After a gunman ki!!ed eight people at a Dallas-area outlet mall over the weekend, the Dallas Morning News is encouraging Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) to take action against gun violence.
“Gov. Abbott, Eight more innocent people were ki!!ed in Texas yesterday. This time it was a shopping mall. They were simply going about their day, men, women, and children. A man got out of his car and sprayed them with bullets of such a high caliber and in such rapid succession that a mass ki!!ing was inescapable,” writes the Dallas Morning News Editorial board in an open letter to the governor.
The board also called out Abbott for labeling the Allen Premium Outlets ki!!ings an “unspeakable tragedy,” arguing instead that “the people of Texas need you to speak to it and its cause.”
“There is nothing conservative about refusing to acknowledge evidence or give voice to the true nature of a problem. The people who are dead today are not dead because a twisted and evil soul walked among them,” the editors wrote.
“They are de@d because that person was able to obtain a weapon so powerful and with such a high capacity that even the bravest and fastest response of law enforcement could not save their lives.”
In a Fox News interview following the massacre, Abbott focused on mental health, claiming that there is a “dramatic increase in the amount of anger and violence that’s taking place in America.”
Members of the editorial board, who endorsed Abbott for reelection last year, contended that mental health issues are growing more frequent around the world, and that “no nation suffers from mass shootings like the United States.”
The shooting at the outlet mall, which injured seven people, comes less than a year after the slaughter of 19 children and two instructors at an elementary school in Uvalde last year.
Over the weekend, Uvalde State Sen. Roland Gutierrez compared living in Texas to “living in communist Russia” and chastised Abbott and other politicians and law enforcement for “refusing to tell us the truth about what’s going on here.”
“This is not the Texas miracle that Greg Abbott calls it. We’re living in a Texas nightmare, and it’s a nightmare that they created. It’s chaos that they created,” Gutierrez said.
Reports indicate the gunman in the Allen outlet mall shooting used an AR-15-style rifle and reported that responders to the Uvalde incident held off on confronting the shooter out of concern over his high-powered weapon.
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