Texas Gov. Asks Legislature To Form Committees On School Safety
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Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) asked state lawmakers Wednesday to form legislative committees on school safety and other topics in the wake of the school shooting in Uvalde that killed 21 people last week.
Abbott requested the committees be charged with “examining and developing legislative recommendations” around school safety, mental health, social media, police training and firearm safety, his office said in a statement.
The governor sent a letter to Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R) and Texas state House Speaker Dade Phelan jointly, calling on them to begin “immediately.”
The move is not a formal reconvening of the Texas legislature, which typically meets every other year and is not currently scheduled to convene until 2023.
After lawmakers concluded last year’s session, Abbott called three special legislative sessions: one to challenge pandemic-related public health mandates, another to place new restrictions on transgender athletes and a third to preserve Republicans’ hold on power.
Abbott and other Republican leaders in Texas have rejected calls for stricter gun control measures since the shooting at Robb Elementary School, where 19 children numbered among the dead, and do not appear poised to change their minds. The Uvalde incident was the deadliest school shooting nationwide in nearly a decade.
Instead of gun access, the governor blamed the state of the shooter’s mental health, and claimed that gun control measures like the ones enacted in Chicago do not work, even though next-door Indiana has lax gun restrictions, undermining the laws across state lines.
Abbott’s responses to other mass shootings in recent years have led to no substantial changes to residents’ ability to get ahold of guns. The two-term governor responded to the 2018 shooting at Santa Fe High School, where 10 were killed, and at an El Paso Walmart, where 23 were killed, by creating task forces.
In 2019, Abbott signed a measure suggested by a task force aimed at strengthening mental health resources available to children, while other measures he enacted made it easier for adults to carry guns at schools, increasing the number of armed law enforcement officers on school campuses.
The state legislature rejected the task force’s suggestion that courts be allowed to seize guns from people deemed a risk to themselves or others, known as “red flag” laws, according to the Texas Tribune. One member of Abbott’s task force, gun control activist Ed Scruggs, eventually quit in frustration, telling Politico he felt he had been “used like a prop.”
This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.
