![]() ![]() Some do - passionately.Ĭhad Hasty, a well-known conservative talk radio host based in Lubbock, mourns the latest killings - “I don’t want to get to a time where we’re not shocked by a mass shooting” - but is adamant that gun rights be protected. Bush signed legislation that allowed Texans to carry concealed guns. By then, decades of Democratic control were giving way to Republicans who saw gun rights as a key issue. He killed 14 people and wounded dozens more.īut the state’s strict gun laws didn’t begin to crack until a few years after another mass shooting - this one in 1991, when a gunman drove his pickup truck through the window of a central Texas cafeteria and killed 23 people. Arguably the first modern American mass shooting happened here in 1966, when an engineering student opened fire from a building observation deck at the University of Texas. Mass killings have a deep history in Texas. “I just think the whole thing is a damn mess,” Leeson said. He’s especially furious that his 9-year-old son is so worried about school shootings that he checked all the windows in his classroom to see which would open in case of an attack. The Texas Legislature is currently debating various bills that are targeting how Democratic Harris County, the state’s most populous, runs its elections. ![]() He’s furious at how Republicans “bleed every vote they can out of West Texas” to overcome growing populations in the state’s heavily Democratic urban centers, from Houston to Dallas, Austin to San Antonio. Leeson is furious at how immigration has become a political battleground. And what troubles some Texans is not how outsiders see the state, but whether those living here can navigate the divisive political climate - and overcome a complicated and sometimes violent past.ĮVEN THOSE WHO SUPPORT GUNS FRET ABOUT THEM Yet lately, things here have felt unrelenting. But Texas is also far more nuanced than a collection of clichés that consider the state through the narrowest of lenses. Many Texans will tell you there’s some truth to this. That it’s nothing like the rest of the country, really. ![]() That it’s a wildly conservative place full of oil roughnecks and cowboys and brash braggarts. The “Texas things.” Texans have heard this all before. He describes himself as a “conservative West Texan” whose kids “know how to handle guns, know how to ride horses, know how to do all the Texas things.” “This is out of control right now,” said Jay Leeson, an illustrator and cartoonist who lives in Lubbock, a city in the Texas High Plains. It’s enough to make even the proudest Texan wrestle with how he sees the state. But in Texas, with its immense size and a population that grows by more than 1,000 people a day, the stage is far bigger - and often louder. These issues and the forces behind them - anger and guns, immigration turmoil, deep political divisions about what democracy means - are playing out across American life in various ways. The likely approval of legislation that would let the Republican governor overturn elections in the most populous county, a Democratic stronghold. Eight immigrants killed when an SUV slams into a crowded bus stop. HOUSTON (AP) - Thirteen people dead in two mass shootings. ![]()
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