With each Texas mass shooting, Gov. Greg Abbott looks more inept
Greg Abbott of Texas continues to make a robust case for being the nation’s most inept governor. The most recent mass shootings in his state mark a shameful low level.
It’s not simply that he’s a gun proprietor and a Republican, as a result of let’s face it, elected officers from each events money gun-lobby checks. It’s his very public mishandling of the gun-violence epidemic that units him aside.
Abbott is the governor who posted an notorious tweet Oct. 28, 2015, celebrating weapons, and he has saved it on-line because it will get increasingly cringe-worthy. It was nonetheless up Sunday morning, the day after a gunman opened hearth at an outlet mall outdoors Dallas. No less than eight lifeless. No less than seven others wounded. And but there’s Abbott on the file:
Texas had 18 mass shootings the yr he tweeted that, based on the Gun Violence Archive. As a rustic, we misplaced 468 individuals to 372 mass shootings in 2015, together with one the day that Abbott posted that tweet. Mass shootings occurred most days: 220 to be actual. The opposite 145 days we cleaned up the blood, had our ideas, mentioned our prayers and waited for the subsequent one.
Abbott’s clumsy response to the college taking pictures in Uvalde final Could was not a fluke. He didn’t meaningfully reply in any respect. He didn’t even postpone a fundraising occasion the night of the taking pictures. That is who this man is.
Final month, after a household was gunned down, Abbott callously dehumanized the victims by calling them unlawful immigrants. This was not a misstep on his half. That is who this man is.
His newest try to vary the topic is particularly wealthy.
“One factor that we are able to observe very simply is that there was a dramatic enhance within the quantity of anger and violence that’s going down in America,” Abbott mentioned on “Fox Information Sunday.” “And what Texas is doing, in a big-time approach, we’re working to handle that anger and violence by going to its root trigger, which is addressing the psychological well being disaster behind it.”
In 2022, Texas was ranked final within the nation in total entry to psychological well being care, based on information analyzed by Psychological Well being America. A shameful statistic, however not stunning contemplating that Abbott has minimize $211 million from the division in command of his state’s psychological well being packages.
In 2015, Abbott’s first yr as governor, he acknowledged Psychological Well being Consciousness Month partly by saying: “Guaranteeing well timed entry to efficient remedy is helpful not just for particular person well-being, but in addition for our society as a complete, leading to numerous value financial savings within the healthcare, legal justice, housing and household companies fields.”
Certainly. Abbott recognized the issue aptly, however then he made it worse.
To assessment: The governor who recognized the significance of his state’s psychological well being companies later took $211 million from them. The governor who gutted psychological well being care now says it’s the key to stopping mass shootings.
That’s Abbott.
The governor who used his workplace to make it as simple as attainable to get weapons has additionally expressed concern in regards to the Mexican cartel presence alongside the border. As if his insurance policies didn’t play a job in arming them.
The governor who crowed about gun proliferation in 2015 — and tagged the NRA as if searching for approval — had the nerve to say just lately “what we’ve seen throughout the US over the previous yr or two.” As if something about these mass shootings is a brand new phenomenon.
So don’t get your hopes up when he says a few of the proper issues about psychological well being care. Abbott has proven us who he’s, and he received’t be a part of the answer.
