Lawmaker aids Uvalde shooting probe three years after massacre in his city

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State Rep. Joe Moody sat in the auditorium of St. Luke Catholic Church in El Paso on Aug. 3, 2019, making ready for a non secular retreat with a bunch of fellow churchgoers. That day, they have been speaking about neighborhood.

“A lot of that discussion was kind of, what do you do in your daily life to reflect God’s love into the community?” Moody remembers.

Then, some legislation enforcement members of the group began getting calls and started to depart. Moody shortly realized {that a} 21-year-old gunman had opened hearth at a neighborhood Walmart, killing 23 individuals and injuring many extra in a racially motivated rampage in opposition to Hispanic immigrants.

The El Paso Democrat mentioned he went to the shooting scene and witnessed the ache of households that have been ready to seek out out whether or not they could be reunited with their family members.

“You don’t imagine anything like this happening,” Moody mentioned. “But … it changes you, and the urgency it puts into your heart is different.”

Three years after the shooting in his hometown, Moody is on the middle of the state’s response to one more mass shooting: the May 24 killing of 19 college students and two academics at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde by an 18-year-old gunman, the deadliest public faculty shooting in Texas historical past.

Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan appointed Moody as vice chair of the House investigative committee on the Robb Elementary School shooting, which launched its interim report in July. After a lot of the blame for a greater than one-hour delay in confronting and killing the gunman had fallen on native police — notably Uvalde faculty district police Chief Pete Arredondo — the report additionally criticized the inaction of a whole lot of state and federal legislation enforcement officers who responded.

The report additionally gave the general public an in-depth portrayal of the shooter, highlighting the pink flags that surfaced in his communications with associates and on-line acquaintances, and the way simply he was in a position to legally buy the weapons and ammunition he used in the massacre.

“What that says to me as a policymaker is [if] there’s no legal impediment to doing what was done here, then there should be,” Moody mentioned.

Moody mentioned a guiding promise he made to the households of the victims in El Paso — to proceed combating to enhance gun security and to maintain weapons out of the fingers of “people that don’t need them” — has guided his work since then.

“We can’t be complacent and we have to do what we can to make people safe,” Moody mentioned.

But after every of the mass shootings in Texas in the previous 5 years — Sutherland Springs, Santa Fe High School, El Paso, Midland-Odessa — calls to limit gun possession have gone nowhere in the Republican-dominated Texas Legislature, which has as a substitute handed legal guidelines to make carrying firearms simpler in the state.

“I know the steepness of the hill in front of us,” Moody mentioned. “I’ve been up it … so many times, I feel like Sisyphus, but you have to continue to do that,” mentioned Moody. “You have to continue to work through every possible angle you can to get something done.”

Moody’s warning resonates a yr later

In the wake of the El Paso shooting, Gov. Greg Abbott fashioned the Texas Safety Commission, which held a collection of roundtable discussions and advisable options to forestall mass shootings. The governor had organized comparable roundtable discussions after the 2018 Santa Fe High School shooting — which left eight college students and two adults lifeless — that led to a School and Firearm Safety Action Plan.

After the Santa Fe roundtable discussions, Abbott signed into law payments that will strengthen psychological well being initiatives and supply funding to colleges for rising safety in their buildings. The School and Firearm Safety Action Plan inspired the Legislature to “study the possibility of creating a ‘red flag’ law to identify persons who are a danger to themselves or others and who either have access to or own firearms.”

Ari Freilich, state coverage director on the Giffords Law Center, a San Francisco-based group that promotes gun management, mentioned the roundtables organized after the Santa Fe shooting appeared to recommend that future gun security laws could be potential. In the tip, that didn’t pan out.

“The recommendations fell far short of what was needed to meaningfully address the rising rates of gun violence across Texas and the devastating increases in the frequency and lethality of mass shootings,” Freilich mentioned in an e mail.

During the 2019 legislative session, Moody launched a invoice to create a pink flag legislation, nevertheless it died with out reaching the governor’s desk.

After the El Paso massacre, the Texas Safety Commission launched the Texas Safety Action Report, which made a collection of suggestions for firearm-related laws. Abbott additionally issued govt orders that he mentioned elevated “law enforcement’s ability to respond to suspicious activity.”

But Freilich mentioned the security fee’s suggestions “again focused largely on bolstering law enforcement training, data-sharing, and threat assessment systems” as a substitute of specializing in obligatory background checks for buying firearms.

A gun proprietor himself, Moody has filed a number of payments geared toward bettering gun security.

In the 2021 legislative session, the primary after the El Paso shooting, Moody launched one other pink flag invoice, which once more failed, in addition to a number of different gun security measures that didn’t turn out to be legislation.

In that session, lawmakers gave gun rights advocates a giant victory after Abbott signed into legislation House Bill 1927, which permits Texans to carry a handgun without training or a permit wherever a gun will not be in any other case prohibited.

Before his colleagues in the House voted on the permitless carry invoice, a disheartened Moody rose to deal with them.

“One day, a tragedy will come to your community,” he mentioned in an impassioned speech. “It’s come to many others’ community, and it’s going to come to yours, too, because we fail to be responsible to the members of our communities across the state. I pray that it doesn’t, but it is.”

Moody’s warning appeared prescient after the mass shooting in Uvalde precisely a yr and a day later.

A wood cross for consolation

Moody made his first go to to Uvalde as a member of the House Investigative Committee on June 15, carrying a particular wood rosary that was given to him by one of many members of his Saturday church group. Moody mentioned he picked it up on the day of the El Paso shooting and has carried it with him ever since.

Moody, the only real Democrat on the three-member committee alongside Rep. Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock, and former state Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman, says going by means of the investigative information from the Uvalde shooting has been difficult due to the violence they describe. But he mentioned they owe it to the households of the victims to separate the info from the misinformation.

In the aftermath of the Robb Elementary shooting, Abbott and different public officers introduced that they’d allocate $105.5 million in state funds to mental health and school safety — with slightly greater than $11 million of it dedicated to psychological well being companies.

“We as a state, we as a society, need to do a better job about mental health,” Abbott mentioned at a press convention on May 25. “Anybody who shoots somebody else has a mental health challenge. … We as a government need to find a way to target that mental health challenge and do something about it.”

Moody calls the deal with psychological well being a “red herring” and mentioned he worries about stigmatizing individuals with psychological sickness.

Mental well being advocates have warned in opposition to utilizing psychological sickness as a scapegoat on the subject of gun violence. “A vast majority of firearm violence is not attributed to mental illness,” the American Psychiatric Association mentioned in a press release after the Uvalde shooting.

As Moody seems to be forward to the 2023 legislative session that begins in January, Moody says he wants to stay hopeful that extra could be accomplished to forestall one other mass shooting.

“I wouldn’t be going back [to the Capitol] if I didn’t have hope,” he mentioned. “If I don’t carry that with me, then I shouldn’t be in this job. … If you’re not willing to do the difficult and do the challenging, then you need to find a different line of work.”

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