Never let it be said that America refuses to do anything about the continued brutal murders of our nation's children by weapons designed for warfare. The first real consequence, aside from the lifelong physical and mental trauma inflicted on the survivors, the families of victims, and the entire town of Uvalde, Texas, has made itself known: Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Chief of Police Peter Arredondo's swearing-in ceremony for his newly won position on the City Council was to take place on Tuesday, but will be temporarily postponed due to the town's need to focus on nearly two dozen memorial ceremonies, continued law enforcement investigations, press events, and other duties thrust upon it after 19 elementary school children and two teachers were murdered by a disgruntled teenager with two newly purchased AR-15s.
Arredondo will still take his seat on the council, mind you. He was elected to a City Council seat earlier in the month, having swamped his opposition by gaining 126 total votes. For any grade-schoolers studying fractions on our site today, that is roughly six votes per murdered victim. It also appears to be about a third as many votes as the shooter had bullets, but that data could certainly change with the next law enforcement update.
But the point is that the town elected him and he'll be taking his position, despite his new status as the alleged good guy who ordered the town's police force and responding federal officers to remain outside the classroom for nearly an hour while children hiding inside called 911 to beg for police intervention.
In a town that spends 40% of its total budget on policing, it's perhaps not surprising that a chief of police would make their way to a simultaneous city council seat. Whatever downsides the arrangement might bring will probably solve themselves when the final timeline of events at Rob Elementary School is pieced together. For now, though, Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin, himself a focus of criticism in the wake of the horrific murders, appears to be extremely carefully distancing himself from Arredondo.
NBC News reports that McLaughlin released a statement noting that "[t]here is nothing in the City Charter, Election Code, or Texas Constitution that prohibits him from taking the oath of office," which is a tapdancing way to say that it's not against the law to swear him in, while still leaving unsaid "if he is still fool enough to think he deserves the job." And that may be the most lackluster show of support you'll see a Texas mayor ever give one of their police chiefs, so make a note of it.
In the meantime, the memorializing of the dead continues—though none of the Republican leaders of Texas are willing to so much as contemplate altering the just-changed gun law that allowed an 18-year-old to purchase a semiautomatic rifle with no licensing or training requirements, a law that we can be quite sure directly led to this particular mass murder. Services were held Monday for two of the 10-year-olds killed last week, the first of many. President Biden spent four hours meeting with survivors and the families of victims on Sunday, but could offer few promises that lawmakers would do a single damn thing this time around, either.
The Supreme Court is itself poised to further gut state gun safety laws, and will likely again premise those new carve-outs on the thoroughly nonsensical and ahistoric notion that the "founders" of the country wanted individual Americans to have access to weapons of war so that the most frothing contingent of the country could overthrow the government if they, personally, had a desire to do so. It's manifestly a fiction, but one that historians have had no luck dislodging because there are more would-be "good" seditionists in America than there are historians, and several of them were tapped for the Supreme Court by the same movement that would go on attempt government overthrow themselves.
There is no good news yet. The Republican Party is fresh off an attempted violent coup that has coalesced into new state laws allowing the party to alter the results of elections that do not go their way; at present, the party is more fervent in its convictions that, right now, their allies need a tremendous number of guns than they have ever been. Dead children are, we hear yet again, a side-effect of having more "freedom" than countries that attach conditions to gun ownership, and "freedom" means the God-given right not just to own guns, but to kill at a moment's notice and on personal impulse.
If voters go to the booths to elect those that would protect their guns over their children—and in Texas, at least, that has long been the case—then the pace of murders will only continue to accelerate. If voters cannot stomach that odious notion, then they will vote against it. Uvalde, Texas, might give us a small window into what could happen next. But it also may fade from the public view, because there are new mass murders every day. Another supermarket, another synagogue, another school. There is always another, and will be until voters are so overcome with revulsion for the status quo that they are willing to punish those who brought us here.