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.
Hard to believe that out of our last 3 governators, George was the smart one.
1A-Butt even makes Ricky look smart.
Yup.
2Almost everything he’s advocating for normalizes a society of weapon toting for everyone as the cure-all for all our problems. To OUR children and grandchildren. These f**kers can’t get into our homes, so they’ll indoctrinate our beautiful kids at state mandated institutions. And it’s all driven by the bottom line of the weapons and ammunition industries.
Like I said before, you know what they say at the NRA, I love the smell of gunsmoke in the morning. It smells like prosperity.
Useful idiots. Ran across that this morning just shortly after getting out of bed. Great way to start a day, eh? It seems that a great discovery has been made. Russia has been using groups such as conservationists, environmentalists, etc. as useful idiots to ruin our electoral system. I would add NRA to that list,maybe event them at the top. You all may recall recent coverage on how the NRA delightedly escorted a visiting Russian nabob to one of their “conventions” around to various polling places in action so he could see how democracy works. I bet he was hiding a Cheshire cat smile all the time as he watched how well the renamed KGB et al. had done their work starting many years ago! One of the things that may pop out of the Mueller investigation is the way Russia very patiently starts one of their own projects as much as 20 years out. And the Golden Gibbon in the White House doesn’t give a hot damn!!!
3The reactionary mind is a very narrow, tightly constrained thing.
4Unfortunately, stupidity is the key to Texas Rethugs’ success.
5The state seems to have an overabundance of voters who do value guns over education, heck over everything, even the right to life. Abbott is the current manipulator of those misguided predispositions.
Conspiracy theory alert: Is the systematic murder of children the Repugs’ method for: 1) birth control, 2) ethnic cleansing, and 3) creating an uneducated population?
6Abbott, Potty Dan, and Bettencourt are all those who are TAKING money that is to go to the schools. They are pushing their charter school business that will take MORE money from our public schools and put it into the pockets of their already rich cronies who are wanting to open these inferior schools in abandoned strip centers. They also do not want to fund teachers and as far as retired teachers – we might as well pick out our caskets because they will be perfectly happy to see us die from lack of healthcare and/or starvation.
This creature needs to roll away into the dark night and take his little buddies along with him. This is nothing but campaign rhetoric to give him more votes. He won’t fund this and doesn’t mean one single word of it. He does not care about education in Texas.
7Hippie, all of that and more!
8The NRA still opposes the one thing that would have stopped most of the school shootings: the “smart gun” technology that lets only authorized users fire a gun.
maggie, I would like to see your evidence, if you have any, that “Russia has been using groups such as conservationists, environmentalists, etc. as useful idiots to ruin our electoral system.” That sounds like it comes straight off RWNJ talk radio funded by the oil industry.
9I have a solution to the gun crisis and it doesn’t take forty three pages. Treat all bullets like opioids. Every 30 days a household can get 45 bullets as long as they fill out a form saying the purpose is not to kill people and pee in a cup to show they are not on drugs. Then they have to wait for three weeks until their drug test clears and then they can go in to collect their bullets. There will be the usual wait period before being allowed to go in for the next set of bullets.
10Since the Gov is an idiot and so is at least half the lege, here’s an idea that might reduce access to guns in schools, based on reports of exactly how students/outsiders get the guns *in*. Most reports (not all) state that the shooter had had the guns in the trunk of his car (or toolbox of a pickup) and parked at the school, which meant only a short walk to a door.
What if there were no student parking lots? (I know–radical–every teenager in TX wants to drive to school.) When I was in McHi, there was no student parking, though there was some on-street parking relatively near the school–but it was on downtown streets, with traffic, both cars and pedestrians, and parking meters. I was remembering how we had no school shootings, and the same day I was driving past the Academy-Little River HS with a huge student parking lot snugged right up to the school. Much easier to get weapons inside w/o being seen–it’s on the edge of town, playing fields away from any residences or businesses.
Make it harder to get the guns to school–make the student have to carry them a good long distance to get to the door, and then have gym bags searched at the door.
Alternatively, fence the parking lot high and stout, with one gate to drive in/out, and one pedestrian gate. Both locked during school hours, requiring an escort to get to the vehicle if there’s an emergency. Cars have to be parked with the trunk lids popped and toolboxes open. A friendly local policeman shows up, walks the lines of parked cars to check for weapons. And door guard checks gym bags. Anything that can hold a long gun.
Handguns, of course, will fit in purses and backpacks and hollowed-out books for that matter. Not to mention waistbands, though a school rule that shirts have to be tucked in (had it in my HS, albeit in a different geological age) makes shoving your piece in your waistband harder. Also I think making it easy for parents to sue school districts (and thus school boards) for not having bullet-proof (high velocity bullet-proof) walls and doors throughout might jar more people into supporting various gun control laws, but maybe not. It’s way expensive to bullet-proof anything.
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