An Open Letter to Governor Abbott
re:
"I hate to say this, but there are more people shot every weekend in Chicago than there are in schools in Texas. And we need to realize that people who think that, well maybe if we just implement tougher gun laws, its gonna solve it,"
-Texas Governor Greg Abbott, in a press conference following the tragic school shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde.
Governor Abbott,
since you’re fond of finding numbers
larger than the twenty-one deaths
inside Robb Elementary School,
I thought we could continue the comparison
20,000,000
The number of AR-15s
legally circulating in America
15,000,000
The amount of money the
National Rifle Association
paid last year to buy politicians
4164
The number of gun deaths
in Texas in 2020
Versus 1745 in Illinois
2030
The expected graduation year
of Robb Elementary’s fourth grade class
2021
The year you signed
permitless carry into law
2016
The year your state required public universities
to allow students to open carry on campus
2004
The year the federal assault weapon ban
expired, unreplaced
911
The number that one student called
five times, pleading for help,
while nineteen officers remained
just outside her classroom
in the safety of the hallway
173
The number of rounds found inside the school,
yet to be fired
142
The number of rounds found inside the school
that had already leapt towards victims
100
The number of rounds the gunman
immediately fired into
two connected classrooms
77
The number of minutes the surviving students
in classrooms 111 and 112 waited
between when the shooter entered the room
and when the police did
74
The number, estimated from photos,
of “good guys with a gun”
it takes, after more than an hour,
17 wounded and 21 dead,
to stop a bad guy with a gun
60
The percentage of guns
recovered in Chicago
that were purchased from states
with weaker gun laws
40
The percentage of Uvalde’s city budget
that goes to the police
26
The number of days between
a mass shooting in New Zealand
and their banning of most
semiautomatic weapons
25
The age when you are old enough
to rent a car from most rental companies
(because, you know,
those things could kill someone)
But what “greater than” lesson
would be complete
without also examining less than?
18
The legal age in Texas
when an AR-15 can be purchased
10
The number of days since
a white supremacist used
an AR-15 to take ten lives
in a Buffalo grocery store
1
The number of mass shootings
needed for the UK to ban
semiautomatic weapons
1
The number of U.S. state governors
killed in office in our entire history
(your safety, it seems,
always takes precedence)
1
The number of students who
smeared themselves with
a dead friend’s blood
(hoping she, unlike her friend,
might only have to play dead)
0
The waiting period in Texas
to buy a firearm
0
The number of days after turning eighteen
the killer waited to buy his AR-15
0
The number of students left unscathed
Written May 30, 2022