HB 1147, a bill pending in the Texas house of representatives, is strikingly graphic. It proposes that schools across the state should provide “bleeding control stations” equipped with “tourniquets approved for use in battlefield trauma care by the armed forces of the United States”.
Under the terms of the bill, the bleeding stations would deal with “traumatic injury involving blood loss” – in other words, casualties from a mass shooting. School staff would be trained to use the equipment, in turn passing on such battlefield skills to pupils in third grade upwards.
Third grade typically involves eight- or nine-year-old children.
It has come to this. Should HB 1147 pass, Texas eight-year-olds would be taught how to apply compression bandages and chest seals to the gaping, bloody wounds of their friends and teachers in the event of another mass shooting that many assume to be inevitable.
In a recent debate in the Texas house on the bill, Representative Ann Johnson said she understood why a fellow Democratic lawmaker had devised the scheme but expressed her profound unease about it. “It really worries me that we are training our kids that it’s acceptable for their school to become a war zone.”
There’s a lot of talk about war zones in America these days. Across the country, lives are being lost, families destroyed, communities shattered by a spate of mass shootings that are occurring with alarming frequency.
The bloodletting is expressing itself in maverick ways. In Michigan this week two school districts banned students from wearing backpacks, even see-through ones, after a loaded handgun was discovered in the bag of a – yes – third-grader.
So far this year there have been 210 mass shootings nationwide, according to the Gun Violence Archive which defines such incidents as those in which four or more people are shot or killed (the shooter not included). Looking through a slightly different lens, the US is on pace to smash recent records for mass killings.
If the current rate continues, 2023 will see 60 mass killings by year-end compared with 36 last year.
One of the most devastating incidents in recent weeks erupted in the state of HB 1147, Texas. A gunman bearing Nazi tattoos who had been discharged from the army in 2008 for mental health reasons opened fire at a suburban Dallas shopping mall on Saturday killing eight people. The youngest victim was three.
Robert Spitzer, author of The Gun Dilemma and five other books on gun policy, said that the upsurge in mass shootings was the product of several colliding factors. Among them, the copycat effect where shooters study past rampages and are emboldened to act, and the flourishing of extremist and racist ideologies since Donald Trump’s presidency which appear to have motivated some perpetrators including potentially the gunman outside Dallas.
There is one overwhelming factor, however, that Spitzer said was driving the terrible rise in atrocities: the sheer ubiquitous nature of guns in America. Though the US government does not store data on how many firearms are bought each year, with records kept only of the number of federal background checks that are required on some gun sales, the best estimates suggest that about 400m guns are owned in the US – and rising rapidly. (The total US population is about 332 million.)
“More guns in circulation have inevitably led to an upsurge in general gun mayhem, from more domestic violence to road rage incidents and other circumstances where the presence of guns makes lethality more likely,” Spitzer said.
Joshua Horwitz, co-director of the Johns Hopkins center for gun violence solutions, agreed that record gun sales, with more military-style AR-15 semiautomatic rifles in American hands than ever before, was the primary catalyst. “Anybody with any type of grievance is available now to have this type of weaponry and kill people.”
Gun sales rose dramatically at the start of the pandemic, as people’s fears about their own personal safety became converted – with the help of aggressive advertising by the gun lobby – into purchases. During the first year of the pandemic in 2020 Americans bought 23m guns, according to The Trace’s estimates based on FBI data.
In 2022, the annual number of sales remained elevated at more than 16m.
Interrogate the statistics more closely and a vicious cycle heaves into view. Mass shootings generate fear among the populace which, when amplified by paranoid conspiracy theories that the US government is poised to confiscate firearms, prompts a scramble to buy guns; in turn that increases the availability of weapons and the risk of more mass shootings.
The pattern is clearly seen in Texas, which has suffered 17 mass shootings this year alone claiming 29 victims’ lives. The month after the May 2022 Uvalde shooting, in which 19 children and two teachers were killed in Robb elementary school, FBI background checks in Texas rose 17% to an extraordinary 150,464 just in June.
A similar vicious cycle exists in the political response to mass shootings in Texas. After two 2019 gun rampages in an El Paso Walmart store and in Midland and Odessa that together killed 30 people, the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, swore to do “everything we can to make sure a crime like this doesn’t happen again”.
Abbott’s definition of “everything we can” emerged in June 2021 when he signed into law a permitless carry provision that allows Texans to pack concealed handguns in public with no license or firearms training. That too is a cyclical pattern: whenever Texas suffers a shocking gun atrocity it is a fair bet that legislative action will follow loosening its already lax gun controls.
The outcome of this endless churn of more guns, more mass shootings, looser gun laws? More Texans die.
In 2014, federal statistics report, 2,848 Texans died at the barrel of a gun. Two years later that had risen to 3,353; and by 2018 it was up to 3,522.
In 2021, 4,613 Texans died by the gun – an increase of 1,765 lives lost annually over a span of just seven years.
Like so much else in deeply divided modern America, regions of the country have been moving in starkly different directions in recent years – the conservative, rural and Republican south and west embracing a guns free-for-all while the progressive, urban, Democratic coasts and big cities tighten their gun controls. Work by the Johns Hopkins center based on 2020 federal data categorically shows that states which have adopted the most relaxed approach to gun laws now have the highest per-capita death rates – and vice versa.
Republican-controlled Mississippi had a gun death rate of 29 per 100,000, compared with that in Democrat-controlled Hawaii of just three per 100,000. That means that if you live in Mississippi you have more than an eight times greater chance of dying by the bullet than you do in Hawaii.
Paradoxically, Horwitz thinks this glaring disparity offers a glimmer of hope within a country that otherwise appears in the grip of stasis. As the gulf widens, and more and more people die in gun-loving states, the political calculus behind such choices will break down.
“We can see it happening in a number of states,” Horwitz said. “There are solutions, we know what works, you can see the change in death rates. For elected politicians not to move in the direction of public safety – it’s going to become untenable.”
