After years of public bragging over all that he has done to weaken Texas gun safety laws, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is one of the state leaders now appearing in front of the cameras to explain that his dismantling of the old laws has nothing to do with the mass murders that now break in Texas with regularity—it is instead, he insists, absolutely anything else.
We know of at least one Republican act directly responsible for 19 dead grade-school children and two dead teachers, however. The mass murderer who executed children in a Uvalde, Texas, elementary school was allowed to purchase AR-15 assault rifles on his 18th birthday because Texas Republicans changed state law just last September to allow anyone over that age to own and carry a gun with no permit and no training.
Countless pro-gun Republican cowards are claiming that gun laws are pointless because mass murderers don't follow them anyway, but the Uvalde murderer didn't get his gun until he could prove to the sellers he was old enough to buy one, and he was old enough to buy one because Greg Abbott personally made sure that happened.
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Abbott, however, is truly a terrible human being, a man already proven to be a liar, an opportunist, and someone who expresses no apparent remorse as he repeatedly uses his government powers to send his state's National Guard to grind out new border stunts on his behalf. Abbott is now claiming that it's not Abbott's own history of weakening gun laws to the point where any 18-year-old in the state can buy multiple AR-15s and walk into a public school with them that's at fault here, it is "mental health."
"We as a state, we as a society need to do a better job with mental health," Abbott burped out during the Republican news conference dodging blame on Wednesday.
We are all very tired and mostly broken, so rather than addressing Abbott in the manner that most reporters would, let us cut to the chase:
So do it, you craven punk.
Do it. "Fix" mental health. There are 19 more dead kids in your state's morgues, and that's after previous school shootings that left you also doing Nothing At All. Put up or shut up. Show us your grand fucking plan for addressing "mental health."
What have you been waiting for? Why haven't you done it yet, Greg Abbott? Is 19 dead children still too little? Is 20 the number you're still waiting for?
Do it, you gutless, cowardly public showboater. Give it a 10th of the public attention you used in declaring that your state wasn't going to abide by federal gun laws because you, a shit-for-brained opportunist allied with seditionists and murderers, would go to the mat to stop them.
Oh, are you waiting for Florida's Ron DeSantis to do it first, so you can copy whatever he does once again? Sorry, I've got bad news for you: Ron is currently obsessed with accurately imitating Donald Trump's "accordion hands" speech habits and doesn't have time to devote to coming up with new ideas for you. Nor does he give a flying damn about 19 dead kids, any more than you do.
In Actual Fucking Fact, Greg Abbott and his Texas Republicans have done exactly the harm to "mental health" programs that every pro-gun Republican hack always does.
NBC News politely reminds Abbott that when it comes to access to mental health care, Texas ranks Dead. Fucking. Last. It is the worst state. And, not content with being the worst of the worst but wanting to add their own special Texas capper to it, just last month Abbott and his craven pro-murder Republican buddies hacked a whopping $211 million from state mental health programs. Abbott just cut the very programs he now says were the solution that would have kept these children alive.
So Abbott? You're a liar, you're an asshole, and even if we were supposed to believe your stupid bullshitting attempts to evade responsibility for yet another day of mass deaths, you still just pinned yourself, personally, as The Reason This Happened.
There is no pundit who should treat Greg Abbott with any degree of politeness. We will not spit in his face, and that is as much a compromise as anyone should abide. He does deserve such relentless public disgust as to make staying in his current job untenable, and if Texans are not willing to do that then they may not love their children as much as they say they do.
We're done. Greg Abbott has personally bragged of his efforts to bury his state in murder weapons. He has made it a central plank of his campaigns and of his very personality. He says "mental health" solutions are needed to keep American children alive while cutting programs to provide those solutions.
Greg Abbott never cared about those 19 children or those two teachers at any point during his entire life, and doesn't care about them now. His every press conference is devoted not to them, and not to their families, and not to the survivors, but to fluffing his own image after an unrelenting career of doing harm to those kids and those teachers and anyone else in the state who likes having electricity or not being torn apart by gunfire.
Go fuck yourself, Texas Republicans. Go fuck yourself, Rep. Tony Gonzales of Texas, who represents Uvalde in Congress and who trotted out the same "mental health" excuse—even though most murderers don't have "mental health" problems, and experts keep yelling that blaming "mental health" for mass violence is repulsively false framing that only further hurts the millions of everyday Americans who do suffer from mental health problems.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott now claims he'll "double" Uvalde's mental health resources, boosting the programs he himself cut so that the families and community can get some basic level of mental health care after 19 of their children were torn to pieces by a single teenager with a weapon of war. He will do nothing to prevent teenagers from getting those weapons, but if your child gets murdered by a killer wanting to make some political or societal point known only to themselves then Good Fucking News, Texans, Greg Abbott will send a team out to help you deal with your post-funeral trauma. For a while. Until the next budget meeting.
Fuck you, Greg Abbott. You bragged about making your state a breeding ground for mass violence. You laughed about federal inability to stop you and your allies from putting the biggest weapons against the faces of the smallest Texans with not even a cursory check of who those guns might be going to. Congratulations, your state got exactly what it wanted, yet again, and all you have to do is hide until the news cameras go away and the interviews with grieving parents fade into the background with all the others.
Perhaps you can spend the time going to fundraisers, as you did immediately after learning about the Texas classrooms filled with dead children. Perhaps the people cutting you checks will make you feel better about yourself. Perhaps the National Rifle Association executives in their fabulously expensive suits will make you feel better when you pop in to cheer on the domestic terrorism movement in a Houston convention center this weekend.
But from the rest of America? Fuck you, you gutless, lying, traitorous and opportunistic hack.
