STUPID. Abbott’s School Safety Pablum
Greg Abbott published his school safety report and recommendations yesterday in response to the massacre at Santa Fe High School a few weeks ago, it is voluminous at 43 pages. A one-word description of Abbott’s plan?
STUPID.
Much of it is pablum, giving lip service to preventing gun violence in schools, but offering little in the way of hard action items which require legislative action. The legislature is in recess until 2019, unless Abbott calls a special session. The report does contain pages and pages about arming teachers and REDUCING training for those armed “Marshals” as well as eliminating secure storage requirements. Arming teachers is one of the most idiotic recommendations of all the idiotic recommendations Abbott makes. It spends pages on adding more police officers, retired military and police on staff to school campuses. The report also talks for pages about hardening schools with metal detectors, barriers around schoolyards and stadiums, dead bolts, blah blah.
Buried in the back of the report were recommendations to require 48 hour reporting to the NICS system all adjudications that prevent gun ownership, and surprisingly, Abbott has reversed himself and is now in favor of a red flag law, but it remains to be seen if that law would have any teeth in it since the NRA opposes that common sense law. One other improvement is Abbott’s proposal to strengthen the safe storage law that punishes an adult for not securing their weapons and those weapons are used by minors to commit a crime. And yes, you guessed it, there is zero on actually reducing access to weapons through strengthened gun laws. Abbott continues to oppose universal background checks or closing the private sale loophole.
The REALLY stupid feature of the report? Funding. Abbott claims to have $110 million available for all these programs which is woefully short. For example, to put ONE middle of the road metal detector in each of Texas 8,000 schools would cost $40 million. The remaining $70 million wouldn’t touch all of the billions in other expenses for hardening schools, training teachers to carry guns, hiring police, etc, etc. Oh, and that $70 million? It’s being taken from academic grants. So, to be clear…Texas is taking money away from educational programs to add guns in school.
STUPID.
In June of 2015, Louie Gohmert promised to donate $2,500 to the victims of the church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina. He made that promise because the shooter, Dylann Roof, shot and killed nine black churchgoers at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. Roof had a “manifesto” touting that his racism was inspired by Earl Holt of the Council of Conservative Citizens.
And, oh dear lord, she has things all figured out.