The state of Texas is planning for more mass shootings in schools, rather than planning how to prevent them. K-6 students will be sent home with ink-free fingerprint and DNA identification cards, so that in the event their bodies are too mutilated to recognize visually, it will be possible to identify them. While participation isn’t required, parents can collect their children’s fingerprints and DNA and just hold onto them until their children have been murdered in school and the police need help figuring out who’s who, as happened in Uvalde in May, when 19 fourth-graders and two teachers were killed, with some of the bodies so unrecognizable that family members were asked to provide DNA swabs. Now, that will be taken care of in advance.
This initiative isn’t even a response to Uvalde. It’s a response to an earlier school shooting. After eight students and two teachers were murdered at Santa Fe High School in 2018, the Texas legislature passed a law requiring the Texas Education Agency to “provide identification kits to school districts and open-enrollment charter schools for distribution to the parent or legal custodian of certain students.”
RELATED STORY: ‘My daughter’s gone. I have to fix it for others’: Mom of Uvalde shooting victim Lexi Rubio
Campaign Action
The law didn’t go into effect in time for the Uvalde massacre, but the next mass murder of children and teachers in school? Texas will be ready for that.
Texas Republicans aren’t even bothering to pretend they don’t know that another school shooting will happen. They aren’t looking away from the fact that children’s bodies will be so torn up by a barrage of bullets that no one can tell who they are. They’re treating all that as an inevitability that just needs to be handled.
Make it more difficult for 18-year-olds who’ve made social media threats to commit kidnapping, rape, and school shootings to buy semi-automatic weapons? Nah, Texas Republicans would never. The answer to repeated school massacres is to turn schools into fortresses and swab all the kids for DNA in advance of their murders.
This is the Republican Party in 2022: Refuse to accept the results of any election you don’t win. Ban abortion and force women having miscarriages to wait until their lives are at risk before they get the care they need. And instead of trying to stop school shootings, treat the mass murder of children as a logistical problem to plan for.
Abortion rights, climate change, and gun safety are all on the ballot this fall, and there are literally thousands of ways to get involved in turning our voters. Plug into a federal, state, or local campaign from our GOTV feed at Mobilize and help Democrats and progressives win in November.
Republicans are retreating from key Senate races and Dems have the chance to expand their majority. Please give $3 to these three Dems running to flip GOP Senate seats from red to blue.
On Daily Kos’ The Brief, we speak with polling giant Drew Linzer, who runs polling firm CIVIQs and comes in to talk about a new poll his team conducted for Daily Kos. He is also here to explain, as a professional, how to not stress out every time you see a poll going your way or the other way. One thing is for sure, though: We are living in historic times, and what that means for these midterms cannot be easily predicted—so Get Out The Vote!
RELATED STORIES:
GOP solution school shootings? Mental health. GOP response to mental health help to schools? No
Assault rifle manufacturers advertise their guns as weapons for mass murder
