.
These same parents/gaurdians may have witnessed or have had concerns regarding the distraught feelings or mental condition of these young people in days prior to such incidents.
As to the readily accessibility of firearms by a determined young person intent on committing such heinous crimes, I would suggest that legislation consider an immediate charge of negligent homicide with a mandatory minimum sentence of 20 years to be imposed on anyone, parent or guardian, who should, through no thought to commit malice themselves, inadvertently provide such weapons.
Perhaps a locked and secure gun safe/cabinet would have provided a deterren, or time to cool down and reconsider the consequences.
A charge of negligent homicide would provide an incentive to parents/guardian to reconsider such easy access to potential weapons.
I’m in favor of gun control, mostly on assault rifles, since even the name refers to it being offensive rather than defensive as our Constitution is written for. But at the same time, I recognize that a law on assault rifles wouldn’t have mattered in the latest tragedy since one wasn’t used.
Then I start to think about all the people who would say that means all guns should be outlawed. Then I read how bombs were also a weapon during the Santa Fe incident. It makes me wonder, if we outlaw all guns, would we just be dealing with a lot of improvised pipe bombs instead?
This article mentions universal background checks, which I’m not against. But would that have prevented Santa Fe either? The guns were legally purchased by a parent; belonged to the parent. Background checks wouldn’t have prevented this young man from taking his father’s legally purchased guns.
I know less doors at schools is definitely not the solution. I can already see a shooter sniping out students who are waiting for their turn to escape out a limited amount of exits. The congestion created by less exits would be a shooters dream-come-true. Not to mention, how many students would die being trampled in a crowd’s desperate attempt to escape through limited exits. Deaths due to crowd trampling have happened in situations that weren’t supposed to be life threatening, so why not when it’s a life-or-death situation?