Living in a rural Texas town renowned for white-tailed deer hunting, where rifles are a regular prize at school raffles, Desirae Garza never thought much about gun laws. That changed after her 10-year-old niece, Amerie Jo, was fatally shot inside Robb Elementary School.
“You can’t purchase a beer, and yet you can buy an AR-15,” Ms. Garza said of the 18-year-old gunman who the authorities say legally bought two semiautomatic rifles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition days before killing 19 children and two teachers. “It’s too easy.”
But inside another Uvalde home, Amerie Jo’s father, Alfred Garza III, had a sharply different view. In the wake of his daughter’s killing, he said he was considering buying a holster to strap on the handgun he now leaves in his home or truck.
“Carrying it on my person is not a bad idea after all this,” he said.
An anguished soul-searching over Texas’ gun culture and permissive gun laws is unfolding across the latest community to be shattered by a shooter’s rampage.
Uvalde, a largely Mexican American city of 15,200 near the U.S. southern border, is a far different place from Parkland, Fla., or Newtown, Conn., which became centers of grass-roots gun control activism in the aftermath of the school shootings there.
Gun ownership is threaded into life here in a county that has elected conservative Democrats and twice supported former President Donald J. Trump. Several relatives of victims count themselves among Texas’ more than one million gun owners. Some grew up hunting and shooting. Others say they own multiple guns for protection.
Another piece discussing the region's gun culture is this Washington Post op-ed, by Neil Meyer, a retired lawyer who grew up in Uvalde and lived there recently, and who now lives in Bethesda, Maryland.
[Y]ou would be challenged to find a more heavily armed place in the United States than Uvalde. It’s a town where the love of guns overwhelms any notion of common-sense regulations, and the minority White ruling class places its right-wing Republican ideology above the safety of its most vulnerable citizens — its impoverished and its children, most of whom are Hispanic.
* * *
The killer allegedly bought his guns at the Oasis Outback, a popular lunch spot for wealthier Uvaldeans, known for its large buffet, hunting supplies and gun shop. On most days you’ll also see groups of Border Patrol agents and local law enforcement there. It’s a monthly meeting place for groups such as the Uvalde County Republican Women, whose Facebook page includes posts decrying “the border invasion.”
The Oasis reflects the establishment’s deep cultural reverence for guns, hunting and the Wild West mythology. I wasn’t surprised that an 18-year-old could walk in and easily buy tactical weapons without anyone being concerned.
Finally, here's a story out of a small city south of San Antonio, Charlotte, population 1,715, about a retired high school teacher and gun owner who was moved by the Uvalde massacre to give up his AR-15.
On Saturday night, [Richard] Small, a self-described “devout NRA Republican,” did what he acknowledges would have been unthinkable days earlier. He unlocked his gun cabinet and pulled out his AR-15, similar to the one used by the gunman in Uvalde. He drove to his local police department and turned it in.
“I’m a gun advocate. I believe in the Second Amendment. But this AR, after what I saw in Uvalde, I’m done with it,” Small said as he turned the rifle over to an officer with the Charlotte police department. “I’m sick over it.”
Guns have long been an inextricable part of Texas culture — tightly woven into small towns like Uvalde, a predominantly Latino community of about 16,000 about an hour north of the U.S. border with Mexico. Here, children are raised to hunt and shoot from a young age, and many residents — including family members of the victims — say they own guns for their own protection. It is an affinity that cuts across the partisan lines that typically define the gun debate in other parts of the country.
I wrote last week about how Uvalde's rurality sets it apart from Newtown, Connecticut, site of the only school shooting in U.S. history to take more lives than the one in south Texas last week.
No comments:
Post a Comment