After the Uvalde Shooting, Lifelong Residents Consider How to Stop the Next One
The best place for arguing about politics over huge cups of ice and soda in Uvalde, Texas, is the Stripes gas station near the center of town. On Tuesday afternoon, Jesus Rodriguez, usually a regular, wasn’t there. Instead, he was at the town’s civic center with his family, waiting to see if his grandson had survived the deadliest school shooting since Sandy Hook.
The civic center was crowded with families, and quieter than you would’ve guessed, Rodriguez said. Every time a new bus of kids showed up, everyone held their breath until they saw who was on it. Midway through the afternoon, another bus came and Rodriguez’s grandson’s teacher got out, followed by a bunch of kids, but not his grandson. He steeled himself for horrific news. Then a border-patrol bus pulled up, and his grandson was the first one off. He told his family he’d been in the bathroom when he heard the shooting start and had become separated from his class. “He was walking around, like”—Rodriguez puffed his chest out, looking brave. Rodriguez’s relief was short-lived; a few hours later, he heard that his brother’s granddaughter was one of the victims.
Uvalde is a rural and predominantly Hispanic community at the western edge of Texas’s Hill Country, sixty miles from the U.S.–Mexico border. The town is proud of its stately oak trees, and of its status as the Honey Capital of the World, an honor proclaimed at the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris, celebrating the local, and particularly sweet, guajillo honey. Uvalde home-town heroes include the Vice-President who described that office as “not worth a bucket of warm piss,” the Texas governor who presided over the closure of the best little whorehouse in Texas, and Matthew McConaughey. The town used to be a lightly policed, unlocked-doors kind of place, but that has changed in the past twenty years. Who to blame for that—the cartels, the Republicans, “the illegals”—depends on whom you ask. “There used to be four border-patrol agents. Now there are around a hundred,” Willie Edwards, a former teacher, a golf coach, and a member of the school board told me. Recently, under Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star, which sent state law-enforcement resources to mobilize border towns, the Border Patrol officers have been joined by a hefty contingent of state troopers from the Department of Public Safety.
The day after the shooting, a local woman who asked not to be named was at El Progreso Memorial Library, watching a television that was broadcasting the press conference being held at the civic center just down the road. “Evil will always walk among us,” Texas’s lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, was saying on the TV. “I’ve seen it, the governor’s seen it, the speaker’s seen it.” He listed the places where Texas’s other recent mass shootings took place: Sutherland Springs, El Paso, Odessa, Santa Fe. “It’s God that brings a community together,” he said. “If we don’t turn back as a nation to understanding what we were founded upon and what we were taught by our parents and what we believe in, these situations will only get worse.”
“What do you do, put barbed wire around the school?” the woman asked. The question didn’t seem rhetorical. She said that her grandson had been at Robb Elementary School, the site of the shooting. He was playing outside during recess when he saw a man in black walk into the school. The woman and her daughter had been at the civic center yesterday, too, walking in tight circles because sitting still felt worse. “I didn’t even realize that I bit myself,” the woman told me, pulling her lip down to show me where she’d chewed her skin raw before she learned her grandson was O.K.
At the Rushing-Estes-Knowles Funeral Home, two travelling chaplains sat on plush chairs in an elegantly appointed room, waiting for an audience with the funeral director. They had been at their usual gig, ministering to unaccompanied minors at a government-run shelter in Pecos, when they heard about the shooting. They were sent to support the funeral-home employees, who were in for a trying week. “You absorb a lot,” one of the chaplains, Abiel Hernandez, told me, particularly in a town where everyone seemed to know, or be related to, everyone else. “We’re just here to support the staff and the families. Emotional and spiritual support.”
On Wednesday afternoon, Jesus Rodriguez was back at Stripes, wearing work boots and a Trump 2020 hat. He sat with his friend, Mark Bonnet, who wore a “Duck Dynasty” cap and camo pants. Both men had spent most of their lives in Uvalde. Word had just come out that the shooter had used an AR-style rifle to kill the children and their teachers. The issue of guns is a complex one in a town that skews Republican, and the men were deep in problem-solving mode.
“What if, if a person wants to buy it, you have to buy it in your home town,” Bonnet suggested. “Because people in your town know how you are.”
“Background check, background check, they keep saying that,” Rodriguez said. “Biden said that last night. But that guy is going to pass a background check,” Rodriguez added, referring to the shooter.
“Uvalde has more D.P.S. officers than anywhere else,” Bonnet said. “They’re always chasing people up and down the street. Why aren’t they—” he started to say, then stopped and shook his head.
“It used to be different here,” Rodriguez said.
“I’m a deer hunter,” Bonnet said. “I like to hunt deer and stuff. But why does somebody need a damn AK-47?”
Rodriguez told a story about a neighbor of his who’d modified a rifle such that it fired like an automatic weapon. At night, the man would get drunk and set tires on fire and shoot his gun. From his home, Rodriguez would listen to the rapid report of the gun and think about what might go wrong. “I done talked to the judge, talked to the sheriff,” he said. “The law won’t do nothing. They’re too busy with that border deal. And the sheriff told me the law changed a lot.” (He meant, presumably, Texas’s new permitless-carry gun law, which made it legal for most Texans to openly carry a gun in most public places—although not while drunk.)
“I don’t even like pistols,” Bonnet said.
Rodriguez looked pained, as if the conversation had begun to encroach on uncomfortable territory. “But if they start taking our guns . . .” he said. “I ain’t got nothing against guns. It’s the people.” He took out his key ring, which was as full as a jailer’s, and began fiddling with it. “I don’t know what they need to do, but they need to do something.”
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