Texas senator proposes payments to scale back shootings, monument for victims

By Brad Brooks

LUBBOCK, Texas (Reuters) – A Texas state senator on Tuesday proposed a package deal of laws aimed toward decreasing mass shootings, just like the one at a Uvalde elementary college that killed 19 youngsters and two lecturers final yr.

Senator Roland Gutierrez, a Democrat whose district contains Uvalde, made appropriations requests of $2 billion in spending for increasing psychological healthcare entry and one other $2 billion for rising college safety.

Gutierrez mentioned that subsequent week he would introduce laws aimed toward curbing entry to weapons and ammunition, however didn’t present particulars.

He’s additionally proposing transferring a Accomplice monument positioned on the grounds of the Texas state capitol and changing it with one devoted to the victims and survivors of a number of mass shootings which have hit the state in recent times.

“We should always honor the youngsters that we failed in order that we always remember them,” Gutierrez mentioned at a press convention with relations of college capturing victims from Uvalde and Santa Fe, Texas.

Gutierrez additionally introduced laws to create a ten,000-officer sturdy Texas Faculty Patrol to assist safe colleges throughout the state and elevated coaching for a number of different legislation enforcement companies in how to answer college shootings.

One other invoice would enhance radio operations in rural communities, as radios failed for officers who responded to the college capturing in Uvalde.

The response from a number of legislation enforcement companies to the capturing at Robb Elementary in Uvalde final Might was extensively seen as disastrous.

Officers waited properly over an hour earlier than confronting the gunman who was holed up in fourth grade school rooms, regardless of youngsters calling emergency companies from a instructor’s telephone and pleading for assist.

It was the deadliest U.S. college capturing in virtually a decade.

Gutierrez known as on fellow legislators to cross the payments, saying “we’ve the cash” and the duty to make enhancements at school security.

“Every father or mother ought to be capable of ship their child to high school, figuring out they are going to have the ability to choose them up on the finish of the day,” he mentioned.

(Reporting by Brad Brooks in Lubbock, Texas; Modifying by Stephen Coates)