I want to make something clear here-there are horriffic acts of gun violence daily nationwide. In Houston alone, in the past week I have read stories about a grandma being shot at an ATM, a mass shooting at Downtown Aquarium Restaurant, and an apparent random home invasion where the alleged perpetrator even murdered a child.
Those all deserve mention and reflection and action to prevent future such events. So I am not holding any human in higher regard over another, it is just that in the case of 17 year-old David Castro, it struck a nerve.
You see back in the early 1980’s, in better economic times for my family, I went to dozens of Houston Astros baseball games. I loved them. I met Jose Cruz, and Larry Dierker, who had moved onto announcing at that point, and some others, and they were kind to me. Terry Puhl, Alan Ashby, all of these guys treated a then blonde tot with love and respect. So I grew to love them. At the time they played at the Astrodome, which was south of Downtown, near the Medical Center district. It was a lot less populated, though still busy.
My family and I would go mostly on the weekends, but we would go two or three times a month. To get home, we had to come back using I-10. While at times I remember being concerned about drivers, especially after a terrible accident my family suffered in 1983, I gave no thought to gun violence and probably would not have even known what it was.
It is the most familial of family outings, a ballgame. Some of my happiest moments are of my grandpa, my mom, and my grandma and me at the ballpark.
Maybe things were different, then at the risk of sounding like a two straw milkshake drinker with a pompadour.
David Castro was 17 years-old with a massive intellect, a love for people, and a bright future that could have changed the world. But Texas pays no respect to gun violence whatsoever. By making a gun as easy to get as a Swiss Army Knife at Wal-Mart, it seems all efforts to protect the citizenry from gun crime has been abandoned.
"The two drivers exchanged hand gestures and the suspect followed the victim's vehicle onto the East Freeway and then on to McCarty Street. There, the suspect fired several shots at the father's truck, striking one of the male passengers at least one time," a
Houston police news release said.
Paul Castro, David's father, told CNN he was driving his two sons after the Houston Astros' game when they encountered the suspect in a white vehicle.
Castro said they were stopped in traffic after the game, about two blocks from the stadium. He let three cars from lanes alongside him pass before he tried to move up, and that's when he encountered the suspect, he said. The suspect's vehicle was in a lane that was merging into Castro's and there was a police officer overseeing traffic.
Police said the suspect followed Paul Castro and his sons onto I-10 East and then McCarty Street, before opening fire on Castro’s truck.
Out of the three people in the truck, 17-year-old David Castro was the only one struck.
“David was one of the good guys,” Paul Castro said. “He was set to be a National Merit Semifinalist. He loved percussion and was planning on playing in band in college.”
Paul Castro said his family is devastated.
“He didn’t deserve to get shot,” Paul Castro said. “He is innocent. There are no words to convey the deep pain our family feels.”
As many of you undoubtedly know, gun crime in the U.S. is at a crisis point, with freeway shootings being an everyday occurrence so common they don’t even lead the news.
But here we have a child, a brilliant young person who was at a ballgame with his family, and was brutally murdered on their way home. At what point do we cease the ability to credibly call ourselves an evolved society? We have grandmas killed at an ATM, we have entire families being shot in their own apartments.
And the Republicans, THE REPUBLICANS want to campaign on crime? Holding up California and Chicago as their examples? Texas is a red state, i would like to point out. It has some of the most dangerous cities in the country, and a government who has basically said, “good luck, buy a gun.”
So now let’s take a look at what the right wing is asking for if they want to make 2022 a referendum on crime.
Let us start with 2019 firearm mortality, as reported by the CDC:
California is 7.2 gun fatalities for every 100,000 people. Texas is 12.7.
Data in raw form here:
Now let’s look at violent crime, a situation where both states live in glass houses, but only one is throwing rocks:
Along with California, Texas is one of only two states in which there were more than 100,000 violent crimes committed in 2018. Adjusted for population, Texas's violent crime rate stands at 410.9 per 100,000 people, slightly higher than the national rate of 380.6 per 100,000.
Texas has one of the highest imprisonment rates in the country. There are 746 adults incarcerated in state and federal prisons in Texas for every 100,000 people, more than in all but four other states.
While California certainly should not go around strutting over their crime progress, nor should they be held as the poster child for “liberalism run amok” as the right wing media is trying to do.
And Illinois? It ranks two slots safer than Texas. You know, the state that contains, Chicago.
To a victim of crime, these are just numbers. Nobody who loses a child to violence wants to hear, “but statistically, things are getting better.” In fact they are not, however this is largely owed to expanding wealth gaps, especially amongst disadvantaged groups, and an economic system largely defined as a bad economy meaning rich people are rich and a good economy meaning rich people are really rich.
And while I do not want to make excuses for the criminals, we can’t lose sight of root causes in the midst of our rage. Otherwise many of today’s toddlers will become tomorrow’s statistics as well, and on either side of the ledger. We can not solve this problem through punishment alone, nor can we hand out guns like candy and tell people, “shoot back, then call 911.” It is not enough to rely on cameras, or extra cops, the fact of the matter, is guns have to go.
In my research for this story, and other related stories for The Claw News, i spent a good hour on YouTube being served up stories of gun violence from just, yesterday. Not stories that were reported yesterday, incidents that happened yesterday.
So yes, guns have to go.
They have to go because it was not a throwing knife that took the life of David Castro. It was not a Chinese Star. It was not a axe throw at 40 miles per hour. It was a gun. Start with that. His Dad did. Paul Castro minced no words on what he blamed as the cause of his son’s death.
You know the seventh-inning stretch is where we get up and say “Take Me Out To The Ballgame.” There is a line in that song that goes, “I don’t care if I ever get back.”
That wasn’t supposed to be literal. Thanks to a complete and total abdication of governance, and fealty to the NRA, David Castro, who may have sung that very line Tuesday night, did not get back home.
In the U.S. in 2021, perhaps the line that goes, “Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack-
should be replaced with, buy me some kevlar and bulletproof glass.”
-ROC
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