Texas Legislature Finally Advances “Raise the Age” Bill for Semiautomatic Guns After Mass Shooting

It took masses of concerned mothers and families of the victims of the Uvalde school shooting to convince just two Republicans to get the stones to support incredibly modest public safety regulations.

On Monday, large groups of protesters flooded the Texas state Capitol as one Republican committee chair threatened to kill a proposed bill that would raise the minimum age to purchase an AR-15-style rifle from 18 to 21. The bill, endorsed by families of the victims of the Uvalde school shooting, was introduced in February but didn’t even get a wink of hearing time until April.

Cheers erupted in the chamber on Monday as the committee advanced the bill.

Monday was the final day the bill could advance. Originally, the committee chair, Ryan Guillen (a former Democrat), said he was not interested in advancing the bill. In face of the mass protests, he seemed to waver, allowing the bill to go to a vote.

And upon voting, two Republicans swung to vote with the Democrats, advancing the bill on an 8–5 vote.

The moment showcases the power of people to actually demand their government act on the wave of gun violence sweeping the nation, and yet still the appalling fecklessness of Republicans to have forced such protests at all. After Uvalde, Republicans have done nothing. After another mass shooting, they had to be convinced, not empowered, by the people to even advance a bill out of committee.

And even then, five Republicans (a majority of Republicans on the committee) still found it within themselves to look at the families of those who have lost their children to gun violence, and still vote the incredibly modest gun reform down.

Oklahoma’s Republican Governor Kevin Stitt doubled down Monday on his decision to veto funding for PBS, accusing the network of indoctrinating children.

Stitt vetoed a bill two weeks ago approving funding for the Oklahoma Educational Television Authority, which broadcasts PBS and PBS Kids throughout the state. OETA receives both private and public funding. It offers shows including Sesame Street, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Antiques Roadshow, and PBS Newshour.

When asked Monday on Fox Business to explain his decision to veto OETA funding, Stitt demanded, “Why are we using taxpayer dollars to overly sexualize or indoctrinate children with this type of programming?”

A gubernatorial spokeswoman provided “evidence” of such sexualization and indoctrination to Tulsa World the day after Stitt issued the veto, which was basically just a list of LGBTQ content. She said OETA has aired Pride Month programs in recent years, and two children’s cartoons have included lesbian characters in some episodes. PBS Newshour also ran a segment in which an Indiana couple discussed how much gender-affirming care had helped their daughter.

Unless two-thirds of the state legislature votes to override Stitt’s veto, OETA will shut down in about a year—which could have devastating effects for more rural parts of Oklahoma, warned Friends of OETA board member Ken Busby.

Busby told Tulsa World that OETA is crucial to the state’s emergency alert system, especially for people in rural areas who don’t have cable television. “Our broadcast towers are how we inform a lot of rural Oklahoma about disasters like tornadoes and thunderstorms,” he said.

Republicans have been waging war on anything they deem “woke,” which usually means anything that encourages freedom of thought. A major argument has been that they are trying to protect children. But as moves such as Stitt’s veto show, a lot of their efforts to combat “wokeness” will actually have a detrimental effect on children’s well-being.

A Democrat-turned-Republican Texas legislator is obstructing incredibly modest gun reform in the wake of yet another mass shooting in his state.

Families of victims of the Uvalde mass school shooting have been rallying for months behind an array of gun safety bills, including one to raise the minimum age to buy semiautomatic rifles from 18 to 21. The bill was filed back in February but was not given a hearing until April 19. Even then, families had to wait more than 12 hours just to testify on the bill.

Monday—in the wake of a horrific mass shooting that left nine people, including the shooter, dead—is the final day the bill could have advanced.

And on Monday, Ryan Guillen—the chair of the Community Safety House committee where the bill is stalled—put a nail in the coffin: He does not want to bring up the bill for a vote.

It “doesn’t have the support in the legislature,” the Republican said, simply, ignoring the protesters demanding gun control inside the Capitol.

Who is to say how many more coffins will be nailed by the cowardice of Guillen and the rest of his Republican colleagues?

“To honor our children, you’d put this up for a vote.… It’s time for you to grow some balls and do your fucking job,” one family member said last week, addressing Guillen.

In face of the growing protests, Guillen then announced that the committee is taking another look at voting on the bill. “We’re considering it,” he said.

Guillen was elected to the state House as a Democrat in 2002 and, after nearly two decades, switched to the Republican Party in November 2021. The lawmaker is also a friend to national Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Texas Representative Henry Cuellar.

Guillen shares much of his state district with Cuellar, an anti-choice, A-rated NRA conservative blessed by Nancy Pelosi and James Clyburn. The conservative Texas duo share both a tendency for political fence-riding and an apparent kindred camaraderie, perhaps in relating to each other’s spinelessness. Just last week, Cuellar boasted about spending time with a couple of his “friends” while visiting the Texas state legislature, including one Ryan Guillen.

“Coming back always brings so many memories of bipartisanship,” Cuellar wrote.

The mirroring between Cuellar and Guillen is almost beautiful in its patheticness. Last year, in the aftermath of the Uvalde mass shooting that left 19 children and two teachers dead, Cuellar voted against raising the minimum age to access semiautomatic guns from 18 to 21—just as Guillen blocked similar legislation Monday. The bill Cuellar voted against would have also created penalties for gun trafficking, required manufacturers to include serial numbers, and mandated safe storage of weapons away from children, among other very moderate provisions.

The “bipartisan” order that Cuellar so warmly recalls is indeed an influential one. It is one in which Texas Republicans and conservative Democrats put on a showcase of the most cynical, despicable, shamelessly wretched ways of leading one’s life.

This post has been updated.

Ever since Texas passed a law two years ago allowing people to carry a gun without a permit, random acts of gun violence have increased dramatically—including over the weekend when a shooter attacked a crowded mall.

A gunman opened fire at a mall north of Dallas on Saturday, killing at least eight people and wounding seven others before authorities shot him to death. It was the deadliest attack in Texas since the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde last spring.

There have now been 202 mass shootings since the start of the year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, five of which occurred after the Texas shooting. The Texas mall attack was the second-deadliest mass shooting of 2023, after the one in Monterey Park, California. But Texas is in its own category when it comes to mass shootings, thanks to the state’s lax gun laws.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a law in 2021 that allows anyone over the age of 21 to carry a handgun without a license or training. A study found that the number of mass shootings increased by 62.5 percent in the year after the law was implemented

“From June 13, 2020, to June 13, 2021, when Abbott signed the permitless carry law, Texas had 40 mass shootings. In that same time period from 2021 to 2022, the number of mass shootings rose to 65,” state news outlet Reform Austin reported in September 2022.

In the one-year period before the bill was signed, 187 people were killed or injured in mass shootings in Texas, Reform Austin said. In the one-year period after the law was implemented, that number doubled to 375 people.

Many state authorities also say “they have seen an increase in spur-of-the-moment gunfire” since the law went into effect, The New York Times reported.

Texas was already struggling with gun violence, according to a study published in April by Colin Woodard, the head of Salve Regina University’s Nationhood Lab, which studies American democracy and authoritarian threats to it. The Deep South region, which includes a large swathe of Texas, “is the most deadly of the large regions,” Woodard wrote in Politico.

From 2010 to 2020, the Deep South had the highest rate of gun homicides of all U.S. regions. Over that same time period, the Deep South also had the highest rate of overall gun deaths (homicides and suicides). Woodard attributed these high rates in part to the Southern culture of “honor tradition”—meaning that people feel they need to respond personally to perceived slights or insults, or else it diminishes their dignity.

Infuriatingly, Abbott said Sunday that he would not attempt to reform gun laws in his state, even in the wake of the shooting. When a Fox News host showed him a recent poll that found the overwhelming majority of people favor increased gun control, Abbott said he would focus instead on the “root cause” of gun violence: mental health issues, a favorite Republican scapegoat.

“I have to frame it in a way that’s not gonna piss off all his voters.”

It is 2023, and while Ron DeSantis still hasn’t announced his run for president, he’s apparently been formally preparing for at least five years.

Streams of leaked footage from 2018 show the Florida governor sparring debate questions and talking strategy. In footage obtained by ABC, DeSantis mulls how to win over Trump voters, whether the NRA is “quite the boogeyman the Democrats think it is,” whether the NRA even donated to him at all, and how he can remind himself to try being “likable” instead of unsettlingly aggressive.

In other footage, Representative Matt Gaetz coaches DeSantis and tries to tell him that he comes in “too hot” and prep him for how to respond to attacks from his opponent.

DeSantis, who was preparing for the 2018 gubernatorial race at the time, was accused of making a racist comment by asking voters not to “monkey this up by trying to embrace a socialist agenda” in voting for Democrat Andrew Gillum, who is Black. DeSantis was also criticized for close association with David Horowitz, who, among other things, has complained about Black people not feeling “gratitude” for white people’s “sacrifices” in ending slavery. And reports claimed that DeSantis was an administrator for a racist Facebook page.

“It deserves to be hot!” DeSantis replies in exasperation. “I mean, I’m sorry.”

“Kavanaugh showed that when you say ‘fuck this’ …” DeSantis suggested, referring to Brett Kavanuagh’s success in whining and yelling enough about the numerous allegations of sexual assault against him that he was still able to weather the storm and become one of nine jurists in one of the most powerful institutions in America.

Not necessarily a great role model for someone trying to prove themselves as definitively innocent or trustworthy.

DeSantis is said to be undergoing more debate prep and considering skipping the step of launching an exploratory committee, instead diving right into the race sometime next month. The final touches of the longtime coming presidential campaign follow a remarkably hostile and incendiary state legislative session, in which the Florida governor has attacked millions of LGBTQ people, students, teachers, women, immigrants, people fearful of gun violence, Disney lovers, and fans of Dwyane Wade.