As a Latina from Houston, Texas, I felt the shooting in Uvalde very deeply alongside my community. In Houston, parents hug their children a bit tighter. Students slouch entering their schools, weighed down by fear. Teachers create new plans to protect their students and themselves in case tragedy strikes again. As the community collectively mourns, the Texas atmosphere remains heavy.
When I took my 14-year-old brother to his high school just three days after the shooting, I noticed the increased presence of police officers and administrators at the front doors, guarding and alert. That same day, thousands of students, activists, and community members gathered at the NRA Convention in Downtown Houston in protest of Texas’ Republican leaders’ inaction and refusal to support commonsense gun regulations. Some protestors walked across the stage to graduate that morning and attended the protest immediately after. Some of the protestors were children.
Our entire community was holding its breath.
We feel the loss of the 19 children who remind us of our siblings and cousins. We feel the loss of the two teachers who remind us of our own mothers. It truly could have been any of us. We feel anger and frustration at losing so many lives who undoubtedly helped shape their community. We grieve for the individuals lost, the dreams they had, and the love they each radiated into their community and our world.
How was this violence not stopped? How were so many lives were lost despite the police being at the scene for more than an hour? The systems in place failed the children and teachers — at every single minute. We try to understand why and how a tragedy like this could happen, time and time again, with no change or progress.
Our educational institutions are fundamental to the growth and prosperity of our communities. However, an entire generation of students, composed of our future leaders, fear for their lives while many others live with a traumatic memory. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently found that since 2020, firearm-related injuries are the leading cause of death among children and adolescents, outpacing deaths by motor vehicle crashes. This is more than a political controversy. This is a public health crisis.
Our approach to ending gun violence cannot be treated as a merely political issue. Gun culture is so deeply embedded into states like Texas that we must also push for a transformative cultural change.
In the past 13 years, Texas has witnessed 13 mass shootings. In 2016, within his first year in office, Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill allowing license-holders the ability to carry guns openly. Since then, the governor further deregulated guns: People with concealed handgun licenses can now enter a public university building with a handgun, including dorms and classrooms. And as of 2021, people aged 21 and older can carry a handgun in public without a license or training.
Ultimately, inaction on gun violence is about maintaining power and control.
But Abbott does not work alone. He simply follows the typical Texas Republican playbook to maintain power — which largely depends on voter suppression, particularly of people of color and low-income communities. Because people of color historically vote Democratic, are less likely to own a gun, and are more likely to be affected by gun violence, creating obstacles for them to vote allows Abbott, among others, to maintain power and control to continue passing legislation that deregulates guns. Just last year, Texas Republicans ended policies that increased voting access and participation of lower-income individuals and communities of color. For this reason, we cannot exclusively rely on elections and political action to protect our communities from gun violence.
However, the power of the people is an undeniable force. Culture informs policy just as policy informs culture. A cultural shift begins with changing the narrative around gun regulation.
In 2021, a Pew Research survey found that 42% of Americans believed that even if guns were made harder to legally obtain, the rate of mass shootings would not change. And 9% of Americans believed that the number of mass shootings would increase if more restrictions were placed on gun access. This was a product of a harmful narrative fueled by the National Rifle Association, Republicans, and other gun lobbying groups that oppose gun regulation. If these groups convinced enough Americans that gun regulation was ineffective at stopping gun violence, Americans would continue to vote for gun rights supporters or remain passive on gun issues. If they convinced enough Americans that gun violence was inevitable or that people would always find a way to inflict harm, regardless of their access to guns, a cultural shift would never occur.
The truth is: Gun regulation works. In California, the firearm mortality rate dropped by 55% between 1993 to 2017 as a result of increased gun regulation. This is the narrative that we must push to the forefront of the gun conversation in regard to public policy. The United States is an outlier in gun violence among higher-income countries with a rate of 3.964 deaths per 100,000 people, while second on the list is Cyprus with a rate of 0.628 deaths per 100,000 people. The difference is astounding. Still, this means that decreasing gun violence is feasible and well within reach.
After a mass shooting occurs, many encourage Americans to vote in order to enact changes in public policy. Although this may lead to change, the ballot box cannot be the only medium we depend on, especially given the intentional disenfranchisement of Black, Latinx, immigrants, and other marginalized groups that are more likely to support gun regulation. We need transformative cultural change: understanding how Black and Latinx communities are disproportionately affected by gun violence, deconstructing the glorification of guns and synonymy of guns with personal identity and Southern culture, rethinking how guns and gun violence are portrayed in the media and entertainment, and addressing how the presence of guns can destabilize a community. The list goes on.
Gun violence is multilayered and complex. We cannot simplify the conversation to a “yes” or “no,” “deregulation” or “control.” Similarly, our approach to ending gun violence must be multidimensional and intersectional.
We cannot afford to say that gun violence will never end, policy will never change, or schools will never be safe again. This very narrative helps perpetuate cycles of violence. We must remain hopeful, resilient, and unmoving.
None of us want to imagine what it would be like to lose a loved one to gun violence. Many do not have to imagine because it is their lived reality. The unfairness of the world must motivate us, push us to seek better solutions, and drive us to speak for the voices who were unjustly deprived of their own opportunity to inspire change.
Image by Tim Mudd is licensed under the Unsplash License.
