Less Than Human

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

The power and impact of a story can shift dramatically depending on how the tale is told and what facts are emphasized. 

Last Saturday I used this space to preserve and spread a news story out of a small town in Texas that was unfolding that very morning.  The story that I tried to tell was of a drunken gun owner in a small town in Texas who had been out in his yard firing his AR-15 into the night sky the evening before, and when neighbors tried to get him to quit firing his gun so that their children could sleep, the inebriated man stormed into a neighbor's home and opened fire, killing five, including one boy who was only eight-years-old.   By the time I was typing my account of the incident several hours after the shooting, the gunman had fled into the night and was being pursued by authorities..

Over the weekend Texas Governor Greg Abbott posted a tweet about the same incident, one in which he expressed  sorrow and outrage, announced a reward for information leading to the capture of the shooter who is still at-large.   But then the wily politician added one additional element.  Governor Abbott also mentioned the fact that the victims were "illegal immigrants."   Those two words, "illegal" and "immigrants" changed the basic nature of the story.

Abbott's version took the emphasis away from the lax-to-non-existent gun laws of Texas, and the fact that the body count from Texas mass shootings under his governorship had just increased again, and instead subtly turned the story into one about immigration, a whole different can of worms in the Lone Star state.  Greg Abbott's story was an indictment of the victims who were suddenly themselves at fault to some degree by being "illegal," and were now something less than human.  Greg could still be outraged that it had happened, but with a wink and a grin.  Under his telling, the story was not nearly as tragic as it once had been - at least to much of the good ol' white boy culture that keeps Abbott in the Texas governor's mansion.

Greg Abbott went to Uvalde, Texas, last spring to roar in outrage after a teen gunman armed with legally purchased semi-automatic weapons massacred nineteen fourth graders and two teachers, all of Hispanic descent.  As the cameras clicked and whirred, one politician bravely rose to face down the governor by telling him that he was doing nothing to address the real problem of easy access to guns,  but Beto was quickly thrown out of the press conference.    Governor Abbott went back to Austin content that he had done his job.  What Greg did not do was to attend even one of the twenty-one funerals that were held in Uvalde during the subsequent days of extreme grieving.  He wanted the story to be about "law and order," and an emphasis on human suffering might bring the public's attention back around to lax gun laws.

The victims of gun violence in Texas are not less than human   The governor, however, may be a different story.