2023-05-12 04:58:02
HOUSTON (AP) — Thirteen people were killed in two mass shootings. Eight migrants killed when a van rammed a crowded bus stop. The possible passage of a law that would allow Republican Gov. Greg Abbott to nullify elections in Texas’ most populous county, which is a Democratic stronghold. All in the course of these two weeks.
These issues and the forces that drive them—anger and guns, turmoil over immigration, deep political divisions over the meaning of democracy—are playing out in American life in many ways. But in Texas, with its immense size and population growing by more than 1,000 a day, the stage is much bigger, and often louder.
It’s enough to make even the proudest Texan feel internally conflicted regarding how he views the state.
“Right now the situation is out of control,” said Jay Leeson, an illustrator and cartoonist who lives in Lubbock, a city on the Texas plains. He claims to be a “conservative western Texan” whose sons “know how to handle guns, how to ride, how to do all the Texas things.”
The “Texas stuff”. Texans have already heard regarding all this. They have been listening to it for generations. That everyone is armed. That it’s a deeply conservative place full of tough oil workers, cowboys and brash bullies. That there really is nothing like it in the rest of the country.
Many Texans will say there is some truth to it. But Texas is much more complex than a collection of clichés that view the state through a narrow lens.
However, lately things here have felt unforgiving. And what worries some Texans is not how outsiders view the state, but whether those who live here can navigate the divisive political environment, and overcome a complex and sometimes violent past.
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EVEN THOSE WHO SUPPORT GUNS ARE CONCERNED
Leeson is furious at the way the immigration issue has become a political battleground. He is furious at how Republicans are “squeezing as many votes as they can out of West Texas” to outpace the growing populations of the state’s heavily Democratic-leaning urban centers, from Houston to Dallas and Austin to San Antonio. Currently, the Texas Congress is debating several bills focused on how Harris County, the most populous in the state and heavily Democratic, handles its elections.
In particular, Leeson is furious that his 9-year-old son is so worried regarding school shootings that he’s already checked all the windows in his classroom to see which one he’d open in the event of an attack.
“I just think the whole situation is a reverent disaster,” he said.
Mass murders have a deep history in Texas. Arguably the first modern-day mass shooting in the country occurred here in 1966, when an engineering student began shooting from the veranda of a University of Texas building. He murdered 14 people and injured dozens more.
But the state’s strict gun laws didn’t begin to crack until a few years following another mass shooting, this one in 1991, when a gunman rammed his pickup truck through the window of a Central Texas diner, killing 23. people. By then, decades of Democratic control were giving way to Republicans, for whom gun rights were a central issue.
In 1995, then-Governor George W. Bush signed into law a law allowing Texans to carry concealed weapons. At present, the inhabitants of the state can openly carry weapons. And some do it with passion.
Chad Hasty, a well-known conservative radio host who lives in Lubbock, laments the latest killings — “I don’t want to get to a time when a mass shooting doesn’t shock us” — but is adamant that gun rights must be protected. . He rarely leaves home without his Sig Sauer P365, a small firearm designed for everyday carry and one of the best-selling pistols in America.
He dismisses the idea that Texas is particularly prone to violence.
“It doesn’t seem like a specifically Texan thing to me,” he said. He rather considers that the large number of shootings is simply due to a matter of size: “We are a huge state, with millions and millions of people.”
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IT IS A MUCH MORE DIVERSE STATE THAN THE CLICHES
The litany of mass murders in Texas in just the past few years is staggering: Sutherland Springs, 26 killed in 2017; Santa Fe, 10 deaths in 2018; El Paso, 23 murdered in 2019; Midland-Odessa, seven people killed in 2019; Uvalde, 21 shot dead in 2022; Cleveland, five homicides on April 28; Allen, eight murdered on May 6.
Guns have long been a part of Texan culture, in state mythology and in reality. But for some, equating the number of guns with the number killed by firearms is a false equivalence.
“You will never get people to give up their guns, nor do I think you should try,” said Vanessa Brashier, editor-in-chief of Bluebonnet News, a website that covers rural areas north of Houston, including the town of Cleveland, where five immigrants were killed in a mass shooting on April 28.
She was deeply moved by those killings, especially the way some women died while protecting their children from being shot. But she considers herself a supporter of the Second Amendment: “I want to be able to defend myself if someone comes knocking who shouldn’t be on my property.”
Like so many things in Texas, his politics are complex. Brashier, who claims to be politically independent, sees immigration as a good thing, “I just think we need to figure out a better way” to handle it.
Just two weeks ago, he created a Spanish-language news website to better inform the area’s growing Latino population. She named the site “The Texas Sunrise” because she “wanted it to be hopeful.”
“These residents who have moved here deserve to be informed regarding what is happening around them,” he said. But the entry of migrants has faced rejection from some residents, who feel “like there has been an invasion,” Brashier added.
This week, Texas and other border states were preparing for the end of the rule known as Title 42, which allowed the government to expeditiously remove migrants to Mexico to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Abbott has deployed additional Texas National Guard troops in response to the end of that rule. The goal, he said this week, is “to protect the Texas border.”
Texas border cities have tended to be more welcoming to migrants than other parts of the state, because many people have long seen themselves and their Mexican neighbors as one large, blended community that cuts across the political boundaries of governments. In El Paso, for example, more than 80% of its nearly 700,000 residents are Latino. Many residents have relatives on the other side of the border, in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.
This situation at the border has created a welcoming community that reacts differently to various issues, including immigration, says Richard Pineda, director of the Sam Donaldson Center for Communication Studies at the University of Texas, El Paso campus. For Texas, he says, it’s an outlier, a “fluid and reciprocal culture.”
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LARGE CHANGES IN THE STATE MAY GENERATE TENSIONS
Texas can feel like a study in contrasts. It is famous for its oil industry, but it is a producer of a quarter of the wind energy in the United States and a leader in solar energy. Known for its open and undeveloped landscapes, it is also home to some of the largest and fastest growing cities. Personified by the cowboy, but with some of the largest migrant populations in the country.
With over 30 million people, Texas has always been a destination for out-of-towners from across the nation and abroad. Since 2010 it has added nearly 4 million additional residents, more than any other state, according to federal census figures. In 2020, Latino residents were responsible for half of the population growth, and many demographers believe that Hispanics will soon overtake whites as the largest ethnic group in the state.
But it’s not just regarding Latinos. Texas has large immigrant populations from India, China, the Philippines, Vietnam, and other countries. Allen, where a gunman murdered eight people in a shopping center on May 6, is among the most diverse suburbs in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Over the course of nearly a century, Texas has had a one-word state motto: “Friendship.” But many see that light-hearted bond is changing.
“Texas always seemed like a friendly place to me. But to be honest, this last decade just feels worse,” said Chris Tomlinson, a fifth-generation Texan and business columnist for The Houston Chronicle. He has written two best-sellers on state history, including: “Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth.”
Tomlinson notes that more than 70% of Texans age 60 and older are non-Hispanic white, while more than 70% of Texans under age 30 are people of color.
“This creates the tension that you see around voting rights and cultural issues like critical race theory and LGBTQ issues,” he said. “When you have that level of demographic change, there is going to be tension.”
For example, Texas is among the states where drag shows have been targeted by right-wing politicians and activists, and Republican lawmakers have proposed restrictions on such shows.
At times, it can seem as if the population of Texas is changing faster on many issues than the politics of the state, which remains staunchly conservative and Republican. No Democrat has been elected to a statewide office since 1994. However, Tomlinson points out that polls indicate that Texans are not that different from the rest of the country on many issues, from abortion to immigration.
And then there are the guns, a reputation that, for better and worse, follows Texas everywhere. A poll conducted last year by the University of Houston and the University of Texas Southern found that there is “overwhelming support” for at least some kind of gun control. Yet few expect to see that in Texas in the immediate future.
Gary Mauro, a longtime Texas Land Bureau commissioner who ran for governor in 1998, is one of those last Democrats in statewide office. Although he reserves most of his criticism for the Republicans, he blames extremists in both parties for targeting the political periphery and amplifying some of the clichés Texas continues to wrestle with.
“I still think the situation is going to get better,” he said of the state’s policy, “but it just keeps getting worse.”
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Tim Sullivan reported from Minneapolis.
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Lozano is on Twitter as: and Sullivan as:
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